July 17, 2015 - Written by: Becky Solomon

The ‘C’ Word: Confidence

Confidence is a funny thing. You can read a million things on the internet that tell you to believe in yourself and yet when we see a confident person, we often make the assumption that they are arrogant and need bringing down a peg or two. There is a very fine balance and some of us struggle to value ourselves in the way we would others.

At times when I suffer from those horrible nagging thoughts of self-doubt, I like to think of all the little things I’ve achieved or the bigger things I’m slowly working towards. When I see low self-confidence in others, I don’t want them to feel like that.

I want them to know that they are amazing people with really good hearts.

So this week, as it’s been something on my mind, I wrote some pick me ups for myself and others who might be suffering:

It gets better. If you are having a really shitty time and if the third bad thing hasn’t quite happened, brace yourself for that (bad news come in threes!). But also life is full of up and downs. This is just a down moment and you have the up ones to look forward to.

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Don’t be afraid to manufacture some of those good moments. I had a really shitty time one year when I was fed up with my job and felt like there weren’t a lot of people around me any more, I went inter railing for a month and came back refreshed, jobless but not even caring. In fact, all that free time gave me a chance to enjoy the summer and apply for jobs I really cared about.

If you start to grow in confidence – that’s good. I think people with low self-confidence feel guilty sometimes for having faith in themselves. Don’t! You will have skills and abilities in something that other people do not. Be proud of this!

Don’t worry about having a lot of friends, a few good ones are much better than lots of acquaintances you couldn’t count on in your time of need.

Don’t internalise things too much. Try to let things go and not over think them. Give people a bit of leeway to get things wrong, if someone doesn’t call when they were supposed to, understand that they have busy lives and it probably wasn’t deliberate.

Stand up for yourself. People might have beaten you down before but that certainly doesn’t give anyone the right to do it again. If you know something is wrong or someone is being out of order, you can calmly address it. It takes guts, but people will not try to mess you around if you call them out on it.

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You can always start over – believe me I know this! If everything goes absolutely tits up and you think, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’, the beautiful thing is that you can move on. You can quit your job. You can change schools if you’re having a really hard time. Dig deep, think about what it is you really want and go and pursue it. It takes time to rebuild life, but it can completely restore your faith in people if you take yourself out of a horrible situation.

Remind yourself of all the good things. And trust me, they are there. You just have to start small and be grateful for the smaller things as well as your big achievements. For example, I am proud of myself if I cook a good meal. It takes quite a lot of discipline for me to do that. I thought my cooking skills were bad, they’re certainly not perfect, but it’s more my patience than anything else.

Go out and do things on your own. If you’re feeling like there aren’t a lot of people around you at the moment, I would strongly suggest joining a club. It doesn’t mean that they will automatically turn into your weekend drinking buddies, but you might find yourself looking forward to seeing this new bunch of people every week, that are different from your work colleagues and normal social circle. You’re likely to meet people in the same position as you, looking to broaden their social horizons.

If you enjoyed this article, why not check out: ‘On Being Confident: Learning Jenny Garrett’s Three A’s‘?