Overcoming lack of confidence: Strategies for Self Improvement and Personal Growth

I've never been a super confident person.

I'm quite shy, and and I would say I'm an introvert as well.

I'm the person at a party who kind of stays in the background.

I love to watch people.

I love to be around people, but I don't particularly like being in the middle of everything.

Through my experiences I've always felt that that was a bad thing.

In the past, I’ve been criticised a lot.

I've been compared to other people a lot.

If I've not wanted to do things, I've been told that I'm miserable, or been asked “what's wrong with you? Why don't you want to do that thing?”

And so I've had to work on that because I did want to be more confident, but also I needed to accept who I was and how I was, and for me that was the biggest thing.

It was not seeing my shyness and my being an introvert as a negative thing.

It took me a long time.

Having a lack of confidence, being naturally shy and lacking in self-esteem has held me back.

It stopped me from doing things.

It stopped me from speaking up when I did have something to say. The thought that people will just think I'm stupid or boring or dull, would prevent me from putting myself out there.

I had to find a way to change these thoughts and feelings.

I needed to start to recognise the positives that were within me and not just focus on the negatives.

When we are in that negative cycle, we are very good at highlighting the things that we are not doing, or perhaps not very good at.

But we don't look at the things that we are doing well, the things that we do do that are great or the positive things.

Here are the 5 things that I want to share with you today that I did that really really helped me to turn that round for myself.

1. Daily Affirmations and Daily Achievements - I still do them to this day.

Every day I write down 5 positive statements about myself and 5 things that I have achieved each day.

One thing I would say on this is not to overlook what you may consider small things when writing these down.

Getting the kids their breakfast and ready for school count.

As does making the beds and cleaning the house.

I think sometimes we just accept them as things we “should” be doing anyway, and so don’t give ourselves credit for actually doing them.

2. Social Media Connections - I started to follow people on social media who were also like me!

I searched up using key words like confidence, shyness, being an introvert to see who was talking about those things, and I started to follow those people.

I found people who were embracing their shyness.

I had never thought to embrace it.

After years of feeling like I needed to be different, these new connections were people who inspired me, who resonated with me, who made me feel like there wasn’t anything wrong with me - for the first time in my life.

3. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) I talk about CBT a lot. It played a massive part in my recovery.

I used CBT to challenge those negative thoughts that I was having about myself.

There's a really great exercise that I came across that I still use to this day, and I share it now in my coaching practice.

It’s called “Worry or Fact”

Essentially it’s identifying the negative thoughts and thinking about whether or not we know that to be true or if it’s just a feeling or worry of ours.

It can be used for a variety of different situations, it really helped me a lot when considering those feelings I had about myself and what I was telling myself that people were thinking of me.

4. My environment - this was a tough one to start with

Who was I associating with?

How was I feeling being around them?

I did notice that some of my environments weren’t helping me.

That some were adding to my insecurities, making me feel bad about myself.

I became more aware that there were certain groups where I was left not feeling great being around.

If you're coming away from a situation feeling bad about yourself, you’ve got to question whether that situation is the right environment for you.

By the way, I am not suggesting you start unfriending everyone, but, it may be that, for a little while at least, you need to distance yourself from them.

5. I stepped outside my comfort zone.

When you when you think about it, everything within your comfort zone was once something that you hadn't done before.

We grow by pushing ourselves, with that, comes increased confidence in ourselves.

Remember, this is a journey, you don’t have to do everything all at once.

Just pick one area in your life where you would like to feel more confident, then, using my 5 strategies as a guide, choose one thing that you will do to work on it.

Being consistent in working on this will start to make a real difference, but it takes time.

Trust the process.

Thanks for reading

Anne

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