A few things about confidence

There are three things about confidence that we should never stop believing in.

• It helps you with persistence. It will help you hold on so that you can achieve the life you want.
• It helps you become more flexible. When you run across a dead end, you will not lose hope. Instead, you will look for alternatives and see other possible options.
• Finally, it will also help you follow through. We all have ideas that seem just too out there. You might even end up talking yourself out of them most of the time. But, risks do pay off and confidence will help you see that.

Confidence is related to success

Go back and look at the three facts about confidence again. Does it not seem that confidence is the base that you will create your success upon? That means, without confidence, success becomes more difficult to achieve.

Now that we have established the importance of confidence, let us look at what needs to be done to build it. Building confidence requires you be optimistic, surround yourself with people who are equally optimistic, and most importantly, face your fears.

That’s right, fear is anathema to confidence and thus consequently, success. Therefore, to gain confidence, you need to face your fears. We all fear different things but one of the most debilitating fears is the fear of making a mistake. When we make mistakes, we learn. If we remain over-cautious and never let ourselves make a mistake, we might not learn anything!

A few things about fear

There are also some things that you need to know about fear:

• If you let it, it will stop you from taking any action. When we do not overcome our fears, they make it almost impossible to achieve the success we want and deserve.
• Just as confidence helps you be persistent, fear, too, can be persistent. It keeps itself hidden and waits for a moment of weakness and that is when it will strike! That means, it will stop you from moving forward.
• Procrastination is the shape that fear will often take. If you find yourself delaying something, stop and ask what are you afraid of? Once you identify what is holding you back, then you can take positive steps to defeat it.

How to overcome your fear

If you have decided that you will overcome your fears, the first thing you need to do is make a list. That list should include all fears and doubts that plague you. Next, you need to come to a decision about how you can overcome them. Once you have decided, then you can act. It does not matter, if the action is not world changing. It could be something trivial but what is important is that it needs to happen every day.

Taking Action

Some ways of taking action to overcome fears and develop confidence in your abilities:

Replace the negative with something positive

When faced with a fear that is making negative thoughts swirl in your mind, be positive. Again positive thoughts do not have to be earth-shattering epiphanies. They can be as simple, as thinking about your favorite dish. Think of how it makes you feel, then capture the pleasantness and replace your fear with it.

Be aggressive towards fear

Whenever you feel the tendrils of fear creeping into your imagination, react with aggression towards it. Imagine how you can drive them away by reacting that way. While you may not actually be able to do it instantly, gradually it will show up in your day-to-day life.

Start small

If you start by taking on a huge task, then more likely than not, you may be setting yourself to fail. Instead of something that intimidates you, realize that you will progress faster if you can learn to break off small chunks of it. When you achieve that small goal that you set for yourself, you will feel good. Slowly, those little achievements will add up to a big one and so on.

Relax your fear away

When we are afraid of something, it usually triggers a fight-or-flight response in us. That means as adrenaline courses through our body, we get ready for extreme measures. Whether we stick around or run our muscles bunch and get ready for action. It seems logical that if our muscles react this way towards fear. It also makes sense then that if we do something to keep those muscles relaxed, we will not be so afraid. When anxiety turns your muscles stiff, start working on relaxing your fears away.