In this chapter you will learn the following:
- How to prepare your journey
- How to Preview your achievements
- How to focus on your strengths
- How to build the required knowledge for the success
- Accelerate Toward Success
You must determine where you are and where you want to go. You should set your mind right and prepare yourself for the task. Building self-confidence may require changing your lifestyle and interaction with others. If you interact with people who are self-confident you will also acquire self-confidence. To prepare for the journey you need to do the following
Preview your achievements: think about how your life is at the moment and what you have so far gained. Unless you make an assessment of what you have so far you may live in constant worry and anxiety. It is good you appreciate what you have so far done or achieved even if it is little. Everyone must have achieved or done something at some point in life. This is what you should be proud of even if your colleagues and friends are ahead. You can jot down the achievements you have made and be reading them whenever you face any challenges.
Focus on your strengths: Every person has weaknesses and strengths. If you want to build self-confidence, you should focus on perfecting your strengths and improving wherever you are weak. Link your strengths to whatever you want to achieve or do. With the courage and appreciation of what you have achieved you will overcome any challenge very easily.
Think and focus on what is most important to you and where you are going: It is important to think and appreciate what is most important to you and that which you want to achieve in your life. To build self-confidence, you must set goals that you should achieve or meet within certain periods of time. You should set those goals which require working and straining to be achieved. Do not set goals that are very simple. The goals should:-
- Exploit your potential strengths
- Minimize the weaknesses
- Help you realize all your opportunities
- Be able of controlling the threats you face
Begin managing your mind: This includes thinking before you talk or cat. It involves managing your emotions, opinions, and views on something. This will ensure that you relate with all people well including the ones with you who differ in various aspects.
Commit yourself to success: To achieve anything, you must be committed. You should ensure that you dedicate your time, mind, and resources to building self-confidence. As you commit yourself to success you should aim at achieving balanced Self-Confidence lies in the mind of low self-confidence and over-confidence. Both low and overconfidence are not good and you should avoid them. Low self-confidence will put you in a state whereby you do not believe or trust whatever you do.
Overconfidence will put you in a state whereby you overtrust whatever you do. Overconfident people do not accept corrections or contributions by others. Self-confidence gives you confidence in whatever you do and enables you to accept reasonable criticism and contributions from others. Overconfident people do not asses the risks and vacancies of success and failure because they believe they can handle any challenge and this is not always the case because anything can fail or succeed.
Setting Out
This is the second great step in building self-confidence. It is the point where you start advancing toward your set goals. You should start by doing and achieving the easy goals the little and simple things. You should learn to appreciate the simple things you do. In setting out you should do the following:-
Build the required knowledge for success: Look at the goals and set out clearly the skills you need to apply or what you need to do in order to achieve those goals. You should also think about whether you can get those skills. You should think of feasible ideas for doing whatever you want to do. This may involve reading or consulting relevant articles and books on the issue.
Focus on the most important things: When starting, do not aim at doing or undertaking complex and challenging tasks. Do not also aim to do something perfectly. Aim at accomplishing the simple things first. This requires patience; do not be too anxious about achieving.
Set easy goals and achieve them: Do whatever possible to achieve the simple goals you have set out. If you set out complex goals you will most likely get disappointed in the early stages because you will strain to achieve them. You may also fail to achieve anything. Achieving the easy goals and accomplishing the simple take will give you the psyche and encouragement to perform better.
Constantly manage your mind: You should always celebrate and appreciate whatever you achieve and encourage yourself to perform better. You may apply the treasure mapping technique so as to make the visualization better and stronger.
Learn how to handle and cope with failure: Sometimes we may not achieve our goals or that which we desire. Some of the most successful; ventures took after repeated failures. If you fail or you do not achieve your target, do not give up or get disappointed so much. You should practice the habit of taking mistakes as learning experiences and not as impediments of mishaps to success. You should learn to merge stronger after every challenge failure gives people the capacity and know-how of solving facing future problems and challenges.
Accelerate toward success
This is the third step towards building self-confidence. At this point, you must work, strain nada stretch yourself to achieve. You should make the goals a little bit tough to achieve. You are likely to meet serious challenges which are difficult to handle. You should be more committed and apply more skills in order to move towards success.
You need to do the following in order to accelerate towards success:- At this point do not make the common mistake made by most people of being overconfident. Do not show your prowess or superiority. Goal setting is the best tool to achieving self-confidence very easily and within the required time frame.
Excerpted from the book Confident Creatures.
This excerpt has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Download this book on Boostlane:
https://boostlane.com/p/boostlane/880/confident-creatures/
