7 Killer Habits To Boost Your Self-Confidence
Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit. — E.E. Cummings
Confidence is an incredibly important asset. It helps us to be happy in who we are and it means that we aim high at achieving our goals and ambitions and that we generally believe in ourselves.
If you are fortunate enough to have a lot of confidence then you will know how much happier it makes you than those who do not.
Luckily for us, we can boost our confidence by taking specific actions. In the following I’ve outlines 7 actions that you can take to increase your confidence immediately.
1. Smile
Confident people smile. There’s just no two ways about it. The reason is that smiling makes us feel good — it literally changes our state. On top of that, research has shown that it makes us look younger, thinner and releases pleasure chemicals in our brain.
No wonder then that smiling makes you feel more confident — but here’s the fun part: even a forced smile gives you all the benefits of smiling.
Research has shown that if you put a pen in your mouth and force yourself to smile in this way (like, who comes up with this?) then you are going to get all the real benefits of a genuine smile.
On another note when you smile, you also make other people like you more, and you appear more competent.
So if you’re at work — smile. Not only will it make yourself feel better, but it. will also literally pay off in dollars and cents.
Smiling pays off in an infinite amount of ways — including how confident you feel. If you want to be more confident — smile.
2. Open Your Body-Language
People with closed body language often comes off as dull, hard to talk to and defensive.
Therefore when you open up your body language and relax, you come off as confident. Confident people use speak with their hands — they use gestures in order to emphasize what they’re saying and to underline their points.
Open body language also means taking up space. People who are confident are not afraid to claim their space in a room. They aren’t afraid to show that they feel confident and they take up more space as a result.
Another thing that confident people do with their body language is that they open their palms and keep their hands to their sides.
When we are nervous, we tend to cover the most vulnerable areas of our bodies — our neck and stomach area, because we are afraid that (social) predators might get us.
When we’re confident however, we do the exact opposite — we open our body language and invite people to come close. We show that we’re not afraid of anything and that we welcome others into our sphere of intimacy.
If you want to be confident, open up your body language and allow people to come closer.
3. Speak Slowly and Clearly
Julian Treasure has an amazing TED talk on what it is exactly that makes people want to listen to us, which you can watch here:
The key takeaway for this article though, is that if you want to sound confident, you must speak slowly and clearly.
When you show others that you’re not in a hurry, you also show them that you trust in yourself and your abilities. You show them that you trust that you’re worth listening to — and taking the time to listen to.
Most of us — myself included — have a tendency to do the opposite. The more important something is, the faster we want to get through it, because we want to say everything before our time is up.
This is not very productive however, and it’s actually hurting us and makes the message we want to get across less effective.
If we want to appear confident, we need to speak slowly and clearly, in order to show that we are worth listening to.
4. Speak from your belly
This is another tip from Julian Treasure’s talk. Most people have a tendency to speak from the throat. But when we speak from our belly, we exude authority, competence and self-confidence.
Speaking from your belly is an invaluable tool, when it comes to feeling and appearing confident, because our we subconsciously recognize, that that is how confident people talk, and so if we talk in this way, we must be confident as well.
Keep in mind, that we can’t tell the difference between acting in a certain way and actually being that way. That means that if we act confidently, and do what confident people do, then we will eventually become confident.
The bottom line is, that when it comes to speaking, you want to take your time, slow your roll and speak from your belly, so that you come across as supremely confident to yourself and others.
5. Look The Part
Confident people look good. They make sure they’re groomed well, neat hair, clean looking, shaved, showered and nicely smelling. Confident people look like Don Draper and Harvey Specter.
When you dress better, you feel more confident. When you dress well, you’re sending a signal to your subconscious mind that you are a person of value, that you should feel confident and that you should act confident.
When you look good, you feel good, and there are a lot of small things you can do to make sure that you look the best you can.
6. Give a complement
When you give others a complement, you boost their self-confidence, and when you boost their self-confidence they feel better, which in turn makes you feel better because of the mirror neurons in the brain. We mimic how others feel, and that’s why, when you make others feel good, you feel good as well.
That’s why one of the most worthwhile habits you can adopt, is the habit of complimenting others. Not in an insincere and flattery type of way, but in a way that conveys honest appreciation for the other person and their actions.
When you do this, you immediately increases the other persons perception of themselves, and in turn their perception of you.
7. Do things you’re good at
When you do things you’re good at, you feel good. It doesn’t matter what it is, but the more worthwhile we consider something, the better we feel when we’re good at it.
For instance, if you think that helping is important, and that you’re good writing, and you’re writing helps others, then you should do more writing to increase your self confidence.
Or maybe you’re good at selling, and that’s what makes you confident. Then you should look for more opportunities to do that on a daily basis.
Do what you’re good at — the more the better.
The better you do, the more you increase your confidence, and the better you’ll perform as a result. It’s a positive feedback loop, meaning that the more you do, and the better you do, the better you’ll also do in the future.
Doing things that you’re good at, that you think are worthwhile is an incredible way to boost self-confidence. It might be the most powerful of the seven tips, and you if you want to boost your confidence right now, you should go and do the thing that you’re best at.
Right now.
