Wednesday, January 5, 2011

7 Best Ways To Gain Confidence in 2011

Confidence is a characteristic that allows us to take risks in our lives. It is often through risk, we achieve great success in many aspects of our lives. It makes sense, therefore, to try to develop our own self-confidence as best we can in order to be successful and happy. Here are 7 best ways to do just that:

Create a Life Philosophy
The basis of your self-confidence will come from your having developed and followed a life philosophy. This life philosophy can grow out of a great thinker whom you admire, a convergence of ideas you’ve picked up in your education, or something unique to yourself that you’ve developed. The point is that you should have a philosophy that will guide your every action. If you have a solid philosophy on life, and it’s one that you’ve developed smartly, then you’ll always know how to act and think. That’s something you can be confident in.


Be Aware of Yourself
Always strive to be aware of yourself: your body and your mind and your emotional state. Self-awareness will allow you to monitor how you are currently following your life philosophy. If you are always aware of your actions, then you can be confident that they are true to who you are; however, if you lack self-awareness, you might sometimes act in ways that contradict your life philosophy, thus harming your self-confidence.

Keep Good Company
Surround yourself with friends, family members, and a romantic partner who can help you become a better person. Ideally, these people will fit into your life philosophy in some manner, though they need not share that life philosophy directly. By surrounding yourself with good people, you can be confident in your relationships.

Pursue Your Passions
Confidence comes from doing a job that you know you’re good at. Confidence comes from doing a job that you love. Too often people work jobs they hate in order to do the things they love off the clock. Why not try to combine your passions with your job? You’ll have no reason to doubt yourself throughout the day if your job is to pursue your passions.


Understand Failure
In order to be confident in yourself, you must understand and have experienced the nature of failure. For without failure, you cannot understand what it means to succeed. Without knowing the difference between the two, what’s the point of being confident in yourself? Confidence is what helps you succeed, but there’s no need to succeed if you don’t mind failure.

Practice Self-Discipline
Self-discipline will help you become confident in yourself because it will force you to control your impulses. By controlling your impulses you can understand how your subconscious functions. By practicing self-discipline you can develop the confidence in your ability to control the whims and desires that do not necessarily connect with your life philosophy.

Reflect
Finally, you must reflect often on your day, on your weeks and months, on your year, and on your life. Reflect on how you handled a stressful situation. Reflect on your memories. Use reflection to understand how you have made your way through the world so far. Learn from self-reflection, for by learning, you can figure out how to handle yourself in the future, thus giving yourself the confidence to be a better person.