Focus on Challenges You Can Influence to Improve Self-Confidence

When you're faced with a challenge, you're better off directing your energy toward the things you can positively influence. Stop dwelling on the negative and start focusing on what is in your power to change.

"You can't control what happens to you, but you can control your attitude toward what happens to you, and in doing so, you will be mastering change instead of allowing it to master you." – Brian Tracey

In order to do that you have to build strong self-confidence. Self-confidence is that ability that allows you to believe in yourself, that you are good at what you do and have full confidence that you will achieve what you set out to do. Feeling confident in yourself should be part of your well-being and your satisfaction with life.

It seems obvious and easy; however, it is not. Many people do not have confidence in themselves and that makes it impossible for them to perform many actions. Self-confidence or self-esteem is the beginning of this complex balance.

Leadership lays its foundations in a balanced, stable and  reliable person whose self-esteem allows building permanent, reliable and stimulating relationships. The leader trusts himself. It is not pride, but self-knowledge. With the trust placed, we must add other tools to the box.

Being Bold and Innovative

One of the most important aspects of gaining self-confidence is being bold. Bold people are not better or possess more skills and qualities than those who are not. They simply dare to perform tasks and actions without knowing what the result is going to be.

Of course, when you do it, you get a result. This can be positive or negative. If it's positive, you'll have realized that you're good at doing that. Therefore, daring has allowed you to discover a skill that you may not have known you had and that gives you and generates confidence in your life.

If the result is negative, you must analyze why it did not go well and look for solutions to turn the situation around. This learning will help you to know yourself better as a person and to locate skills that you again did not think you had. Then, you must try again differently until you get it. In this process and in the final positive result you will generate self-confidence.

In addition, you are going to do things better and you will understand how  you must do the following.

Embracing Uncertainty Without Fear

This is linked to the previous point but it’s not the same. When I say "embrace uncertainty," I mean doing things that we are not at all sure of. There is nothing that tells us that we can do it or that we are going to get it. But there is also nothing that tells us otherwise, so it is in our hands to do it and get it.

When you are bold and not afraid of uncertainty, your confidence level increases. Among other things, because you do not expect to achieve anything at the first change, and  if that happens (as is most likely), it will not pose a problem of confidence or self-esteem because you were already prepared for it.

If you learn to work and live in this way, the changes that come your way will not affect you negatively or cause a significant impact on you.

This does not mean that living or working in uncertainty means that you do not know what you are going to do tomorrow because you do not strive in your job and you are on the tightrope or because you do not own your life or your actions. On the contrary, you have to take the reins and once you are sure of it, let yourself go, be flexible, but always with an objective, with goals, with a strategy, with a course, with an illusion, with a focus, with a plan.

Be Passionate, Optimistic and Positive

Another important point is to have the ability to be optimistic and positive; that is, to see things from the perspective that if something can go well, it will go well. If something has a solution, why worry? And if you don't have it, why worry?

You should always try to see the positive side of things or analyze the situation.

If as a rule you are a negative person, who always sees the bad side of things, when you are about  to perform a new action, you will not dare to do it because your mind is thinking that you are going to fail  and your internal interpretations are already conditioned. Therefore, you will not be able to embrace uncertainty because that generates fear and, therefore, your confidence is strongly diminished. However, if you are a positive and optimistic person, you will think that you are going to do well, or at least, that you are going to do your best. From the outset, this condition favors you to want to try, to dare and not to be afraid of uncertainty. And, to be more objective with the result.

Now, be serious about your actions and don’t simply rely on good luck!

Setting Goals and Plans

It is also necessary to have daily goals. If there is no goal to reach, it is impossible to move forward because you will never go in the right direction. And if you do, you would have insecurity, uncertainty, and distrust that you were on the right path, which would make you hesitate and turn around.

Therefore, set your goals. Based on these, create a route plan; that is, a strategy and actions to execute (tactics) that will help you reach the goal.

Generally, it will not be easy or fast to reach your goal, and along the way we find many obstacles, which reduce confidence. To fight against this, it is important to segment those objectives into micro-objectives; that is, smaller objectives that are easier to achieve and closer in time.

Achieving these micro-goals gives us encouragement and confidence because we know we are closer to our goal. By achieving a micro-goal, our confidence increases and we are better prepared to go for the next micro-goal. As our confidence increases, we get faster and it becomes easier to achieve the second micro-goal, which gives us another increase in confidence, and so on.

If in our life, we have several objectives (professional, personal, social) and for each of them, we set micro-objectives that we are fulfilling every day, our level of self-confidence skyrockets, and if we fail  in any, it does not affect us to a great extent because we are backed by our other successes.

In other words, adding additional tools to your leadership style, and enhancing your self-confidence, allows you to strengthen your soft skills. People spend most of the day in their jobs, where they frequently face various types of problems. In this scenario,  inconveniences abound. Therefore, soft skills have acquired great importance and value in the world of work, since they serve to solve problems and help us face the day correctly, balancing the right energy and emotions.