5 Easy Ways to Boost Your Self-Confidence
Who doesn’t want more self-confidence? After all, it’s linked to both positive mental and physical health. It can also improve our resilience, motivation, and even the quality of our relationships.
Here are 5 easy ways to boost your self-confidence today.
1. Love your smile.
Having a smile you are proud of significantly affects how positively you perceive and project yourself. Smiling even gives us the same happiness and confidence boost that exercising gives us without the hassle of lacing up our running shoes or breaking a sweat.
Fully reap these confidence-boosting rewards by practicing smiling often. Think of things that make you happy, either by spending time reminiscing over cherished memories or watching videos of adorably clumsy baby animals. Make it a point to spend more time with the people who make you feel good and keep you laughing.
If you are self-conscious about your smile due to discoloration, unevenness, overcrowding, or missing teeth, restoring your smile can help you regain your self-confidence. Maintain your sparkling, full smile with a solid routine of dental hygiene habits. Your routine should include brushing for two minutes with a soft-bristled brush and fluoridated toothpaste twice each day. You should also floss every day to efficiently clean every surface of the teeth and remove the plaque and bacteria that cause decay and gum disease.
2. Think positive.
By increasing our focus on the positive in life, we can gradually drown out the negative thoughts that squelch our confidence. Experiencing positive emotions helps us to see more possibilities in life, in turn increasing our confidence in what we are capable of achieving.
Albert Einstein once said, “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” Do you know what qualities make up your unique flavor of genius? Create a list of your strengths and achievements to regularly reflect on and keep the positives in your life top of mind.
Take a moment each day to write out a list of three to five things you are grateful for that day. Doing so helps you to reflect on the positive, decrease comparison, and increase self-esteem. You can jot your list out on the back of an envelope or keep a journal filled with your daily entries; either way, this activity gives you a quick boost of confidence for the day.
3. Put your best posture forward.
If you work in an office setting or read sites like Forbes, you have probably come across advice extolling the impact body language has on how we feel and how others perceive us. Don’t worry, we aren’t going to suggest you start practicing your power poses and channel your inner Lynda Carter at board meetings.
Instead of memorizing poses that make you feel varying degrees of ridiculous, you can make a simple change to your posture. Standing with proper alignment of the spine, neck, and head can help you to feel more confident, capable, awake, and alert.
Give yourself a quick boost of confidence by correcting your posture. To build the habit of maintaining good posture throughout the day, set up your environment to support proper spine alignment. If you are sitting all day, invest in an office chair with lumbar support and raise your monitor to be at eye level. Adjust the seat, wheel, and mirror positions in your car to settings that help you to sit in a properly aligned, upright position. Implement an exercise routine, such as yoga, that includes core strengthening movements with a focus on bodily alignment.
4. Set small goals and reach them.
Setting small, achievable goals gives us quick, confidence-boosting wins. These small goals also quickly add up over time to become large accomplishments we are immensely proud of.
When goal-setting, we should select those that are most in line with our values and psychological needs to ensure true success and satisfaction. Another way of thinking of this is considering which goals we truly want to achieve and which we feel we should achieve.
Successful goal-setters follow the S.M.A.R.T. goal methodology, which involves setting goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. Break big goals down into smaller chunks to start building momentum with easy-to-complete tasks. The smaller you can go, the easier it is to reach the final goal.
5. Learn something new.
Learning something new increases self-confidence, as it increases our communication skills, ability to make informed decisions, and feelings of accomplishment. “Practice can be very useful, and is highly recommended because in addition to building confidence, it also tends to improve quality,” says Deborah H. Gruenfeld, Co-Director of the Executive Program for Women Leaders at Stanford Graduate School of Business and featured expert in a piece written for the Harvard Business Review.
Develop new skills to complement your career by taking related courses to boost your self-confidence. Make a list of small actions you can take each day to practice what you’ve learned and grow your skill set. Or you can learn something new just for fun each day by subscribing to the Word of the Day, This Day in History, or Wikipedia’s featured article.