How To Series; Embrace Your Confidence!

Hi! Welcome back to the MFP How To series...where we’ll talk about a skill or concept and how you can use it in your everyday life. 

Today I’ll be talking about how to embrace your confidence. 

Confidence is one of those things that fluctuates as we go through life’s experiences. When we start life’s journey as babies, we embrace all of life’s experiences, successes and failures, as everyday necessities. We build confidence through trial and error, persistence and perseverance, and many, many failures. 

The thing is, in our earliest days, we don’t see failures the same way we do once we get older. Said another way, our failures do not impact our confidence. They, in fact, fuel us to keep trying, and to conquer the challenge.

Once we reach middle childhood, we become more aware of the impact of each of these so-called ‘failures’. We are acutely more conscious of our confidence and, in particular, what impacts it negatively. From here, we may start to learn avoidance behaviors as we try to protect and shelter our confidence as much as we can. This avoidance can continue into adulthood and lead us to fear failure. But here’s the thing: failure is a crucial component of success! Failure fine tunes our road map, giving us valuable information about what improvements to make, what’s working and what’s not, and how to adjust. So learning to embrace your failures is an important and underrated tool in embracing your confidence. 

Before we dive into how to embrace confidence, let’s define what it means. Confidence can be defined as believing in ourselves. To believe in ourselves, we must be proud of and embrace our strengths, use mistakes and failures as fuel towards improvement, and speak to ourselves kindly. Yet, we don’t always do that. 

So today, let’s look at ways to embrace our confidence. 

1. Identify and embrace your strengths.
   -What makes you, you! And what makes you great! Embracing your strengths (physical, mental, emotional, psychological, etc) is the foundation of your confidence. Examples of your strengths may include; your awareness, your muscle tone, your hearing, your vision, your kindness, your commitment, your (sport specific) skills, your mindset, the type of teammate you are, etc.
   

2. Identify and embrace your weaknesses.
   -Weaknesses are key stepping stones to confidence! It can be hard to embrace our weaknesses, but when we work on improving ourselves, we know our weaknesses will eventually become strengths. Think of weaknesses as opportunities for growth.
   

3. View your weaknesses as temporary.
   -Most things are temporary, so let’s learn from mistakes and use them to make us better, rather than dwelling on them. Like Ted Lasso said, “You know what the happiest animal on Earth is? It's a goldfish. It has a 10-second memory. Be a goldfish”. Weaknesses are only weaknesses if we let them be.
   

4. View mistakes as opportunities for growth.
   -Abby Wambach said of my favorite quotes, “Failure is fuel”. Mistakes make us better when we allow ourselves to learn from them, and by doing so, we strengthen and embrace our confidence. As a result, failures no longer impact our confidence in negative ways, but in fact, can boost it when we embrace the approach that failures fuel us.
   

5. Believe in yourself! 

   -Belief is a key ingredient in confidence. We must truly and deeply believe in our abilities, our preparation, and our grit in order to embrace our confidence. Belief comes from many places, such as our preparation, our training, our approach, how we talk to ourselves, and our self-trust. When we identify our objective, prepare, train, use positive and motivating self-talk, and trust we can do it, our belief and confidence can flourish.  

6. Speak kindly to yourself! 

-Your self-talk is arguably one of the most important things you can do to impact your confidence (and it’s backed by science!). Rewriting our internal script is a vital skill to improving and embracing your confidence, and by doing so, we slowly but surely rewrite our self-beliefs. Combining kind and encouraging self-talk with the perspective that failures are a necessary part of your confidence, you can start to embrace your confidence and strengthen its foundation so that it’s not as easily impacted by life’s experiences. 

Let’s recap. Confidence can, and likely will, fluctuate throughout our lives. But, there are things we can do to make sure our confidence remains steady throughout life’s experiences. You have the skills, you are prepared, and you can do it! And remember, I’m here to help.