Self Confidence & Your Strengths

At the heart of every self confident person is a foundation of high self esteem, because without this you won’t love yourself or recognise the things you are good at.

Therefore in order to build your self confidence, you first need to work on improving your self esteem if it is not already at a high level.

Otherwise you will be working with a self rejecting mindset, which will make changing anything in your life extremely difficult.

Self Confidence And Your Talents

In general, you will find that the things you are good at and which you regard as being important to you, will be the areas of your life that your self confidence is at its highest.

Conversely, if you are not very good at something which is important to you, your self confidence is likely to suffer.

What this all means is that your self confidence largely stems from your strengths and your values. In other words, self confidence comes from the things you are good at and the things which you think are important.

So naturally the first thing anyone should do to improve their confidence levels is to start with their strengths, because this will provide them with a foundation upon which to build higher and higher levels of self confidence.

You do this simply by acknowledging the things you are currently good at (e.g. playing a musical instrument), and then accepting praise from others (and yourself) for the things you do well.

Once you start to respect yourself for your talents, that self respect will then slowly spread into other areas of your life thereby allowing you to gain confidence at other things.

What Are You Good At?

To help you decide what you are good at, try thinking about things you did well at school, work or home and then think about future actions you can do to expand upon these talents.

For example, if you feel that making people laugh is one of your talents because you told several funny jokes at a party once, then you may decide to expand upon that talent by reading joke books or humour psychology books.

So the basic format to use is:

• What I am good at.

• Example of when I did it well.

• How can I expand upon this talent?

After you have completed this list, you will know what you are good at and things you can do to start building up your self confidence.

Asking Other People’s Opinions

If you are still struggling with finding what you are good at, then why not ask your friends or colleagues?

Often we assume that the things we are good at others are also good at, and so discount them even though they are perfectly valid (and often unique) talents.

Here are some questions you could ask those who are close to you:

• What do you think I am good at?

• What could I do more of?

• What could I do less of?

• Can you rely on me for anything?

• How do you think I could improve my skills?

The purpose of these questions is to get a good idea of the things you are good at, why you are good at them and how you could improve them.

Once you know what your talents are, you will then have something to work with to improve your self confidence.

Revealing Unknown Talents

One of the advantages of asking other people, as opposed to just deciding yourself, is that often we see ourselves differently to how other people see us.

For example, we may be doing things well which we were unaware of, or we may have been doing things badly which we were unaware of. So speaking to people about ourselves can help us to see things we didn’t see before.

In addition to this, by speaking to several people you will be able to spot patterns in the feedback you receive.

So if you find everyone is telling you the same thing, then it would be a wise move on your behalf to act upon what they are saying.

Likewise, if you ask five people for feedback and only one says something bad about you, then you might be able to discount what they have said, or ask someone else if they agree or not.

Self Esteem & Feedback

It is very important that you work on your self esteem before you seek feedback from other people.

This is because if you try to get feedback from others when your self esteem is low, you will probably either reject the good things they say about you, or be hurt by the bad things they say.

Once your self esteem is at a reasonable level such feedback shouldn’t affect you that much, because you will know that that you are strong enough to hear it and that it will help you to improve yourself for the better.

Overall the purpose of receiving feedback from others is to identity your strengths, so that you can expand on them to help you improve your level of self confidence.

If you do hear bad things about you (which is likely since no one is perfect) try not to focus on them too much, but if you feel strong enough, use them to improve those areas of your life also.