How To Find Your Lost Confidence

By having the humility to embrace your failings you will find the strength to live a better life..

n order to be successful you have to be confident because belief precedes evidence. You have to believe you can do something before you can do it, and when you are confident it’s a wonderful feeling.

You believe you can achieve anything however when that confidence is lost there is a real danger that you can enter a downward spiral.

You don’t believe in yourself so you don’t perform to your abilities.

And when you don’t perform you lose even more confidence.

With less confidence you perform even worse which then leads to even less confidence and before you realise it you, your career and your life is now on a downwards spiral to failure.

When this happens, what can you do?

In this article I want to explore what you can do in order to rediscover your lost confidence.

How the mind works

When you have that deflating feeling of lost confidence, what is actually happening in your mind is that it is a recalibration of expectations in order to increase the probability of you remaining safe.

The mind perceives failure as a risk so if it experiences too much failure it readjusts your perceptions so that your failure no longer hurts as much because you never expected to succeed anyway. So remember what you are experiencing is just part of your mind’s self-defence mechanism.

You are ultimately in control of how you feel and how you react - success is a choice.

Failure is inevitable

‘The greatest risk to man is not that he aims too high and misses, but that he aims too low and hits,” Michelangelo once said.

I’ve never ever met a successful person who has never experienced failure, in fact the only people who have never failed have done so because their expectations were so low that they never ever pushed themselves.

A life worth living is one that allows us to discover our limitations and these limitations can only be discovered through failure and with failure comes a lack of confidence.

Therefore failure is not something to be avoided or feared, failure is a natural part of our journey and needs to be embraced because it’s not failure that defines us but how we deal with that failure.

Ignore the doubters

‘No one can make you feel inferior without your consent,” Eleanor Roosevelt.

It’s difficult when those around you don’t believe in you whether it’s a negative boss at work or a family member who means well because they don’t want to see you fail. It’s difficult not to let all the negativity drag you down.

However it’s you and only you that determines how you feel regardless of other people’s comments or opinions.

The biggest regret people have on their deathbed is that they never had the courage to live a life they wanted instead they lived a life others expected of them so don’t be one of those people and instead start listening to yourself about what is possible and stop allowing other people to transfer their inadequacies onto you.

Raise your standards

“If you want to change your life you have to raise your standards,” Tony Robbins

When confidence is low it’s easy to allow all aspects of your life to be impacted.

You might start sleeping longer than normal, do less exercise, and not eat as healthy as you would like.

This is all natural but there is a danger that these behaviours can create a downward spiral.

The more you lose confidence the greater the failure and as the failures increase the confidence diminishes.

The best way to avoid this is to maintain and then raise your standards and it can start small.

Dress well, eat well and start treating yourself with the love and care that you would want others to give you.

Set high standards for all aspects of your life even things that may seem small because when addressing confidence it’s the small things that matter.

Do something that scares you.

‘If you hear a voice within you saying “you can not paint” then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced,” Vincent Van Gogh said.

Remember when I said about the mind acting as a self defence mechanism by lowering your expectations therefore diminishing the hurt during failure, well another thing your mind does is that it creates a comfort zone for you with a clear understanding of what you can and can’t achieve however you can never achieve greatness by staying safe.

The person who you were always meant to become exists outside of your comfort zone and is waiting for you.

To find your confidence and achieve your ambitions you need to become comfortable with being uncomfortable because it’s in these moments that your self doubts start to diminish so embrace those doubts and aim to do something you have never done before.

Be authentic

‘Always be yourself and have faith in yourself. Do not go out and look for a successful personality and try to duplicate it,” said Bruce Lee.

The only thing worse than having no confidence is having false confidence.

This is when people convince themselves that they are better at a task than they actually are.

So they never feel a need to go outside of their comfort zone.

These people can become vocal about their limited achievements and when faced with the reality of the situation, they choose to blame other people for their own failings and while they can appear extremely confident on the outside, inside they are filled with feelings of insecurities.

You don’t want to become this person so always remember to stay true to yourself, be honest and above all, be you.

By having the humility to embrace your failings you will find the strength to live a better life.

Talk to someone

“A problem shared is a problem halved.”

When you see successful people it’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that they have always been confident and have never had any doubts yet you couldn’t be more wrong.

I spend my time coaching leaders, many of whom are very successful in their roles and it’s common for me to help them deal with self confidence, people who you would never imagine having doubts but they are struggling internally.

Success is not about the absence of self-doubt, instead it’s about doubting yourself and carrying it.

Regardless, it can be a long journey and a lonely one but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Loneliness is not the feeling of being alone, it’s the feeling of believing that no one cares but they do.

Take the time to reach out to a friend, a family member, a health professional or anyone in your life that you trust and share your concerns and you will be surprised just how many people are there for you.