One of the most crucial
factors to success in any task and/or skill we do in life is self-confidence
which is a part of non-verbal communication. There are many ways of non-verbal
communication and all of them can be really important in our daily life, it influences
almost every situation we encounter and its outcome.
I use the definition of
self-confidence to be the ability or the belief to believe in yourself to
accomplish any task, no matter the odds, no matter the difficulty, no matter
the adversity; the belief that you can accomplish it – self-confidence. And you
may think “Well great, I don’t have it. I’m too shy” and you quit trying as
soon as you can, but what you have to remember though is that it’s a skill. Why
is it a skill? Because it can be trained. Let’s talk about some ways to do it,
before that though, you need to get the idea of a magic button out of your
head. It’s not something you get overnight, at least 99.9% of the time. If it
was that easy, everyone would do it and everyone would have it. That being
said, the easiest and arguably the best way: repetition and persistence. As probably
someone important once said: “Practice makes perfect. After a long time of
practicing, our work will become natural, skilful, swift, and steady.”. We
expect to be self-confident, but truth is, we can’t be unless the task/skill
we’re handling is not new to us. We want to be in a situation where you can say
to yourself “Hey, I’ve done this a thousand times” but do it with baby steps,
you first start with something easy and from there go to harder and harder
levels. The problem with this is, most
people quit right after the first adversity or the first failure. If Thomas
Edison was like most people, we would be with candlelight still or we would be
without it only years later at least. If J. K. Rowling was like most people, we
wouldn’t have Harry Potter. Another way to train self-confidence is self-talk.
Self-talk is , for example, that interior talk you do when the professor asks a
question you don’t know the answer to and start telling yourself “Please don’t look at me, please don’t make
me answer” or when you’re trying clothes and say “Damn I look bad in this
pants”. We all have that negative self-talk that goes in our head but what we
have to remember is that there are enough people that tell us how we can’t do
it and how we are not good enough, we don’t need more of that. Thoughts
influence actions so why do that negative self-talk? We need to do
self-affirmations. What’s that, you may ask. Easily answered by a quote of
Mohammed Ali “I am the greatest”. After all, if you don’t believe that why
should others do? If you don’t tell that to yourself why should you believe
them if they do? Look at yourself in the mirror every morning when you wake up
and say, “I am the captain of my ship and the master of my fate.”. Something
you also need to do if you want to gain self-confidence is to get away from
people that tear you down. You don’t need that in your life. You probably even
thought of those persons in your head as soon as you read that, you know who
they are, why are you keeping them in your life? Expect they may change? Why
should they if it doesn’t seem to have no consequences? Maybe you think that
it’s all fun and games but let me tell you, it probably isn’t, and you know you
it. Think about it. There’s one more thing you can do, if you want, you can
write a letter to yourself when you are feeling great and everything seems good
and perfect so when things are feeling bad and ugly you can read it. Write in
it why you are feeling good and what you have in your life that’s good and you
feel thankful for, something that you make yourself proud to have or be. Things
like that can uplift your mood in some bad days, after all, we all have them.
Looking at self-confident people one thing that you can learn right away from
them is how they interpret feedback the way they choose to. Learn to see the
glass half-full. When that girl/boy tells you that your chances with her/him are
1 in a million think “Hey...! I’ve got a chance!”. When you go to that
important job interview and you feel like you failed and messed it all up,
raise your head up and look to the next interview and the next opportunity.
Nothing in life comes easy and if it did it wouldn’t be so fun. Stop taking life so seriously and remember, we are all human. There are billions of people in this world, why should you care so much about the opinion of one negative person? Even if they are ten negative persons, if you think about it, it makes no sense to listen to them.
Unless you have a
psychological issue, for example, OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder), you can
always train and get better self-confidence. References:
TED. (2012, January 13).
The skill of self confidence | Dr. Ivan Joseph | TEDxRyersonU. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-HYZv6HzAs
César Ramos (8985)
Interpersonal Skills Class
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