If you already have a general understanding of what confidence is, then you’re ready to learn more about a very specific type of confidence that most people want and love: self confidence.
Now, what does it mean to be self confident? And where does self confidence come from?
These are excellent questions to ask, because if you want to build confidence in yourself and become a more self confident person overall, it’s important to first understand what you’re trying to achieve.
Understanding self confidence
Self confidence is a good feeling about yourself and your capabilities. So, if you’re a self confident person, it simply means that you feel good about who you are, and you also feel good about your ability to achieve things you want to achieve.
Digging a little deeper, you can think of self confidence as being a good feeling about yourself and your capabilities that:
For example, if you think that you’re a great person, and that you can achieve anything you want to achieve, you’re self confident as a result of thinking this way.
This is important to appreciate, because it’s a common glitch in thinking to think that some people think positively about themselves and their capabilities because they are self confident.
But it is the other way around: these people are self confident because of the way they think.
The lesson here: if you want to become a more self confident person, you can and will definitely achieve this by thinking more positively about yourself and your capabilities.
The more self confident you are, the happier and more successful you’ll tend to be.
This is because the better you feel about yourself and your capabilities, the more you naturally enjoy who you are, and you are therefore naturally happier with yourself.
Also, the better you feel about your capabilities, the more energized and motivated you are to take action to achieve things you want to achieve, like personal dreams or goals that interest you. This naturally translates into greater success.
Since self confidence comes from the way you think about yourself and your capabilities, it is something that you can maintain in any situation or circumstance.
For example, let’s say you’re a very self-confident, wealthy person who runs a lucrative business, and you’ve got tons and tons of friends.
Then, one day, you lose your business, you lose all your money, and you lose all your friends soon after. (Or, at least, people you thought were your friends.)
Now, even if all this happens, you can still remain self-confident, simply by continuing to think positively about yourself and your capabilities, even though all these things happened.
In fact, you could even grow in self-confidence, and feel even better about yourself and your capabilities, by handling this situation in a way where you learn valuable lessons that make you an even stronger, more confident person.
Click on any of these qualities to learn more about self confidence.
With these qualities, self confidence is something that benefits you in a powerful way, because not only is it a good feeling that naturally makes you happier and more successful, but it’s also something that you can develop and maintain in any situation or circumstance.
This is because it is self confidence that comes from within you, not confidence that comes from other people or things that are external to you.
Where does self confidence come from?
Self confidence comes from your abilities. For this reason, you can think of self confidence as self canfidence, since it comes from things you can do in any situation or circumstance, regardless of what others want you to do.
More specifically, self confidence comes from three powerful abilities that you, like every other human being, possesses:
Your ability to think positively about yourself and your capabilties (rather than negatively)
Your ability to be certain that you are someone of positive value and have powerful capabilities (regardless of whether others doubt this or disagree with you)
Your ability to continue thinking positively about yourself and your capabilities, in any situation or circumstance, no matter what
Having these three powerful abilities makes it possible for you to be very self confident; developing and using these three abilities is what actually makes you self confident.
So, if you want to become a more self confident person, it’s first a matter of recognizing that you already have all the abilities that it takes to become more self confident, and then developing and using those abilities to create greater confidence in yourself.
When people talk about true self confidence, they are generally talking about having a strong degree of confidence in yourself and your capabilities, which isn’t shaken by a change in your situation or circumstances.
For example, let’s say you have billions of dollars, and you think you’re the greatest person in the world. Then, you lose all your money, and you also lose all your self confidence, as well, as you begin thinking of yourself as a worthless loser.
In this situation, you might say that you didn’t have ‘true’ self confidence. Clearly, you were confident in the value of having a lot of money, but you weren’t that confident in the value of being you, regardless of how much money you had.
Similarly, if you’re a self confident person when everyone loves you and is praising you, but you lose all confidence in yourself the moment everyone turns their back on you and despises you, you could say that you’re not ‘truly’ self confident.
After all, in this situation, you learn that you’re confident in the value of what others think of you, but you’re not that confident in your own positive perception of yourself, regardless of what others do or don’t think of you.
The lesson: if you want to develop what people consider true self confidence, you want to develop confidence in yourself that remains even if you’re stripped of any material possessions or any support from others.
Since examples of self confidence are excellent for helping you understand what it means to be self confident, consider the example of a very self confident person who is delivering his very first public speech.
It’s common and normal for people to feel nervous about speaking in public (especially the first time), but this very self confident person doesn’t feel nevous or anxious at all, because he knows without a doubt that he can deliver the speech he’s written, and he also knows without a doubt that he can accept, handle, learn, gain, and benefit from any outcome.
This confidence is tested: when he delivers his speech, the entire crowd boos him and tells him to get off stage. But because he is so self confident, he continues to hold his head up high as he delivers the rest of his speech, unphased by the crowd’s reaction to his speech.
Indeed, for this self confident person, it’s no big deal that the crowd boos or mocks him, since he remains absolutely certain that he is someone of great positive value, no matter how others react to him.
From this public speaking experience, he learns that he can easily handle being mocked and booed, which only makes him even more confident in himself and his abilities.
Furthermore, he learns that he could deliver a speech in the future in a more effective way that will likely elicit a different response from the audience, and by recognizing this, he already becomes more confident that the next time he delivers a speech he’ll be a better public speaker.
In this way, his self confidence grows as a result of this experience, rather than diminishes.
And it is because his self confidence naturally grows like this on a regular basis that he is such a self confident person in the first place. He’s simply a self confident person who just grows more and more self confident over time, which naturally always works in his favor.
If you have low self confidence, it just means that you see little (if any) value in yourself and your capabilities.
Also, any value that you do see is easily shaken by different situations or circumstances.
For example, even if you think positively about yourself sometimes, you begin thinking negatively about yourself the moment anyone says anything negative or critical about you.
An important thing to appreciate is that if you have low self confidence (or even no self confidence at all), it is no big deal at all to increase your self confidence.
After all, if you want to become more self confident, it’s simply a matter of learning what self confidence is, what steps to take to become more confident in yourself, and then taking those steps.
Out of all the keys to self confidence, the most important key is to see positive value in yourself and your capabilities, regardless of whether anyone else does.
Once you do this, you’re well on your way to developing strong self confidence that you can enjoy in any situation or circumstance, no matter what.
Learn more about self confidence
Already, you have learned what self confidence is, and how you already possess everything it takes to develop greater confidence in yourself. This is a valuable achievement in and of itself, since this knowledge opens the door for you to become a much more confident person.
The next step, for you, is to learn more about the importance and benefits of self confidence, and why it’s in your best interest to be self confident, regardless of whether others want you to become more confident or not.
Hi, I'm Dave Fonvielle, the founder of Always Greater. On this website I teach you step by step how to be happier and more successful achieving your goals, whether it's completing a small personal to do task, like doing the dishes, or a large business goal, like launching a new product. Get my free 3 Tiny Habits for Being Happier & More Successful training for all of this right here.