Building confidence: Recognising what you've got going for you....

Hi everyone and welcome to another blog post.

★

This week I am challenging you to dedicate some time to thinking about YOU and celebrating all of your qualities, skills and achievements.

One of my aims when I was creating this blog was to help you build confidence, so this is the first blog post of many which will hopefully help you on this journey to become a more confident you. One of the first steps to achieving a sense of confidence is to accept your authentic self by understanding who you are as a person and what you’ve got going for you. Confidence does not come from external sources or materialistic things, it comes from an internal source when you accept who you are and where you are in life.

Understanding what you’ve got going for you brings a focus to your achievements, your strengths, skills and your value to the people around you. A lack of confidence is often attributed to comparing yourself to others, judging others and criticising others for being different. Today we are focusing on YOU and YOU only, step one to becoming a more confident you.

Grab yourself a piece of paper, notebook or your journal and I want you to think about and answer the following questions. Be truthful with yourself and remember this is your chance to reflect and think about you for a moment:

1. What achievements in life are you really proud of?

List at least five things down. They can be related to anything from your family, home life, social life, hobbies, relationships, jobs, mindset, health, old achievements or recent ones.

2. List as many of your positive qualities as you can think of.

These can be qualities you have as a friend, a parent, an employee, a partner….. Imagine you asked the people around you, what would they say? Your qualities could be things like patience, kindness, driven, trustworthy, reliable, a good listener, selfless…. List them all.

3. Write down what you regard as your top ten skills.

A skill is an ability to do something, it’s not about having a particular qualification or experience. There are many different types of skills as outlined below:

• Planning skills (having ideas, organising, predicting, budgeting)

• Doing skills (physical strength, operating equipment, technical expertise, speaking different languages)

• Motivational skills (coaching, supporting, encouraging self and others, being adaptable)

• Evaluating skills (measuring, reflecting, drawing conclusions, responding to feedback).

I was introduced to a strengths based approach to self development a couple of years ago after always having believed I should work on the things I wasn’t so good at. It blew me away the impact of a strengths based approach on my mindset, I stopped focusing on what I couldn’t do and started focusing on what I could do. Often you will never change many of your ‘weaknesses’ (I don’t like that word) there will naturally be some things in life you are better at than others, so it’s a more effective use of your time to build on your strengths and existing skills to become really strong in these areas.

4. Write down any qualifications you have, going as far back as you can remember to ensure your list is an accurate reflection of the qualifications you have obtained.

Confidence is a feeling of being able to do what you want to do, in the belief that things will work out OK or that you will not be ‘rocked’ if the outcome isn’t one which you expected. Confidence isn’t about thinking you are better than anyone, or that everyone likes you, it’s about feeling secure and knowing you are exactly where you need to be.

5. Complete the following sentence… I feel most confident when…..

Think about the people who make you feel the most confident, the environment and what it is about it that makes you feel confident? This will also help you identify the opposite - what and who makes you feel the least confident, unpick these situations and think about why they make you feel like this.

Hopefully you now have a list of things you should celebrate about yourself, all of the positives about YOU that you should accept, embrace and feel confident about. Now is the time to stop dwelling on the things you can’t do or have not yet achieved and focus on all of these things you have! Whenever you find yourself comparing yourself to others or doubting your ability to do something, refer back to your list and realise that you are capable and have achieved more than you realise.

I hope this exercise has been helpful and has highlighted all that you have going for you. It’s time to feel confident, worthy and proud!

Love Alice

X