How Can You Increase Your Self-Confidence?

Four interesting ways to increase self-confidence and assertiveness

You need self-confidence in all areas of life. In our private life, as a student at school, and later in the workplace or in any decision-making position-in many situations. Unfortunately, self-confidence does not always come naturally, eventually we must make efforts to make it work. However, it is worth maintaining it gradually.

What can we do to achieve this?

Herein, we outlined some helpful hints that may help to gain self-confidence. Feel free to apply them!

Act as if you were self-confident!

It does not matter that you lack assertiveness, imitate it as if you had! By doing this and learning to reflect this ability, the outside world will consider you confident. How? The simplest and easiest way to do this is to apply body language.

Which body language elements might be helpful? Let’s see which are these!

Firstly: raising your head, secondly: keeping your back straight and shoulders back and thirdly: maintaining eye contact. It can also help a lot if you avoid fidgeting with small objects (pen or phone), chewing your nails or walking up and down that reflects anxiety. Beyond that, it is worth keeping a natural, gentle smile on your face, which again shows self- confidence and builds trust in other people. Ultimately, with these tiny tricks you achieve to:

Feel yourself confident

It is a proven fact that a confident (or “victorious”) posture of yours entails assertiveness. However, as soon as you fold your shoulders, curve your back and gaze at the floor, the feeling of insecurity increases and self-confidence decreases. Prior to important events-such as a job interview, presentation or public speaking-it is worth taking that victorious posture and keeping it for at least 1 minute. This will in the end significantly enlarge the chances of the positive behavior you want to present.

Tiny exercises throughout the day for the sake of self-confidence

The above mentioned victorious posture is a great way to increase our confidence with our body language. There are, however, additional tiny, easy-to-use tricks that can enhance the effect and that we can exercise during the day.

One of these tools, for example, is that we check our posture many times during the day in situations that are commonly occurring. Such situations can be, for instance, when we look at our phone, if we drink water, when we get up from the chair or pass through a doorway. In these cases, raise yourself the following quick questions:

• Do I hold my back straight?
• Do I keep my head raised?
• Do I have a nice facial expression?
• Do I show a positive impression?

If you answer with ’no’ to any of these questions, you can change and improve your posture quickly. As a result, you can increase your confidence.

There is, however, one more trick to use, and this is:

What would the ‘Super Me‘ do in this situation?

Apart from the correct application of body language, you can also increase your self-confidence by imagining how the ‘Super Me’ (i.e. the self that already possesses the desired assertiveness) would behave. Just think about what would your Super Me act who is self-confident, assertive, and always makes the right decision. This may seem difficult and strange for the first time, but you can improve it by exercising and it may lead to an assertive behaviour.

These ideas may seem odd at first as they may cause “false” feelings, but do not be frightened of your initial inner resistance! Test the methods for a few weeks! Think as if you were trying out a system or a new procedure. Keep track of yourself whether you feel any change and check the feedbacks you get from the outside world. Remember: it is only a question of habits what behavior you take on yourself. In short, confirmation signals will make your anxiety disappear and other people will notice what kind of positive change you go through.

As a result, your confidence and assertiveness finally increases and you become the person you always wanted to be.