Mental Health

Having confidence and believing in yourself is a critical aspect of your life. Confidence directly impacts your happiness, your satisfaction with each day, and your overall well-being. Being confident means you trust yourself to make the right choices, voice your own opinions, and accept your true self.

Confidence means letting go of comparing yourself to others and seeking validation from your surroundings. When you accept yourself and become the best version of yourself, you will be happier and feel fulfilled. Feeling confident allows you to achieve your greatest dreams and reach your highest potential. Below are four ways to help you reflect within and build habits to help you boost your self-confidence.

Meditation
Meditation is the ability to clear your mind and relax your thoughts to become mentally stronger, become more emotionally stable, and stop negative self-talk. By meditating for a few minutes each day, you will make it a habit. Link it with something you already do. Like drinking that first cup of coffee in the morning, or taking the dog for a walk. Meditation helps you to calm the mind and reflect on your thoughts and emotions. Meditating is important because it allows you to identify negative self-talk and self-doubt and analyze where it may be coming from. I’ll be writing a lot more on meditation on this website. It’s been a part of my daily life for the last 5 years and I credit this practice to many improvements in my own well-being.

Once you make it a habit, you can control your thoughts and realize your potential. This will transform your mindset and allow you to react differently. You will find yourself stepping out of your comfort zone and facing fears that may have held you back in the past. For help in creating habits, read: SmallHabitsBigImpact

Self-Care
Taking time for self-care is an important way to boost your self-esteem and confidence. Give yourself some love by making time each day to improve your appearance, mental health, and sit with your thoughts, you will learn more about yourself and discover your self-worth. Working on taking care of you will make you feel better about yourself is a great way to take care of and love yourself.

Self-care looks different for every woman but setting time each week to spend with yourself and take care of yourself is important for your confidence. From picking up a new hobby to getting a massage, or even taking time reading a book. There are so many ways to practice self-care and feel more fulfilled within. Try to remember things you’ve loved doing in the past and do them again! This sense of satisfaction and self-care will project to your external environment in many ways, making you feel more confident overall.

Journaling
Making time for a daily journal is an important way to boost your confidence. We all have tons and tons of bottled-up thoughts in our minds that repeat in cycles on a daily basis, even if it occurs subconsciously. Taking a step back and writing down these thoughts can allow you to process them in a different way and look at them from a different perspective. This was a hard one for me. But again, it’s something you need to link with something else that you do every day. Like after you do the dinner dishes, or climb into bed. I keep a digital journal so I always have it with me.

One of the best ways to use journaling to improve your confidence is by finding specific prompts that will motivate you to reflect on different aspects of your life and be honest with yourself. AI, is great for this! I asked ChatGPT to give me 5 journal prompts that would help women boost their self confidence and here’s what it gave me.

Reflect on your strengths:
What are three things you are really good at, whether in your personal life or your career? How have these strengths helped you overcome challenges or achieve success?
Reframe past challenges:
Think of a time when you faced a difficult situation but came through stronger. How did you handle it, and what did you learn about your abilities?
Celebrate your uniqueness:
What makes you unique? Write about the qualities, experiences, or traits that set you apart and make you proud of who you are.
Visualize your confident self:
Imagine yourself one year from now as your most confident self. How do you speak, carry yourself, and interact with others? What steps can you take today to become that version of yourself?
Challenge self-doubt:
What is one limiting belief you’ve had about yourself, and how has it held you back? Now, write down evidence that disproves this belief and explore how letting go of it can help you grow.

Once you question your deeply rooted beliefs about yourself, you can discover capabilities you never knew you had.

Face Fear
One of the reasons we have low self-esteem in different situations is that we feel unprepared or have self-doubt because of past failures or experiences. These fears hold us back and prevent us from achieving our goals. One of the best ways to come to terms with and overcome these fears is by facing them and forcing ourselves into situations that are outside of our comfort zones. When I’m feeling uncomfortable, I often ask myself “What’s the worst that can happen?” In most cases, the answer isn’t so bad that it prevents me from trying something I might normally avoid out of fear and I can take a small step out of my comfort zone and enjoy my life more fully.

Once you overcome your fear, you will feel a great sense of resilience that you can carry with you in future situations that once seemed daunting. You will realize that many of these fears stem from within and it is often our in our own limiting beliefs and self-talk that perpetually repeats the worst possible scenarios when the outcome is uncertain.

I encourage you to try these practices for 30 days and see how they can improve your self-confidence and your life! If you’d like to learn how to make these practices habits, read: SmallHabitsBigImpact.

As sure as the sun rises and sets each day, we all have periods of time, some brief and some longer, when things are just not going our way. The reality is that life constantly fluctuates emotional highs and lows.

While most of our time is spent in the fairly even, mundane state of emotional normalcy, this is broken up by the peaks of the best of times and unfortunately, the valleys when nothing is going right.

While almost no one ever seeks information on dealing with the best moments of their lives, handling the lows can be difficult. Today we live in very troubled times, a pandemic has taken over most of the world, and people are affected in many profound and very real ways.

Everything that surrounds getting through this pandemic is based in suffering and pain, its just the nature of the beast. Death, isolation, fear, facing the unknown, and grief and loss can strip us of our joy and may lead to depression.

While you cannot control what happens outside your door, you CAN control yourself. There are things you can do to maintain a positive and even joyful mindset.

In this discussion, we are going to talk about three tips for doing just that.

Surround Yourself With The Right People

It is often said that we are the sum total of the five people we surround ourselves with most often. If that is the case, making sure you get the right people around you, especially when going through a difficult period, is critical to hold on to your joy. Often times when life is really beating us up, we retreat into the solitude of our home, wanting to throw the covers of our heads and be left alone with our thoughts.

Make no mistake; sometimes periods of solitude are healthy and necessary. Right now, isolation is the norm as we fight a health crisis. However, when you find yourself in a really low spot, robbed of your joy, connecting with those who make you happy is mandatory.

Although it may seem obvious in concept, avoiding people who have the opposite effect can sometimes be the real battle. Negative individuals are especially important to keep out of your life when you are already struggling to find joy in your current situation.

You can stay connected even when you’re feeling isolated and all alone. Technology has seen to that.

Face Time on iPhones and Video calls on Android
Skype
A simple phone call
Email
Text
Zoom and other video conferencing software can bring together friends and family while staying safe and following health official’s orders.
Good old-fashioned letter-writing

Remember That Nothing Is Permanent

“THIS TOO SHALL PASS”

Nothing in life is permanent. Fortunately, nothing in life is permanent! Let’s state that again, this will pass.

During periods of extreme happiness and joy, thinking about the temporary nature of each season in life is not something we like to dwell on.

On the contrary, keeping this truth in mind during the low times can be very beneficial. Whatever you are going through, no matter how bad it may be, it WILL pass.

In fact, most of the difficult times you experience in life will end without any extra effort on your part. It is so easy to get into the mentality that we have to put forth an immense amount of effort to make something bad go away.

Even though this is sometimes the case, most of the time, TIME is the only remedy for tough situations. If you want to maximize your joy during difficult times, remember that your situation is not the way things are, only the way they are RIGHT NOW.

Base Your Happiness On Yourself

Since we have discussed how life is divided into highs and lows and the fact that nothing will lasts forever, this leads to another thing to keep in mind during the best AND the worst periods.

If you want to have joy consistently, your joy absolutely cannot be dictated by your circumstances.

If you let every good thing that happens to you leave you soaring on cloud nine and every negative situation sends you crashing to earth, you will go through life in a state of emotional exhaustion! Stable, consistent, sustainable joy can only be created and found within yourself.

Life’s joy is far less about what happens to you and more about how you react to the things that happen in your life. You are in charge of how you feel. Don’t fall into the routine of letting happiness get to your head and failure to your heart.

Habits to Boost Your Self-Confidence

How to Find Joy During Hard Times