Increasing Your Self-Esteem and Confidence
Low self-confidence lies at the root of many people’s shyness, social anxiety, and insecurities. This post addresses the most important points for improving your self-confidence (aside from the concepts that have already been covered, like how to dispute counterproductive thoughts) by covering two concepts that both fall under the term “self-confidence.”
The first is core self-esteem, which is your overall assessment of your worth as a person. The second is how self assured, competent, and brave you feel in specific social situations—your situational confidence (for example, “I feel confident about how I’ll do at the party tonight”).
Having high self-esteem gives you strengths that will override aspects of shyness, anxiety, insecurity, and pessimism. People with high self-esteem feel good about themselves and what they have to offer, are more optimistic and more prepared to take risks, and are better able to tolerate uncertainty, discomfort, and rejection.
Their positive feelings about themselves are stable and come from within, and their emotions don’t constantly go up and down based on outside factors, like whether enough people smiled at them in the hallway that day.
Having a healthy level of self-esteem does not mean being arrogant, boastful, and entitled. That mentality is damaging and may be an indication of deeper feelings of inferiority; it’s not true self-esteem at all. Having situational confidence is similarly helpful.
You’ll feel calmer and surer of yourself, you’ll perform better, you’ll have an easier time putting yourself out there, and you’ll tend to make a better impression on others.
Ways to increase your core self-esteem
There’s no one path to increasing your core self-esteem. Rather there are many things you can do that add up to feeling more sure of yourself.
Practice self-acceptance and realize it’s okay to be a normal, less-than perfect person
The foundation of good self-esteem is realizing you’re okay the way you are. People sometimes imagine that if they had high self-esteem, they’d feel cocksure and amped up all the time, but having good self-esteem feels more like a deep, solid level of comfort with yourself. You’re aware of your personality traits and quirks, your strengths and weaknesses, your successes and failures, and you’re fine with the overall package they create. The following factors play into being self-accepting:
- Realizing that it’s all right to be a regular human who makes mistakes and isn’t perfect. Everyone gets things wrong sometimes, and it doesn’t mean they’re broken through and through.
- Setting realistic standards for yourself and letting go of perfectionism. People with low self-esteem sometimes believe they won’t be able to feel good about themselves unless they become an overachieving superhuman who’s the complete opposite of how they are now.
- Being nice and compassionate to yourself. Accepting yourself means being on your own side. If you mess up, you can look at the situation with an understanding eye, rather than tearing into yourself.
People are sometimes wary about the idea of being self-accepting. Being self accepting doesn’t mean you have to condone or approve of everything you do wrong or embrace all your flaws.
However, when you do make a mistake, you don’t need to disown everything about yourself. But don’t think you need to abandon all desire to change or improve yourself either. Instead, acknowledge that there are areas in your life you’d benefit from working on.
The well-known saying is “You’re fine the way you are… and there’s always room for improvement.” When you accept yourself, personal development is something you choose to do because you see how it will add to your life, instead of viewing it as something you have to do to stay a few steps ahead of your supposed intrinsic shamefulness.
Similarly, being more self-accepting doesn’t mean you’ll become content in your rut and lose all desire to grow and achieve. If something is truly important to you, you’ll still go after it. It’s human nature to keep moving forward.
However, you may find yourself losing interest in goals that were mostly a means of gaining faux self-esteem. For example, someone might retain their desire to become an artist because it makes them happy to develop their creative potential, but be less motivated to own an expensive wardrobe, because they didn’t want it for anything other than to impress people.
Question the negative messages you’ve internalized about your value as a person
A core reason people develop low self-esteem is that at some point in their lives, they came to believe they were fundamentally defective. Usually this is because of messages they received and took to heart when they were young and impressionable.
Kids can pick up these messages from the people they’re closest to, either by hearing their words directly or through interpretations of their behavior (for example, a father has a horrible temper, and his children take it to mean there’s something wrong with them).
The messages can also take the form of ubiquitous, taken-for-granted cultural values about what it means to be a worthwhile person. However, many of these messages are inaccurate and harmful. When several are taken together, they often suggest that there’s something wrong with anyone who doesn’t fit the standard mold. Here are a few cultural messages related to socializing:
- There’s something wrong with you if you’re not effortlessly socially savvy.
- There’s something wrong with you if you’re not naturally sociable and like spending time alone.
- There’s something wrong with you if you feel shy or unsure of yourself in social situations.
- There’s something wrong with you if you don’t have a giant group of friends.
- There’s something wrong with you if you have quirky, non-mainstream interests.
- There’s something wrong with you if you don’t always act like a traditional man or woman.
Here are few cultural messages not necessarily related to socializing that cause many people problems:
- You’re not a worthwhile person unless you achieve a ton in your life.
- You’re not worthwhile as a person unless you earn a certain salary.
- You’re not a worthwhile person unless you have a professional, white collar job.
- You’re not worthwhile as a woman unless you get married and start a family.
- You’re not worthwhile as a man unless you’ve had a lot of sexual conquests.
These messages are wrong and potentially damaging. No one’s intrinsic worth is lower because they don’t meet some random societal criteria.
Someone isn’t automatically inferior just because they don’t have a lot of friends or the right job. Is a doctor who has devoted her life to operating on premature infants a “loser” just because she sometimes feels shy at parties?
Of course, you may want to have more friends or a higher paying career, and you recognize the advantages they provide, but that’s different from believing you’re an inherent failure for not acquiring them.
Whatever negative messages they received, people with low self-esteem believe them in a very strong, unthinking way. You can bolster your self-esteem if you identify, question, discredit, and stop living by the negative statements you follow.
Some of them will stop affecting you as soon as you stop and think about them for a few minutes. Others will be harder to shake. Many socializing-related messages are so entrenched that they just feel right.
If you had a particularly rough childhood, you may need to see a counselor or support group to dismantle the negative core beliefs about your value as a person that were instilled during your upbringing.
If you’re younger, you may also need to gain more life experience and perspective before you can accept that certain ideas aren’t true (for example, when you’re still in high school, it can seem like your life hinges on your social status. Once you’re older, you can look back and see how overemphasized it was).
Gain self-esteem through your actions, behaviors, and accomplishments
A contradiction lies at the heart of self-esteem: On one hand, everyone has inherent value that doesn’t depend on their actions or accomplishments. Self esteem comes from within. It’s not something other people bestow on you or a prize you earn after you’ve achieved enough to prove to the world that you’re worthy.
On the other hand, self-esteem is partially affected by how you behave. It gauges whether you’re living in a way that’s important to you. If your life is not in a place you want it to be, your self-esteem will decrease. However, you can change your behaviors to boost it.
Make improvements in the areas where you’re unhappy
Your self-esteem is affected negatively when you know you’re missing something vital. One of these missing pieces could be poor social skills. They could also be problems in other spheres, like your finances, health, or career.
Whatever your issues are, you should feel better about yourself once you get them under control. Doing so will take time because you can’t make sweeping changes to your life in a few days.
Though if you’ve been directionless and discouraged, just having a basic action plan for how you’re going to start working on your problems may lift your self-esteem a bit. It can be tricky to approach this point with the right mentality.
Above all else, you should try to develop a foundation of core self-acceptance and a belief system that’s reasonably free of harmful messages. Without a solid belief in yourself, you’ll approach your weaker areas with the unconscious mentality of, “I’m worthless at my core.
I’ll cancel that truth by getting a lot of people to like me / succeeding in my field / making a lot of money.” That mind-set may allow you to achieve a lot, and you may even temporarily feel better, but the confidence it creates is fragile and short-lived.
You need to directly address your core lack of self-esteem. You can’t cover it up and compensate for it through outside sources of validation. This is not to say you should put all of your goals on hold until you become 100 percent selfaccepting. Try to cultivate your goals at the same time as you work on accepting yourself.
Live a life based on core self-affirming practices
Your self-esteem monitors whether you’re living a life based on certain key practices and then adjusts itself accordingly.
Practices that raise self-esteem:
- thinking and being responsible for yourself and choosing your own path through life
- living a life based on your own values, even when you encounter resistance
- showing the world your true self, even if not everyone responds well to it
- treating yourself with respect and standing up for your rights
- living constructively (for example, exercising regularly, trying to form meaningful social relationships, managing your finances)
- doing work and creating things that are meaningful and important to you
Opposing practices that will lower self-esteem:
- blindly following other people’s ideas about how you should live
- breaking or selling out your deepest values (for example, valuing selfsufficiency, but purposely mooching off your family members)
- hiding your true self in order to gain approval from others
- letting others walk all over you
- living destructively (for example, abusing drugs, isolating yourself even though you want human contact, constantly wasting money)
- not doing work that feels meaningful to you
You could argue that principles like these are hardwired into people, though everyone varies in which ones they emphasize. For example, one person may feel a strong pull to have a personally fulfilling career and lose self-esteem if they’re doing something just to pay the bills.
Someone else may be happy to take any old job and put more importance on thinking for themselves. Living by these standards takes consistent work, and it’s easy to unintentionally stray off course. Not perfectly fulfilling them doesn’t mean you’re a failure.
Work to develop positive traits
You’ll feel a greater sense of self-esteem if you have some things going for you. Take time to develop your existing positive traits, or work to attain new ones. This could involve trying to cultivate certain aspects of your personality or learning a new skill. However, developing these characteristics only works if it’s frosting on top of a deeper positive view of yourself. You can’t just pile up a bunch of talents to smother a core sense of self-loathing.
Take on challenges and accomplish goals you set for yourself
You can’t help but feel more confident if you’ve had some successes. The goals you choose to pursue will vary based on what’s important to you. Challenging yourself also increases your feelings of self-efficacy, that is, the sense that you’re generally competent and flexible, and can handle what life throws at you.
Create an environment that supports your self-esteem
All else being equal, who’s likelier to have good self-esteem: someone who works a degrading job and whose “friends” and partner constantly belittle them, or someone who has supportive, encouraging people in their life? On one level, your self-esteem shouldn’t depend on what other people think about you.
You should be able to brush aside the inaccurate, hurtful things they say. On another level, you’re human, and if you’re constantly undermined and insulted, it can’t help but drag you down. Try to improve or discard your toxic relationships, and seek out friends who make you feel good about yourself.
Use short-term self-esteem boosts when appropriate
Some suggestions for raising your self-esteem provide only a short-lived boost to your mood. Sometimes you just want to cheer yourself up, though, so there’s nothing wrong with using them for the occasional pick-me-up. Here are some ideas:
- Take time to remind yourself of your positive traits and accomplishments.
- Say some positive affirmations (for example, “I love and approve of myself,” “I have many strengths”).
- Demonstrate happier, more confident body language.
- Dress up and make yourself look nice.
- Do something to treat yourself.
However, although quick mood-boosters help superficially, you can’t just up the dosage to improve your core self-esteem, no more than swallowing more painkillers will heal a broken wrist. You have to use them in moderation.
If you don’t, the techniques will be a waste of time or become unhealthy habits. The methods above are harmless, but have diminishing returns if you do them too often.
There are two other techniques that are fine in small doses but unhealthy if taken too far. The first is comparing yourself to people who are worse off than you and realizing you don’t have it so bad.
Doing this frequently will get you in the habit of tearing others down in order to feel better about yourself. The second is seeking reassurance or compliments from others. Overuse will make you needy and dependent on others to shore you up.
Increasing your self-confidence in particular social situations
If you have solid overall self-esteem, it can trickle down into your situational social confidence. The two don’t always go together, though. Some people are very successful and confident at aspects of socializing, but don’t think much of themselves deep down.
Other people feel good about themselves on the whole, but still feel anxious and out of their depth in specific social situations. Situational confidence comes in two flavors. When you’re situationally confident, you’re feeling one or both of two mental states. The first is a calm, logical knowledge that you have the ability to handle yourself in those circumstances. The second is a bold, psyched-up feeling.
Feeling calmly confident about your capabilities
When you’re truly confident in your ability to succeed in a specific situation, you know you can perform well the same way you know the sky is blue. You have a well-tested skillset or some other reliable advantage. Your certainty comes from a string of past successes. This kind of confidence has to be earned.
When you feel confident in this way, you have a realistic sense of what you’re capable of and believe your tools are good enough to complete the job. You don’t necessarily think you’re the best in the world; you’re just as good as you need to be.
If you’ve only been playing tennis for three years, you’d still feel calmly sure you could beat someone who’s never held a racket. It doesn’t mean you never feel nervous or unsure of yourself going into a situation. However, underneath those natural emotions is a current of “I’ll be fine.
I’ve done this sort of thing a million times before. It usually works out. And when it doesn’t, I can bounce back.” You can build this confidence in an area you’re weaker at through small successes.
If you’re a beginner, you can’t skip to having the assuredness of an expert overnight. Instead, embrace your newbie status, learn the basics, and then feel confident that you know them, and that you’ll know even more if you keep working at it.
For example, if you’re learning to make conversation with people at meet-up events, you may realize you can’t have a long, engaging discussion with everyone you talk to, but you can feel confident that you’ve gotten the hang of introducing yourself and initiating interactions.
Feeling psyched
In contrast to feeling calmly assured about your abilities, the confidence that comes from feeling psyched is very emotion-based. When you’re experiencing it, you feel charged up and notice how unusually confident you are.
When you’re certain you’ll do well, you feel dry, logical confidence; if you know success is a given, there’s no need to get emotional about it. Psyched-up confidence is more likely to show up ahead of events where you’re not so sure of the outcome. An untested beginner could experience psyched-up confidence, but so could a veteran going into an unusually tough or high-stakes situation.
It’s like your mind is trying to amp you up so you can face the challenges ahead. The big problem with this variety of confidence is that although it does improve your courage and performance, it’s fleeting and unreliable. If it always appeared when needed, that would be great, but it usually doesn’t happen that way.
There’s no consistent technique to bring out that psyched feeling on command. However, you may occasionally have success with the following methods:
- trying to psych yourself up physically, maybe by listening to driving music, jumping around, yelling, or pounding your chest
- listening to a passionate motivational speech or giving yourself a pep talk
- joking around with people to try to get yourself in a loose, playful mood
- trying to reframe the situation so it will seem easier or lower-stakes (for example, thinking of the situation as a potential learning experience, not your one shot at making friends)
- trying to find a piece of practical information that will make you more likely to succeed, and therefore feel surer of yourself (for example, a conversation topic that you know will go over well with the crowd you’ll be meeting)
- getting other people to pump up and encourage you
Even if these techniques work, they tend to have strong diminishing returns. What fires you up the first time never seems to work as well again. If a situation makes you unconfident, it makes you unconfident, and there’s no foolproof short-term method to get around that.
Chasing psyched-up confidence often sidetracks people. They normally feel unsure and skittish in a situation and don’t perform well in it, but every so often, for whatever reason, they get charged up and do much better than they normally would. They understandably begin to see that temporary emotional state as the key to their success, and they think there’s no point in trying unless they’re fired up.
Because there’s no way to conjure this feeling at will, they end up wasting their time and energy looking for that one surefire psych-up technique. If you want to become more consistently confident in an area, you have to put in the time and effort to build your skills. If you do find yourself feeling psyched up, by all means take advantage of it, but don’t depend on it.
A couple of disclaimers about the task of building confidence
When you’re trying to build your confidence, whether it’s of the self-esteem or situational variety, there are some things you should keep in mind:
Don’t feel you have to get your confidence to a super-high level before you can work on anything else
Having confidence is undoubtedly useful. However, some people get sidetracked while working on their social skills by thinking they should solve their confidence issues first. You can do quite a lot to improve your social prospects without having rock-solid confidence. By all means, work on your self-esteem, but don’t put everything else on hold.
Having confidence isn’t the only thing you need to be socially successful
A lot of advice on self-confidence has the underlying message that having a better opinion of yourself is the key to success. At times, being more self confident will improve how you act and come across around people. On other occasions, your success will depend more on having particular skills, like knowing how to make appropriate contributions to a conversation. When you have the ability or traits to get the job done, you often don’t need to be especially confident. If you know how to organize a group outing, it won’t matter if you’re filled with self-doubt while you make a plan and invite everyone. Unless your insecurities are obvious and off-putting, they won’t get in the way of your organizing efforts.
Your situational confidence can’t jump too far ahead of your actual abilities
In that sense that social success is at least partially tied to confidence, people sometimes think they can increase their interpersonal skills by becoming as confident as possible first. That’s not possible because your skills or previous track record and confidence in an area are tied together. If you know your skills rate a two out of ten, you can’t make yourself feel eight-out-of-ten confidence in your ability to perform. Think of it as if you’re building two small towers side by side, and you can only add to the height of one when you’re working from the top of the other.
There’s no quick or easy way to gain a lot of confidence
Sometimes when a person asks, “Can I just improve my self-confidence in order to be better with people?” they not only want the two to be connected, but they hope that gaining confidence is quicker and simpler than improving their interpersonal skills; by focusing on confidence, they hope to find a shortcut to changing their social situation. It doesn’t work that way.
Confidence has to grow slowly over time. Any attempt to increase it quickly will only result in a shortlived psyched-up feeling. We’d all be super-confident if all it took was reading a few inspirational quotes.