Sunday via Syl: Confidence is a matter of mindset.

We all love a person with self-confidence. We love seeing people who know what they are doing (or at least appear that way), people who believe in themselves and are comfortable in their own skin. How we feel about ourselves impacts how we carry ourselves in the world and how we’re viewed by others, both in our personal or business lives. Many people believe confidence to be an innate quality–something that we either have or don’t have. It’s not true at all! The good thing about confidence is that it isn’t at all about luck as it is about mindset. It’s a conscious choice and can be built up.

The biggest enemy of confidence? Overthinking. I’ve realized how badly my overthinking throughout the years led to my pursuit of perfection, which caused procrastination and ultimately resulted in more fear, anxiety and overthinking (for example, with this whole blogging thing- if I wrote something that I deemed less than great, I’d refrain from posting, which made me feel worse about not keeping to a schedule and made me lose confidence in my ability to write quality posts and subsequently, the motivation to post.

Confidence isn’t about impressing as much as it is about expressing. It’s having an attitude, a stance, an opinion, and not letting someone’s judgment of us deter us from what we want to achieve. It’s knowing what we stand for, knowing our worth, and appreciating our own abilities and qualities. It’s believing that we have something to offer to the world.

Confidence is cultivating a growth mindset. It’s believing that a lot of our attributes (creativity, logic, intelligence, writing skills, etc) can be built and expanded. When we think our attributes are set in stone, it gives us an excuse to not take risks, explore areas and learn, and causes us to give up control of our lives. We often are our own worst critics and we seldom think about how many people out there want to hear our wisdom, experiences, and knowledge.

Confidence takes action. The number one mistake we can make is thinking we can get rid of fear altogether and not make any mistakes, fail, or get rejected in life. Most of the time, our fear is usually much worse than reality. Fear is critical to our safety and survival, but it shouldn’t prevent us from making progress and moving forward. If we let fear keep us in our comfort zones, we take on a passive role instead of an active creator role in our lives. When we do one thing, no matter how small, that will get us closer to our goal, it kick starts our success and gives us a boost of confidence. I’ll get that boost when this post goes live 🙂 If your goal is to be more up-to-date with world news, you might want to make it a goal to read at least two news articles per day to start, and start adding to it as you can/want.

Being confident is a state of mind which comes across to others in how we communicate–how we present ourselves to the world as well as what we say. No matter how similar another being can be to us, they’re not us and that is our superpower. When we think about the people we look up to, what do they all have in common? Unapologetically themselves, speaking their truth, sharing their authentic narrative and not letting their doubts and fear hinder them from going after what they want? It’s entirely up to us on how we want to perceive the world and ourselves.

What makes you confident? How do you practice confidence?