The Secret to Instant Self-Confidence

By Henri Junttila

“Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.” ~Dalai Lama
Self-confidence is an interesting concept.
You see, we all have ways of feeling good, bad, low, light, and peaceful. We all have triggers that tell us when to experience these states.
The really interesting part is that you can challenge how you respond to those triggers and change the strategies you use.
There have been countless times in my life where I haven’t felt absolutely confident.
For example, I used to be very shy around people. I just didn’t believe I had anything to say, so I used to freeze. I was afraid of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time to the wrong people.
It felt safer to be quiet, but after awhile it got really boring—and when someone is really bored, they’re often in fear because they’ve put so many restrictions on themselves.
What helped me work through the fear and start being me was tapping into a feeling of confidence, or sometimes just another positive feeling.

It could be as simple as thinking of something that made me feel good, or even thinking about the fact that we are all human, and we are all made of the same earth.
It’s not going to happen overnight, but once you become aware of the triggers in your life, you can exponentially increase the amount of bliss you experience.
You can try to resist feeling happy all you want, but sooner or later you will start experiencing that bubbly joyous feeling inside of you, because that is who you really are deep down inside.
That is who we all are.

The Strategies We Have

Children are naturally confident. They ask and get what they want, or at least they try to.
Have you ever seen a child want something? They keep asking until they get it. It doesn’t matter if it’s an expensive bike or a new doll.
They are endlessly creative in influencing their parents or anyone else who can help them get what they want.
We are all naturally like that, but somewhere along the way, people started opposing our actions. For some of us that meant becoming shy, while for others it meant losing their natural self confidence.
The good news is that you can tap back into that confidence if you want.

How Do You Tap Into Your Natural Confidence?

As I mentioned before, we all have triggers and strategies. We have triggers that make us feel stressed and bad, and strategies to deal with those feelings.
A strategy could be as simple as finding a friend who taps you on your shoulder and looks into your eyes, smiling.
It’s a feel-good strategy that you know generally works for you.
So what is your self-confidence strategy? Because I’m sure there are times when you do feel confident, so it’s not like you lack confidence altogether.
In fact, you may be awfully confident about the fact that you lack confidence.
Maybe you feel low when you’re around men (if you’re a woman) or women (if you’re a man).
When you’ve identified the events that trigger lowered confidence, you can now question the strategy you’ve adopted to feel comfortable in those situations.
What do you do when something triggers low self-confidence for you?
Do you go inside and imagine the worst possible outcome? Do you say negative things to yourself in your head? This is your strategy for dealing with your low confidence, and it ends up being a trigger for feeling bad.
If you start to look within, you will recognize these strategies and triggers and realize you can change them.
It’s fascinating how we are the ones in control, even though we may not think we are.

Changing Your Strategy

Often becoming aware that you have a strategy is enough to break it.
The start is to identify what triggers low confidence for you, and then observe what happens inside of you. What do you feel? What do you say to yourself? How do you act?
Your strategy may have been put in place by a younger you. It may have been there to protect you from something that is no longer there.
When you’ve identified your strategy in a certain situation, you can start imagining how you would like to be different.
You can change your inner state and become more confident by asking yourself: How would I be without this thought/strategy?
So imagine if you didn’t feel bad in a particular situation. What would it look like? What would you think instead? What would you do instead? Would you be happier, feel lighter, or even be more outgoing?
This is just the tip of the iceberg.

Your Natural Power is Inside

You are already aware at some level how naturally confident you are. When you remove the negative thoughts, strategies, and beliefs, you become your ideal self.
You have the power to easily become who you want to be. You see, you are already the person you’ve been dreaming about becoming.
As you take that in, it may sound confusing, but it’s completely true.
It’s just that you have a lot of layers on top of that ideal person that stops it from shining through. All you have to do is slowly but surely start letting go of the layers.
Letting go of them isn’t always easy because you’ve spent years accumulating all of it, and it’s designed to protect you from the “outside dangers.”
A good example of this is when we interact with someone and put on a façade because we think it will please the other person.
However, each time we do this, we move further and further away from who we truly are.
It takes significant effort for us to stay self-conscious and unhappy, but once you remove the layers, you become that person you want to be—just by removing the strategies that get in the way.
Once you accept this, you will discover a feeling of freedom that you’ve never experienced before.
The thing we all really want is to feel good, so why not let go of the thoughts and beliefs that are in the way and do it right now?
Photo by Yashna M
 http://tinybuddha.com/blog/the-secret-to-instant-self-confidence/