Essential skills in life: Confidence

“The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it.” ― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

Be more confident. How many times have you heard this? We hear this countless times from our friends, colleagues, from ourself: Be more confident or Have more confidence in yourself.

But what is confidence more exactly? The dictionary definition says like this : A feeling of self-assurance arising from an appreciation of one's own abilities or qualities (Oxford dictionaries).

So being confident it’s the ability of being sure you can get things done. Of course, you have to be sure not to cross the line and reach go into the arrogance area. Being confident it’s good, but overconfidence it’s dangerous.

Confidence it’s about being positive either, because blindly charging into things, like a newborn calf it’s equally dangerous.

Confidence comes from knowing yourself, knowing your skills and limits.

Why is confidence important?

Confidence it’s having a direct impact on your happiness. Have you seen people that are confident in what they are doing? Do they look happy or sad? I’m sure there were moments when you were confident in yourself. How did you feel back then?

Getting things done. Being confident will eliminate the self doubt and in this way you will start working better and faster. The more confident you become in yourself, the better you will work. It’s a good kind of never ending cycle.

You will have more energy. Just like on happiness, confidence has a direct impact on your energy levels. Have you felt that when you were working on something that you were good at it, therefore you were confident, your energy was high? You were in a good mood and everything was brighter than usual?

Confidence is one of the key components of our life, because without confidence, we wouldn’t even get out of our bed in the morning.

How to build confidence?

Confidence is a state of mind and might be a little bit harder to train, but I believe everything can be learned with enough practice.

I’ve been saying that confidence it’s related to your skills. If your skills aren’t good, you won’t have that much confidence to finish the job. So to build up confidence you will need two things: knowledge and experience.

Knowledge of the skill you want to be confident in and experience in practicing it.

You can’t expect to have confidence in doing something if you never have done it before and you don’t know anything about the subject. But do that thing 1000 times and it will be as easy as breathing.

So pick up a thing, a skill, an activity that you want to be confident in and start practicing it. Learn more about it. Go on google and search more about the subject, watch videos, read books. And start doing it. Little by little, practice 5 minutes per day, every day. And in time you will gain the confidence you want.

Don’t tell yourself that you can’t do it. Of course you can’t now. You’ve never done it before. This is why you need to start doing it today. No matter what you want to do.

Only by practicing you will gain confidence.

“Believe you can and you're halfway there.” ― Theodore Roosevelt

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This is Day 7 of the 30 days writing challenge during January 2017 launched by @dragosroua. If you want to join the challenge, here's the introductory article.

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Essential skills in life is a series of articles regarding skills that I consider everyone should try to develop them. Some of them I have, some of them I'm working on. Please follow me @sstefan if you want to check the next post of the series.