Confidence is a skill — here’s how to build it

A psychologist's quick tips to change your perspective on confidence.

Meditation, self-affirmations, positive thinking — the pile of suggested habits grows and grows. With every season, a new confidence trend has found a place in our newsfeeds and an enthusiastic band of advocates to sell it. We’re all looking for ways to feel better, but, according to clinical psychologist Nadene van der Linden, confidence is not so much a feeling as it a skill.

What this means is that confidence is something you can learn and implement. These are some of her tips on building confidence:

Choose a goal. When you say you want to be confident, what does that means specifically? What goal do you have in mind? In other words, what is it that you want to acquire the confidence to do or accomplish?
Review your skills. Once you’ve established your goal, break down the main goal into smaller goals: what skills will you need to accomplish? Which of these skills do you already have and which do you need to work on?
Try new things. Okay, this is the hard part. This is the part where we work on acquiring the skills that we need to accomplish our goal but don’t already have. Our insecurities love this part, because it’s the perfect time for them talk us into giving up. You won’t be able to do it … you’re not good enough … you won’t be any different than you are now … But it’s when our insecurities are screaming the loudest that it’s the most important that we push forward.
Change your thinking. It’s so easy to forget that we can choose how we think. A lot of the time, we might experience our thoughts passively and that creates the illusion that we have no power over them. Not true. We can choose to believe the thoughts we have or not to believe, and we can choose to think in new ways.
Support squad. Change is easier with some help. Think of who you can call or ask for help when you’re feeling discouraged about your goals.

It’s so easy to let life happen to us, thinking that there is nothing we can do, but most of the time there is something we can do! Confidence isn’t just something innate; it’s a skill that we can choose to lean and develop.

For more advice, you can check you the rest of the article here.