4 tips to improve your confidence

A lack of confidence is a terrible thing and can mean the difference between living life to not experiencing it at all.  When you feel confident nothing can stop you but when you have a lack of confidence you can't even look a person in the eye.  A lack of confidence can ruin your life, it can make you feel like a failure and can take the joy out of life.

At some point in our lives, many of us will have had a lack of confidence, but thankfully you can work on it.  In this article, I will give you 4 tips that have helped me overcome my lack of confidence.

1) Don't be afraid to say yes.

When you say yes, wonderful things can happen in your life. Whether it's going on a date, taking on more responsibility at work, going out with colleagues, joining a team or whatever life could throw at you.  Say yes!

Even saying yes to little things in life gets the ball rolling for you.  Small accomplishments every day soon snowball and you begin to grow as a person and as that happens so does your confidence.  

Getting out of your comfort zone is difficult I get it, I was there too.  In my work life, I was terrified of getting on the phone and selling to people, but I knew that if I didn't do it, I wouldn't be able to pay my bills and provide for my family.  A few years after getting on the phone for the first time, I now make more money than most people I know, just because I said yes.

2) Improve your appearance.

By improving your physical appearance you are going to improve your confidence, there's no doubt about that.  If you are looking to improve your appearance but don't know where to start, here are some suggestions:

• Whitening your teeth or fixing your teeth.
• Losing weight.
• Improving your skin, either exfoliating or by getting botox to hide wrinkles.
• Gaining muscle.
• Have a haircut or grow your hair.
• Buy new clothes.
• Change your style, become more fashionable.
• Eat healthier.

Even if you carry out a few of the suggestions above you will look and feel a million times better than before.  When I was younger I had bad teeth, so I invested in braces to straighten them. When I had my braces off I felt like a new person.  I couldn't believe how much a physical change affected my mental state.

3) Be you.

Nothing brings confidence like just being yourself.  Trying to please others and caring what they think of you is a loser's game.  When you stop caring about what others think of you, you become a new person. 

You can't control what others think of you, so don't worry about others opinions about you.  Being yourself is the best thing you can do as you tend to attract others who like you for who you are.

Honest and genuine people who come into your life who will like you for being you are worth a million times what someone who only likes you for being a "fake version" of yourself, so just be you and reap the rewards of that.

4) Make mistakes.

Everyone makes mistakes, so don't worry about it.  Making mistakes is part of life. You don't learn from your victories, you only learn from your mistakes, so making them is even more important than "winning".  In my opinion, you won't win at anything in life if you haven't lost.

No one is perfect and when you realise that you will learn to embrace it. 

Knowing that everyone has flaws is good for your mental state because you will stop chasing perfection and will focus on being the best you can be.

Conclusion

If you take the above 4 tips and run with them you will improve your confidence very quickly.  Don't expect things to happen overnight but if you work on these tips little by little you will build your character and in the space of a year you will be a new person entirely. 

Confidence comes from experience and whatever it is you do in life if you work at it every day you will improve.

If you have any tips on how to boost your confidence, leave them in the comment section below.