How To Permanently Boost Your Confidence

Where does self confidence come from? It's something that we seem to know implicitly whenever we see it, right? It's a guy that can walk into any room in the entire world and no matter who's in there, he feels comfortable. Or a woman who can walk up to a total stranger and start conversation effortlessly. Or maybe just someone that you might have met who doesn't seem to have the hesitation, the self doubt that plague so many people. But the question remains, where does this self confidence come from? The common belief and the common myth is, is that it comes from being built up, right? It comes from achievement and then doing things really well and having people praise and compliment us. And that belief is pervasive. It's why whenever we see someone who is very rich or very beautiful, we tend to assume that they must have high self confidence. But a quick cursory reflection on your own life will probably reveal that that's not the case, Right? I'm sure that you've met someone in your own life that has been built up. Their social circle talks very highly of them, they're very, very well regarded in work, but they still feel crappy about themselves. In fact, all oftentimes, it's people who receive the most compliments who are the most lacking in self confidence. And that's not by mistake. So if it's not from praise and compliments, where then does self confidence come from? And the answer is that it comes from raising your self esteem. Now, self esteem, like self confidence, is one of those words that tends to get thrown around. People don't know what it means, but basically it's your sense of worthiness, right? As Nathaniel Brandon put it, the guy who wrote the book on self esteem, your self esteem is your reputation with yourself. It is what you think about you. And that is why compliments cannot build your self esteem. That is what other people think about you. And the truth of self esteem is, I want to talk about three very important things. First one being this is that your self esteem cannot be generated externally. It can't come from other people. It must come from within you. So no matter what you have going on in your life, if people think that you're very successful, that you're smart, that you've got the perfect spouse or the perfect body, it doesn't matter how much praise they pile on you, if you are not happy with the decisions you've made, maybe you've taken someone else's path, right? You've done everything that you were supposed to to be successful, and you've achieved it by other people's standards, but not by your own. You are going to lack self esteem and your self confidence is going to suffer as a result. That is the first thing. It needs to come from within you. The second thing about self esteem, which is so important to raising your self confidence, is that self esteem, high self esteem at least doesn't compare itself to other people, right? I'm sure you know someone or maybe there's an aspect of your own life. I'm guilty of this at times that you feel that you need to be better, that you need to be the best, right? And so maybe you go into the gym and you look around and you're the strongest guy in your section of the gym and you feel really good, or you look to your group of friends and you're the funniest or the smartest or whatever it is that gives you that sense of pride, that gives you a very temporary sense of confidence. But that's not true self esteem because all that has to happen is to put you in an environment with someone who is pushes your limits, right? Who is better than you in some way that's important to you. And all of a sudden that self confidence crumbles, right? So while you can get a temporary boost from comparing yourself to others, you don't want to make that the fountain of your self confidence. And this is the third thing. You need to pick where your self esteem comes from. Now a lot of people, like I said, implicitly take it from compliments. They implicitly take it from comparisons to other people that will not last. That only gives you that temporary boost if you want something that is going to be there, that is consistent. The best source of self esteem is simply to become the person who does the right thing. And what I mean by this is so many people think that their confidence hinges upon good performances. So if they go out into a social situation, they feel like they need to kill it with every person. Everybody needs to like them. They need to instantly click in any sort of group that they run into, right? If they're thrust into a new situation, they expect perfection out of themselves or at least to do better than the people in, in the same room. That is signs of weak self esteem. True self esteem is more concerned with doing the right thing, which in those situations is likely going to be expressing yourself, right? Trying to strike up a conversation, dragging a conversation out for a little bit more than you might feel comfortable with because you feel like it's going to help you grow. Those sorts of things are going to Boost your self esteem over time. So those are the three things, the basic, basic basics of self confidence and self esteem. To raise your self confidence, you need to raise your self esteem. And self esteem is how you feel about you. It raises only from internal sources. It can't be from compliments. It doesn't really get benefited by comparing yourself to people around you. But it does need some sort of yardstick. And the best yardstick that I can recommend for you is to force yourself to be the guy to be the girl who does the right thing, whatever that means to you. So in order to keep this as actionable as possible, what I would recommend and something that I've reflected on lately is to write down or say out loud where you've been tending to get your confidence and self esteem right. Are you one of the people that tends to build yourself up and feel really high off compliments that other people give you? Or on the flip side, you feel really down when people don't give you compliments? Are you someone who needs to compare yourself to other people to feel better? Write down or say out loud where you have tended to get your self esteem in the past because it's very helpful to know. And then write down where you commit. Define the new source which where you can get it in the future. This is the important part and I recommend something very, very simple which is I'm the type of person who does the hard thing even when it's not convenient, right? I do the right thing when it's not convenient. I'm the type of person that strives to be the best me that I can be, even when it's not easy. Those things are internal. They're comparing only against yourself. And that is going to be the source of high self esteem that is consistent, that carries with you no matter what room you're in, no matter who you're around. And that doesn't force you to be the kind of person that is jealous of other success, that tries to bring other people down or constantly needs to be weighing who else is in the room to determine how you feel. That is the very basics of self esteem and self confidence and that is the core of it. So I hope that you have found this helpful. This is just a very general overview of self confidence. If you want to know one of the exercises that I often do to build my own confidence just in the moment. This stuff is really overarching life stuff, kind of cerebral. But there are some exercises that you can physically do in a moment that to increase your confidence right there really helpful if you have a presentation, if there's a group that you want to do well in those kinds of things, this exercise can absolutely kill it. And so if you're interested, go ahead, click this box that will pop up here. It'll take you to another page, you drop your email and you will get to see that video. It takes like five minutes to watch and it's really, really helpful. If you've enjoyed this video, go ahead, let me know what other topics you'd like me to cover down in the comments. I got this video from someone who wrote in and told me that they were having trouble with self confidence and so this goes out to them and if you want to get more of these and this is the first time on the channel, go ahead and subscribe. We've got new videos at least every Monday morning and I am working on fitting into my schedule, doing at least two a week. So I hope that that has been helpful and I will see you in the next video.