How to build confidence

Confidence is often high on the agenda for clients seeking coaching. In my experience, people may want greater confidence in their career, relationships, communication or other areas of life. Building confidence can take time, but there are practical ways to begin exploring what confidence means to you.

Confidence can mean different things to different people and can also vary considerably between situations. Figuring out what confidence means for you will make it much easier to understand what you are looking for.

Next up, you need to decide what will be different when you have it. How does the confident you differ from the you right now? Knowing this will allow you to understand what changes might help you move towards your goal.

Along with this, you need to figure out the areas that cause you to lack confidence. Again, this may signal areas where you might choose to think or behave differently. You might, for example, know you aren’t confident because you decided to stay in on a Saturday night when you had the option to go out. So what might happen if you made a different choice? What might you learn if you chose to go out instead?

You need to identify exactly where that lack of confidence lives. You will probably find that, actually, there are many areas of your life that you feel perfectly fine and normally confident about. Be specific about exactly where the lack of confidence is, and you may be able to target that particular area rather than feeling that you are not a confident person on the whole.

Identify the areas of your life where you already feel confident, and note exactly what this feels like; how you behave and what is different about the confident parts of you in these situations. How do you behave? How do you know it’s OK to feel confident in those situations? What are you telling yourself?

7 steps to build your confidence

1. Define what confidence means to you

Write a list defining what confidence means for you. Forget about others who you see as confident; this is about you.

2. Imagine what would be different

If you wake up tomorrow as the true confident you, what is different? How are you behaving? How are you feeling? What do you look like? Write this down or draw a picture capturing your answers.

3. Question the evidence

Write down the answer to this: How do you know you aren’t confident already? What exactly tells you this?

Are there any areas where you are being unhelpfully hard or unfair to yourself? Are there any ideas you might have been holding onto that are out of date and don’t really apply anymore? Can you allow yourself to reconsider them and change your mind about them?

4. Identify where you lack confidence

Allow yourself to identify the areas in which the feelings of a lack of confidence show up. Be specific. How does it feel? If it helps, imagine whether the feeling has a colour, shape or particular physical sensation. Where do you notice it?

5. Remember times when you felt confident

Think of areas or times in your life where you feel or have felt really confident. Remember every detail about the situation. The place, the temperature, the people, the sounds, smells and feel of the situation.

Identify what that sense of confidence was like for you. If it helps, give it a colour or a shape, a sound or a name, and make a note of what helps you reconnect with it.

6. Revisit a previous situation

Now imagine one of the situations you felt less confident in; as you begin to recall it, bring to mind the feeling of confidence you have just identified.

Play out the situation in your mind with this different perspective and see what happens. Do this two or three times. Is there any advice that the confident you would like to pass on to the less-confident you?

7. Imagine a future situation

Finally, imagine a situation in the future that you had previously thought would leave you feeling less confident. As you imagine it, bring to mind this sense of confidence.

Imagine yourself responding in a way that feels calm, capable and realistic. You might choose to repeat this exercise with different situations over the course of a week.

There is no holy grail to confidence. Confidence doesn’t necessarily mean becoming a completely different person. Sometimes it involves questioning old ideas about yourself, noticing where you already feel capable and experimenting with different ways of responding.

Rather than putting pressure on yourself to become confident overnight, allow yourself to be mindful and aware of your situation, what you say to yourself and the choices available to you.