Tips for Looking more Confident
1. Pay attention to your posture. Stand straight, and don’t slouch.
2. Smile.
3. Look people in the eyes. Averting your gaze or looking down at your feet sends the message that you’re feeling insecure.
4. Take your time - so you look more relaxed and ease with yourself, and with your ideas and decisions.
5. Speak slowly, carefully and with self-belief. Don’t mumble or continually apologize for yourself.
6. Accept compliments from others (don’t deflect them, or quickly brush them off).
7. Dressing with confidence often helps us feel more confident about ourselves. Don’t be afraid to try new things, and to look as if you have a (positive) statement to make.
8. Be aware of your positive qualities and strengths. Keep reminding yourself that it is great to be you!
Why you Should Believe in Yourself
1. You matter. Your thoughts, feelings, hopes, dreams, wishes, longings, fears, anxieties – they all matter.
2. There is no-one else like you. You can play a unique role in the world and in other peoples’ lives. The world will be a poorer place without your own very special contribution.
3. You were made to be loved, wanted and treasured. It’s not just a matter of accepting or putting with who you are. You were meant to be valued and cherished by others.
4. You were made to live a full and happy life.
5. You were made to have purpose and to go after your dreams – to feel that you achieve and your life is meaningful.
6. Your life is a gift – it is given as you matter. You’re a beautiful person. Be all that you can be.
How to be Yourself
1. First, and most important, see yourself as a valuable, likeable and worthwhile person – someone who is worth knowing and loving. If you find that hard, then you are likely believing lies about yourself. (And that may be something you want to explore, and work through with, a counsellor.)
2. Recognise that your thoughts, ideas, views and beliefs are as important as anybody else’s. You are your own person. You are not just a clone of somebody else. What you think is worth hearing – and you don’t have to apologise or change your views in order to please, or be acceptable to, others.
3. Stay away from people who are trying to change you, or who want you to think and act as they do. Don’t allow yourself and your personality to be swamped or dominated by others.
4. Surround with people who encourage you to be yourself, accept you as you are, and bring out the best in you.
5. Resist the urge to emulate or copy people you admire. At the end of the day “they are them and you are you”. That’s the way it should be. Each of us is unique. The world is a richer place by you expressing who you are in your own way.
6. Don’t compare yourself with others. We each have different experiences, and are evolving in our own way, at our own pace. There’s no one formula or recipe for becoming or being. Trust your intuition, and follow your own path.
Writing Tips #61: Seven Ways to Build Up Your Writing Confidence
Writing tip Requested by xjeremyjohnsonx
Do you ever worry that your writing isn’t good enough?
Maybe you’re scared to let anyone read your latest short story. Or perhaps it’s worse than that – you find yourself agonising over every email that you write.
You’re not alone.
Most writers – even those who make a living from their craft – lack confidence at times. Writing is, after all, a daunting thing to do: you’re putting down your thoughts on the page and hoping that they’ll be worthy of someone else’s time and attention.
A lack of confidence, though, can be crippling. It leads writers to give up before they’ve even begun – or to fret for hours over the simplest of writing tasks.
Whether you’re struggling to get to grips with grammar or preparing to launch your third novel, you can become more confident.
Here’s how.
#1: Practice Writing – RegularlyAs a child, I had piano lessons. I didn’t much like having to practice – but I knew that if I didn’t, I wouldn’t get any better.
It’s the same with writing. Some people love writing, others find it tedious: but either way, you’ll find that the more you practice, the more you’ll improve.
That could mean:
- Spending ten minutes free-writing every morning
- Working through different writing exercises, so you get experience in several forms
- Deliberately working on the elements of writing that you find hard (e.g. if you write fiction, practice dialogue or description; if you write for work, practice those difficult emails)
- Writing a weekly post for your blog – no excuses!
- Write from a prompt (a word, phrase, question or image that inspires you)
Your writing exercises might be for your eyes only – or you might choose to develop them into something more. Author E.J. Newman’s From Dark Places is a book of short stories that started as pieces written from prompts sent in by her “story of the month club”.
#2: Read WidelyYou’re probably already reading a lot in your chosen genre or area – but try dipping into a book, magazine or blog that’s very different from what you’d normally choose.
You’ll come across authors who are:
- Journalistic and factual, giving you the details without making any judgements about them
- Extremely personal and introspective, writing based on their own experiences
- Unconventional and creative with their use of language, perhaps coining new words
…and so on.
There’s no one “correct” way to write a book, a blog post, or an article – and the more you read, the more you’ll realise that lots of different styles can be effective. You’ll learn new techniques, and you’ll also get a better feel for your own voice and style (look at what resonates with you – and what turns you off completely).
Dealing with a Confidence Crisis
All writers will receive rejections throughout their career. Most of them will receive loads of rejections. So how do you cope with the inevitable crisis of confidence that follows?
There’s no point in me telling you not to take it personally, because it is personal. But here’s some ways that will help you get your confidence back and start writing again.
- Remember that much of the time you are rejected because your writing didn’t quite fit the publication, not because it was rubbish.
- Write a piece about how stupid they are for not accepting you, how they don’t know talent when they see it. Then delete it.
- Moan to a friend, because we all need someone to tell us that we’re amazing.
- Make a list of your writing successes.
- Go through your rejected piece and highlight all your favourite lines.
- Eat an entire tub of ice cream.
- Watch your favourite movie.
- Find a new call for submissions and start writing a piece for that.
- Keep an eye out for somewhere else to submit your rejected piece.
- Buy yourself a treat. You deserve it because you’re amazing.
