You enter an interview with a timid stance and give a weak handshake to your interviewer. You sit down and begin answering questions about yourself. The person you’re speaking to hears fear in your voice. You become flustered and forget a key part of your former job when explaining your responsibilities. When you leave the building, you realize there’s little chance you’ll land this new job and you may need to learn how to improve self confidence.
Now imagine the complete opposite scenario. You enter a room with a big smile on your face and a friendly greeting. After giving a strong handshake, you make some small talk and begin discussing your background. Your interviewer hears confidence in your voice and believes you would be a good fit at the company. Best of all, you get an offer by the end of the interview!
What’s the difference between the first scenario and the second? In the second interview, you possessed much more confidence and leadership ability. Have you ever wondered how to improve self confidence? Below you can learn more about ways you can boost your own self confidence so that you can nail that next interview or get a new promotion.
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1. Work on Your Posture and Body Language
A key strategy that will impress your manager and co-workers is standing up straight and having the right body language. You’ll find that the difference between a confident person and one with low self-esteem can literally be seen in their posture. Someone who smiles and stands up straight looks much more self-confident while someone who hunches and has a grimace on their face does not appear to have any tenacity.
Next time you enter a room, try to pull your shoulders back and smile at your co-workers. This makes those around you more comfortable and more likely to return your smile and greeting. Don’t forget to make eye contact and talk slowly and clearly with those around you.
When getting ready for work, be sure to brush your hair back and put on clean, professional attire. These extra steps will boost your self confidence and improve your overall mood.
2. Perform Affirmations
If you are wondering how to improve self confidence on a long-term basis, the best way is to completely change your own perspective of your self worth. Affirmations are positive and beneficial comments that you tell yourself. Performing affirmations can help you achieve greater self confidence, according to Entrepreneur. If you feel that your own appearance isn’t satisfactory, say what you like about yourself in front of a mirror.
You can also ask yourself positive questions such as, “Why am I so great at my job?” Then you’ll have to come up with answers to this question. For instance, you may realize that you’re always on time for work and you complete all your assignments by the deadline. Performing positive affirmations will change your own perspective on the type of person you are and will help you learn how to improve self confidence on a long-term basis.
3. Celebrate Your Achievements
The best way to improve your self confidence is to focus on the small and large achievements instead of worrying over every little mistake you may have made in the past. Be sure to go out for a drink with a friend or co-worker if you’ve been promoted or gotten a raise. Buy yourself that cupcake or even a lobster dinner if you’ve done a great job on an assignment. Recognizing your achievements will give you that self confidence boost you need, according to an article from Lifehack.
4. Take Part in Self-Care
You will find that having confidence in yourself is much easier if you take part in self-care. Having good physical and mental health is key to raising your confidence. Getting enough sleep, eating healthy and nutritious foods, and exercising on a regular basis are all part of taking good care of yourself. This will give you more energy and you will feel more confident about your overall self worth.
5. Help Others in Your Community
Sometimes the best way to forget about your weaknesses is to focus on helping others, volunteering your time, and giving back to your community. For example, if you volunteer for a soup kitchen, you will likely feel thankful for the life you lead and be happy about helping others.
In fact, making an impact on someone else’s life through volunteering could give you that boost of confidence you need to land a new job or get that promotion. You could mentor a teenager to help them have a brighter future and find that you have more assurance in yourself. When searching for how to improve self confidence, you’ll find that volunteering could be very helpful.
6. Visualize Your Future Success
Another great strategy to improve leadership skills and confidence is to take part in visualizations. Essentially, this means you’ll try to see an image of yourself that makes you satisfied and happy with who you are as a person.
People with low self-esteem, however, see a poor image of who they are and this image is often incorrect when compared with reality. As such, you should spend a few minutes every morning thinking of yourself as a successful, outgoing, and likeable individual. This will help you take on the persona you want and gain higher self-esteem.
Following these key strategies can help you have greater assurance in yourself. However, there are often various mistakes people make that can lead them to lose confidence in themselves. Below we outline the mistakes you should avoid in order to retain self confidence.
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Five Mistakes to Avoid for Greater Success
1. Putting Too Much Stock into Rejections
If you’ve gotten rejections after interviews or even gotten fired from a job, stressing out about this and worrying about each and every rejection will only lower your self-esteem. Elle Kaplan, CEO and Founder of LexionCapital, wrote for the news source Medium that confident people expect to get rejected a handful of times but do not put too much stock into these rejections and are able to move on more quickly.
If you’re afraid of rejections, you will find that you take fewer risks and fear taking on new things that could lead to more dismissals. Being rejected a handful of times does not mean that you’re not successful in your career and people with high self confidence realize this.
2. Forgetting to Expand Your Skill Base
If you are missing a number of skills necessary for your career such as how to lead a team or project management skills, you’ll likely have lower self-esteem and worry that you lack the knowledge to be successful at your job. In order to have greater self confidence, it is vital to build up your knowledge base and expand your skill base.
You can start by taking a night class at your local community college or buying a textbook about the subject you’re interested in. Reading and studying will help you expand your skill base and improve your self-esteem.
3. Believing Others Are More Successful
We often think other people are more self-assured, successful, happy, etc. You may think that a friend or co-worker is nearly perfect and better at their job than you. However, this thought pattern is usually a misperception. In fact, other people may often be preoccupied with their own flaws and are likely not paying attention to any faults you may have.
The best thing you can do to overcome this fear that others are more successful is to remind yourself that your co-workers are human beings with flaws just like you. Try to think of yourself as equal to those around you and you’ll be less anxious and more confident at work.
4. Fretting about Things Outside of Your Control
“What if there is a ton of traffic and I end up getting to work late on my first day?”
“What if it starts raining and my new suit gets completely wet?”
These are some common worries that may be ruining your self confidence. Many people with low self-esteem often have worries that are outside their control. However, if you want to have greater self confidence, it is key to stop fretting about the things that you can’t control, according to psychotherapist Amy Moran’s article in Psychology Today.
5. Negative Inner Dialogue
People who lack self confidence often think very malevolent thoughts about themselves. They worry about any mistakes they make and have a very negative inner dialogue. You may believe that being hard on yourself pushes you to try harder next time, but it likely lowers your self-esteem.
If you make any mistakes, try to learn from them and move on. Do not obsess over your faults and, instead, think about your strengths and try to have a more positive inner dialogue. This will help you improve your overall self confidence and leadership skills.
If you avoid these five mistakes and follow the six tips above to improve your self confidence, you’ll live a happier and much more successful life. It will reduce your anxiety, lift your mood, and help you achieve what you want out of life. Your mental health will thank you for it and the people around you will be impressed.
Now that you’ve learned how to improve self confidence and are more self-assured when leading a team, you’ll need the tools necessary to plan a team’s tasks, create greater transparency, and reward excellent work. In fact, Runrun.it provides managers and employees with more self confidence especially when it comes to data management and transparency. The right project management solution can help managers see the strong productivity of their team and better analyze their future objectives.
More Confidence in their Productivity
Runrun.it was developed to provide this type of project management solution through automatic software, which gives managers more confidence in their productivity and more time to plan out strategies with their staff. You’ll find yourself becoming more confident and self assured at work due to this work management solution. Best of all, you can test this tool for free! Start your free trial by signing up at http://runrun.it
