Importance of Self-confidence and How can one Improve Self-confidence?

Self-confidence is a trait that reflects in every area of our lives be it educational life, professional, and personal life. People talk about the importance of self-confidence all the time but do not realize the extent of its importance. We only realize the importance of self-confidence when there is a lack of self-confidence in a person and it affects negatively in different areas of life.

Confidence basically means to trust. When you say that you have full confidence in someone, it means that you trust them. Similarly, self-confidence means to trust oneself, trust one’s abilities. It is an ability to make yourself comfortable in different situations while remaining true to yourself. Believing in oneself while accepting the flaws and becoming better. All these descriptions collectively make up the definition of self-confidence.

Difference between Self-confidence and Over-confidence

People often confuse self-confidence or confidence with over-confidence. But the difference between these two can make a huge difference in a person’s personality. As discussed above, confidence means to have trust in abilities whereas overconfidence means to overestimate one’s true abilities. Overconfidence often borders the narcissistic personality in a person. One basic difference between the two terms is that an overconfident person absolutely believes in himself without even thinking that anything can go wrong. Whereas, confidence means to believe in one’s abilities but giving the margin of making mistake.

Why is Self-confidence Important?

Self-confidence impacts the whole personality and life of a person. This is why the importance of self-confidence cannot be denied or neglected. Self-confidence not only has a huge impact on different areas of a person’s life but also impacts every smaller function of our daily lives. The following points highlight the importance of self-confidence.

1. Leads to Better Self-esteem

Self-esteem is a combination of believing in oneself and believing in one’s self-worth. In psychology, self-esteem is considered an important ability to have a successful life in terms of having a healthy life – both physically and mentally. Having confidence in oneself is a gateway to developing better self-esteem and vice versa. Many theories of psychology state that self-esteem is made up of two components that are self-efficacy and self-confidence. It helps people to better cope with life’s difficulties and challenges, inculcate happiness and love in life, and have mental peace.

2. Decreases Anxiety

Having self-confidence is a way to decrease anxiety and fears in a person’s life. Almost all of the issues related to social anxiety, self-esteem, and some other forms of anxiety have a root cause of low self-confidence in a person. If you compare two people – one having self-confidence and the other having low confidence – there is a visible difference in their anxiety level and fears. Moreover, a person with low self-confidence tries to avoid every possible situation where they have to be in the limelight that reinforces the anxious behavior. So the cycles continue unless it is broken by increasing confidence.

3. Positive Self-worth

The importance of self-confidence is positively related to making people comfortable in their skin. Confident people accept their flaws and know that this does not decrease their self-worth. It becomes easier to accept one’s weaknesses because you are confident in your abilities that you will get over them one day. By having self-confidence, one also has a purpose in life to achieve the goals that have been set. On the other hand, low-confident people give up without trying. Consequently, it decreases self-worth.

4. Makes a Better Leader

Leadership is all about having confidence in one’s abilities. One can have necessary skills and talent but without self-confidence, the trust in having to utilize these skills is lacking. This is why there are people with excellent skillset but they are not good leadership. One of the qualities of a great leader is to have self-confidence. A leader is also an eloquent and confident speaker and a charismatic personality. All these qualities are tied with having the self-confidence to impress people and convince them to follow the leader.

5. Increase Motivation

Confidence is an ability that affects everyday life activities whether big or small. When you have confidence, you will automatically gain more motivation to perform those tasks as compared to someone who has low confidence. People with low confidence are preoccupied with the fear of failure. This preoccupation often loses their motivation to perform the tasks and try harder.

6. Brings Happiness

A confident person does not hesitate from doing anything in life. This brings variety into life and gathers various skillsets. There are no regrets of missed opportunities and no self-accusatory and ruminating thoughts. When there is no regret in life, life automatically becomes happier than it normally is.

7. Ensures Security

A person with low confidence has low self-esteem. What happens with low self-esteem is that there is a lot of self-doubt and fear regarding oneself. there is insecurity about one’s abilities. However, confidence ensures the security of the person. Even the person messed up a situation, there is a knowledge that it was just one situation and other experiences will be better. Instead of falling into self-doubt and feeling insecure about one’s abilities, confident people are secure.

8. Improved Relationships

Self-confidence also means to be true to yourself and confidently show the real side of yourself. Instead of worrying over the image one radiates in a relationship, genuine interactions give a better impression. Confident people are known to be more open and genuine in their interactions because they are not constantly thinking about their impression in any social interaction. As genuineness is a character that improves relationships, confident people are known to have a better relationship than non-confident people.

Self-confidence in a Student’s Life

Confidence is directly linked with healthy coping mechanisms a person adopts in difficult times, failures, and setbacks. A student’s life is full of struggles and hardships. Self-confidence means to continue to trust in abilities and motivation to work harder to change those difficult situations instead of giving up that even when the situations are hard. It develops resilience in students to carry on their struggling period, bravely.

How can one improve self-confidence?

There is no doubt over the importance of self-confidence and how it brings a positive change in everyone’s life. However, everyone wants to improve their confidence so that they can do better. What are the ways through which one can achieve that?

• Acceptance: the first step of every change and effort is to accept the lacking and errors. Accept that there is a lack of self-confidence in your personality.
• Identification: Enlist all the weaknesses and strengths of your personality, unbiasedly. Also, enlist your skills and talents that are useful.
• Conscious efforts: It is necessary to put conscious efforts into the journey of acquiring self-confidence. This is a sign of awareness that can go a long way in every stage of life.
• Remove the negativities: Remove all the negative perceptions about oneself from your mind. These negativities are the major hurdle in your journey towards acquiring self-confidence.
• Participate: Participate in different activities in school, college, or office that require social interaction. Participate in competitions. These competitions and interactions positively highlight our weaknesses and this helps us in overcoming them. Moreover, the appreciation we receive from others during these participations automatically motivates us towards self-confidence.
• Be assertive: In some situations, people with more confidence win even without having a proper skill. The reason is that their confidence lets them be assertive and convince people in their favor. Therefore, we need to learn to be assertive without being disrespectful.

Conclusion

In conclusion from the above discussion, it can be assumed that people who succeed have unlocked and understood the importance of self-confidence and have used it for their benefit. It does not matter if the task is small or big, it requires confidence in a person to achieve the task successfully and beautifully. As good as self-confidence is, it is important to learn and practice to be self-confident in our life and improve as a person.