It’s Messy: True confidence can look like you lived through a food fight with your emotions. You often have to travel down some rocky roads and building confidence never seems to look like those lovely movie montages where everything’s resolved at the end of a great song. Cultivating confidence in your life won’t look pretty all the time, so don’t try and hide the mess.
There is no time limit:I almost hesitated making this list because confidence can’t be achieved in 5, 10 or 20 easy steps. It’s an accumulation of your inner work and the risks you take in life to build your character. Self-discovery is a life long journey. So stop stressing if you aren’t where you want to be confidence-wise in your teens, 20’s or 50’s. It’s something we’ll probably never figure out really, so we might as well enjoy the ride.
It’s not permanent: It’s tempting to think that once you ‘have’ confidence you can maintain it for the rest of your life. But much like a gas tank for your car, the feeling of confidence must be replenished and filled up over time. It’s normal for even the most confident people to go through bouts of feeling down, defeated and broken. What’s important is not to give up on creating those moments in life where you are learning and growing, because it’s those experiences that actually build your confidence.
You will HAVE to feel pain: Sorry, but there’s no way around it. Feeling pain is an important part of growing confident. Because it’s when you get to the other side of pain, heartbreak, embarrassment, and fear that you figure out what it means to feel pride, strength, and resilience. And these are the building blocks of truly confident people.
It’s Ultimately Worth It: Learning to love your own company, discovering who you are in the face of adversity, achieving something you never thought possible, believing that you are worth feeling strong and supported — these are all the benefits of building confidence. It’s a marathon, baby, not a sprint. And we just started running.
