To Regain Your Confidence, Start Doing Something Now

“Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy.” Norman Vincent Peale

Dictionary defines confidence as the self-assurance or a belief in one’s abilities to succeed. So confidence is what we believe about ourselves based on what we have achieved so far. It is what we know for sure we can do purely because we have done something quite similar or something more difficult before. 

In other words, the altitude of our confidence is largely determined by our history. In a way, confidence is the mental effect of a repeated practice. For example, someone who always receives compliments for the sweetness of the meals she cooks will likely have some confidence to enter for a cooking competition at any level. And someone who has been repeatedly battered for her poor cooking skills will most likely not want to compete with mere local cooks. This is why the professional golf champion, Hubert Green says: “Winning breeds confidence.” 

Clearly, confidence comes from a previous record of success. Therefore, the level of our confidence is proportionate to the nature of our past and present results; more wins automatically generate more confidence and less wins automatically erode our current level of confidence.

If the winning part of the foregoing doesn’t apply to you, then the next rest of this article should. So read on to learn how to create your confidence anew.

Build It with Immediate Action

If we haven’t succeeded at all in an area that we now want to pursue, we can still create confidence by mentally changing what we believe about ourselves—in that particular direction—at this very moment. 

That means, we need to become the kind of person that thinks and acts in a different way. Right here is where another form of confidence comes in. The confidence to believe we can change, that we can do better than before. 

As Hubert Green concludes, “Confidence (also) breeds winning.” By that he means a positive and strong state of the mind; a proactive mindset that we can learn, grow and start over even if we have failed miserably before. And this must be accompanied with immediate actions.

So if you lack confidence in yourself as a brilliant student for example. You don’t gain new confidence by merely daydreaming of becoming a scholar, but you gain new confidence by doing something meaningful towards a purpose.  You set yourself a target of studying, say, a book, every month.

What we actually do is what we believe we can do. And when we repeat the actions over and over, our confidence in our ability to do it (better) grows.

So do something now—even at a slow pace—to establish the fact that you can do it. Once you achieve that, then repeat the process until your confidence grows bigger than you can now imagine. 

Adopt the following good advice given to us by the author of ‘The One Minute Millionaire,’ Mark Hansen to increase your confidence in any area that you want. 

Hansen wrote, “Don't wait until everything is just right. It will never be perfect. There will always be challenges, obstacles and less than perfect conditions. So what! Get started now. With each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger, more and more skilled, more and more self-confident and more and more successful.”

In a nutshell, be bias for action now if you want to create the confidence that you must have.