Life is difficult. College is difficult. Socializing is difficult. Especially if you are not comfortable in your skin. It’s easy to use sayings like “just be confident” or “love yourself”, but at the end of the day, insecurities still exist. When you’re so focused on how others perceive you and what their opinions are – it’s going to make an already hard time, harder.
There are lots of reasons low self-confidence exists. Maybe the people you’re surrounded by or the environment you’re in tear you down more than lift you up. Maybe your mental health is negatively affecting your self-esteem. Maybe you’ve spent a lot of time looking to social media and mass media to define your sense of worth. There are of course many, many more factors.
Confidence is a thing that varies. Sometimes you’re confident in one situation and completely disarmed in another. It could be because you have strong abilities in that subject (such as English) and weaker abilities in another (such as math), or because you have people lifting you in some situations (such as going to an event with friends) versus having to lift yourself in others (such as going to an event full of strangers by yourself).
If you feel like self-confidence is something you lack, here is a list five of tips to help you take small steps to start building it up.
- Avoid negative/utilize positive self-talk.
It can be so easy to fall into patterns of critical self-talk, especially in the case of self-deprecating jokes. But when it comes to building confidence, say goodbye to this type of language. Try to speak positively (or at the very least not negatively) when talking about yourself. You don’t have to do consistent daily affirmations if that’s not your thing, but at least try giving yourself one compliment a day. It helps more than you think it would.
- Dress in a way that makes you feel good.
When it comes to making social comparisons, it’s easy to try to dress in a way that matches what everyone else is doing. Do all your friends like dressing down even though you prefer to dress up for classes? Does your roommate like to spend an hour every day picking out the perfect outfit, but you prefer to stroll out the door after five minutes? That’s okay. Diversity in what we wear is okay, and dressing to your sense of style and comfort can build your confidence in serious ways.
- Find a supportive and uplifting environment.
The people around you play such an impactful role in your confidence. Your environment is one of the biggest factors affecting your mental health and your emotions, meaning your confidence is going to be affected by it as well. If you build up a supportive environment and surround yourself with your biggest cheerleaders in life, then you’ll be amazed at how your confidence can improve.
- Compliment others.
Intentionally complimenting others means you’re actively looking for things to compliment other people on. Once you start doing this, you’ll notice all the wonderful things about other people. You start to recognize what it is about people that are so special. Is it their smile? Their eyes? Their math skills? Their ability to know every lyric to every Taylor Swift song? You start to notice that every single person on this planet has something worthy of compliments. And guess what? You are a person too. You have traits or abilities that are cool and impressive and charming too.
- Recognize your goals.
Recognizing your goals and being able to list them out means you’ve done enough self-reflecting to know what you want out of life, or at least out of a small portion of it. Once you have your goals listed out, you can start to realize that a lot of the things you’re worried about that are negatively affecting your confidence just don’t matter that much. In the grand scheme of things, things that seem big in certain moments, are pretty small.
So, hold your head up high. Talk nicely about yourself. Do and wear things that make you feel good as often as you realistically can. Surround yourself with encouragement. Spread kindness to others. Practice achieving small goals. And then go get those large ones. You’ve got this.