For just a moment, I want you to close your eyes and imagine a person walking down the street. This person stands tall. This person look forward, scanning everything that lies in his path, while still having a determined look. This person has a slight grin smeared across his face, and even though he’s not walking—more like striding—he moves effortlessly, like a ballerina dancing. There isn’t much you know about this person, but you certainly know that he is confident!
Confidence isn’t necessarily rare, we all have confidence in certain aspects of our lives, but, for some, the nagging sense that they aren’t good for anything (or not good at enough things) haunts them regularly. Naturally, those who think negatively of themselves tend to have a lower self-confidence, and there’s really no reason for it! There’s plenty that everyone does in their everyday lives that they should be proud of! Immensely so, in fact. So, I’m here now to tell you more about how confidence levels are established and how to build yourself up, as well as others.
Rich Nakanishi, Reside Residential Care’s owner, offered a few words on how confidence is developed:
“My belief is that the origin of confidence stems from the culmination of all past experiences relating to both successes and failures in one’s lifetime. If one is lacking confidence then it most likely stems from their previous failures and perceived failures and the feelings that are often associated to those memories. If a person has a healthy level of confidence then one can attribute this to their past successes or perceived successes. The integration of these feelings into the challenging situations that we are posed with everyday serve to strengthen our level of confidence.”
In short, one’s recognition and reminiscing of his failures isn’t going to boost confidence levels, which makes sense. It’s normal to feel a sense of nervousness or a bout of fear when failure is on the line. Everyone fails at one point or another, and what’s important is what you walk away from the situation with. Did you learn something? How can you use what you learned to your advantage in the future? Take every “failure” as a learning opportunity.
Rich went on to explain that the best way to improve your confidence is to increase the amount of success you have. By doing this, you’ll have associated feelings with these successes and a confidence boost is guaranteed!
I know, I know. Some of the readers out there might be asking, “But how can I improve my success rate?” Well, it might be easier than one thinks. It’s not a matter of succeeding at something new. Firstly, we must convince ourselves that a task isn’t just about putting the effort in, it also requires us to view it as something that is, as Rich puts it, “waiting to be tackled and conquered in grand form.” Secondly, we have to be able to recognize where we are already succeeding. There are plenty of things that we all do every day that are successes, and perhaps the only reason we don’t view them as such is because they are things that we do, well, every day. They are still successes, though, and they deserve to be recognized.
We can incorporate these in our lives, but, as caregivers, we might want to consider using these strategies on our clients. It’s easy to fall into a depressed state when you can only manage to focus on the failures. Make sure we take time to recognize the successes, not just in ourselves, but in others too. Making our own food, doing some cleaning, making our own decisions; these are all successes.
Can you imagine what our world would be like if even the smallest successes were congratulated?
