4 Ways To Be Confident When It Comes To Actually Achieving Your Goals
Find your confidence and achieve the goals you set.
GaudiLab / Shutterstock In order to succeed at anything, you’ll need to set goals and have a plan for achieving them. Nothing that's important to you will just magically happen someday just because you wish for it.
There will be challenges on your journey and you may even lose faith in the ability to accomplish your goals.
So, how do you become more confident in order to set and achieve these goals?
You can persevere and overcome challenges by learning to believe in yourself with a few simple adjustments to your mindset. Your mind is the most powerful tool in your toolbox.
How you think about accomplishing your goals is just as important as the series of planned actions to achieve a goal.
Here are 4 ways to become more confident when setting a goal.
1. Change your inner dialogue.
How you speak to yourself has a direct effect on how you feel about yourself. If you repeatedly say to yourself, "I’m so stupid!" every time you make a mistake, you will feel worse about your mistake and your self-esteem will plummet.
If you say, "I’ll get it next time," then you feel a sense of confidence that you won’t keep repeating the same mistakes.
First, identify your inner dialogue by paying attention to what you say to yourself about yourself. Notice if you're kind and compassionate towards yourself or if you're critical and judgmental.
Pay attention to how you feel when something doesn’t go your way or when you are afraid to speak up.
Once you’ve identified your inner dialogue, begin the process of saying more useful and empowering things to yourself. Use in-process language like, "I’m learning to feel more confident each day."
Affirming that you're learning and growing allows you to better create a feeling of hopefulness and willingness to change.
In order to boost your confidence, speak to yourself in a way that empowers you to keep moving forward. You don’t have to do things perfectly. Instead, give yourself permission to acknowledge your efforts to create positive change.
2. Look for evidence.
Humans are wired to see the negative. It's a survival strategy that was much better suited to living in caves and hunting wild animals than it is to our modern-day world.
Your mind highlights those events where things go wrong to keep you on alert for danger.
But, trying something new isn’t dangerous and it isn’t useful for your mind to highlight experiences that confirm your limiting beliefs, fears, and insecurities. Instead, relax your nervous system by highlighting that you are safe and free from immediate harm.
Look for evidence in areas of your life where you do feel good and confident to let your brain know you are a competent person. Everyone is an expert at something, even if it's as simple as folding laundry or staying within a budget.
How did you become good at that? How do you feel when you do that activity? What do you say to yourself about yourself when you’ve completed that activity?
By regularly finding evidence that you are confident in certain areas of your life, you will help bolster your overall sense of self-esteem. You probably weren’t born feeling confident in that area of your life.
If you want to feel more confident in different aspects of your life, identify where you do feel confident and use that as fuel to build up belief in yourself.
3. Keep a success journal.
Highlighting areas of your life where you have accomplished something helps boost your confidence. You can do this by keeping a daily success journal.
At the end of each day, write down five accomplishments or successes for each day. These successes don’t have to be life-changing. They are relative to your day.
For example, if you have a fever and are suffering from the flu, making yourself toast and tea is a success for that day that you can write down.
You can build your confidence even quicker by also keeping a journal of lifetime successes. In this additional journal, you will write down the biggest accomplishments in your life.
You can use this list to remind yourself of how amazing you are and all that you have overcome to arrive at this moment.
You’ll want to start your lifetime success journal by writing down "learning to walk" and "learning to talk" because not everybody gets to do that.
If one of your daily successes is a big accomplishment you can add it to your lifetime success journal when appropriate.
When you want to be more confident, writing down your daily successes and focusing on your accomplishments will help build self-assurance.
4. Put blinders on so you see your goal clearly.
Comparing yourself to others is detrimental to your self-confidence. It’s all too easy to focus on someone else being better than you. Stop comparing yourself to others and put blinders on.
The only one you need to worry about being better than is your younger self.
A horse that wears blinders can only focus on what is in front of them. If you want to be more confident, then keep your focus on your progress and improving on yourself.
Telling yourself that it’s easier for someone else doesn’t help you.
Like a marathon runner, you are only trying to beat your previous time. You're only trying to be better today than you were yesterday.
Track your progress, let your efforts count, and continue to foster an inner dialogue that's supportive.
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