Self-confidence is extremely important in almost every aspect of our lives, yet so many people struggle to find it. Sadly, this can be a vicious circle: people who lack self-confidence can find it difficult to become successful.
Learn how to become more self-confident, with this video.
After all, most people are reluctant to back a project that’s being pitched by someone who was nervous, fumbling, and overly apologetic.
On the other hand, you might be persuaded by someone who speaks clearly, who holds his or her head high, who answers questions assuredly, and who readily admits when he or she does not know something.
Confident people inspire confidence in others: their audience, their peers, their bosses, their customers, and their friends. And gaining the confidence of others is one of the key ways in which a self-confident person finds success.
The good news is that self-confidence really can be learned and built on. And, whether you’re working on your own confidence or building the confidence of people around you, it’s well worth the effort!
How Confident Do You Seem to Others?
Your level of self-confidence can show in many ways: your behavior, your body language, how you speak, what you say, and so on. Look at the following comparisons of common confident behavior with behavior associated with low self-confidence. Which thoughts or actions do you recognize in yourself and people around you?
Confident Behavior
Behavior Associated With low Self-Confidence
Doing what you believe to be right, even if others mock or criticize you for it.
Governing your behavior based on what other people think.
Being willing to take risks and go the extra mile to achieve better things.
Staying in your comfort zone, fearing failure, and so avoid taking risks.
Admitting your mistakes, and learning from them.
Working hard to cover up mistakes and hoping that you can fix the problem before anyone notices.
Waiting for others to congratulate you on your accomplishments.
Extolling your own virtues as often as possible to as many people as possible.
Accepting compliments graciously. “Thanks, I really worked hard on that prospectus. I’m pleased you recognize my efforts.”
Dismissing compliments offhandedly. “Oh that prospectus was nothing really, anyone could have done it.”
As you can see from these examples, low self-confidence can be self-destructive, and it often manifests itself as negativity. Confident people are generally more positive – they believe in themselves and their abilities, and they also believe in living life to the full.
What Is Self-Confidence?
Two main things contribute to self-confidence: self-efficacy and self-esteem.
We gain a sense of self-efficacy when we see ourselves (and others similar to ourselves) mastering skills and achieving goals that matter in those skill areas. This is the confidence that, if we learn and work hard in a particular area, we’ll succeed; and it’s this type of confidence that leads people to accept difficult challenges, and persist in the face of setbacks.
This overlaps with the idea of self-esteem, which is a more general sense that we can cope with what’s going on in our lives, and that we have a right to be happy. Partly, this comes from a feeling that the people around us approve of us, which we may or may not be able to control. However, it also comes from the sense that we are behaving virtuously, that we’re competent at what we do, and that we can compete successfully when we put our minds to it.
Some people believe that self-confidence can be built with affirmations and positive thinking. At Mind Tools, we believe that there’s some truth in this, but that it’s just as important to build self-confidence by setting and achieving goals – thereby buildingcompetence. Without this underlying competence, you don’t have self-confidence: you have shallow over-confidence, with all of the issues, upset and failure that this brings.
Building Self-Confidence
So how do you build this sense of balanced self-confidence, founded on a firm appreciation of reality?
The bad news is that there’s no quick fix,or five-minute solution.
The good news is that becoming more confident is readily achievable, just as long as you have the focus and determination to carry things through. And what’s even better is that the things you’ll do to build your self-confidence will also build success – after all, your confidence will come from real, solid achievement. No-one can take this away from you!
So here are our three steps to self-confidence, for which we’ll use the metaphor of a journey: preparing for your journey; setting out; and accelerating towards success.
Step 1: Preparing for Your Journey
The first step involves getting yourself ready for your journey to self-confidence. You need to take stock of where you are, think about where you want to go, get yourself in the right mindset for your journey, and commit yourself to starting it and staying with it.
In preparing for your journey, do these five things:
Look at What You’ve Already Achieved
Think about your life so far, and list the ten best things you’ve achieved in an “Achievement Log.” Perhaps you came top in an important test or exam, played a key role in an important team, produced the best sales figures in a period, did something that made a key difference in someone else’s life, or delivered a project that meant a lot for your business.
Put these into a smartly formatted document, which you can look at often. And then spend a few minutes each week enjoying the success you’ve already had!
Think About Your Strengths
Next, use a technique like SWOT Analysis to take a look at who and where you are. Looking at your Achievement Log, and reflecting on your recent life, think about what your friends would consider to be your strengths and weaknesses. From these, think about the opportunities and threats you face.
Make sure that you enjoy a few minutes reflecting on your strengths!
Think About What’s Important to You, and Where You Want to Go
Next, think about the things that are really important to you, and what you want to achieve with your life.
Setting and achieving goals is a key part of this, and real confidence comes from this. Goal setting is the process you use to set yourself targets, and measure your successful hitting of those targets. See our article on goal setting to find out how to use this important technique, or use our Life Plan Workbook to think through your own goals in detail (see the “Tip” below).
Inform your goal setting with your SWOT Analysis. Set goals that exploit your strengths, minimize your weaknesses, realize your opportunities, and control the threats you face.
And having set the major goals in your life, identify the first step in each. Make sure it’s a very small step, perhaps taking no more than an hour to complete!
Start Managing Your Mind
At this stage, you need to start managing your mind. Learn to pick up and defeat the negative self-talk which can destroy your confidence. See our article on rational positive thinking to find out how to do this.
Further useful reading includes our article on imagery – this teaches you how to use and create strong mental images of what you’ll feel and experience as you achieve your major goals – there’s something about doing this that makes even major goals seem achievable!
And Then Commit Yourself to Success!
The final part of preparing for the journey is to make a clear and unequivocal promise to yourself that you are absolutely committed to your journey, and that you will do all in your power to achieve it.
If as you’re doing it, you find doubts starting to surface, write them down and challenge them calmly and rationally. If they dissolve under scrutiny, that’s great. However if they are based on genuine risks, make sure you set additional goals to manage these appropriately. For help with evaluating and managing the risks you face, read our Risk Analysis and Management article.
Either way, make that promise!
Tip:
Self-confidence is about balance. At one extreme, we have people with low self-confidence. At the other end, we have people who may be over-confident.
If you are under-confident, you’ll avoid taking risks and stretching yourself; and you might not try at all. And if you’re over-confident, you may take on too much risk, stretch yourself beyond your capabilities, and crash badly. You may also find that you’re so optimistic that you don’t try hard enough to truly succeed.
Getting this right is a matter of having the right amount of confidence, founded in reality and on your true ability. With the right amount of self-confidence, you will take informed risks, stretch yourself (but not beyond your abilities) and try hard.
So how self confident are you? Take our short quiz to find out how self-confident you are already, and start looking at specific strategies to improve your confidence level.
Step 2: Setting Out
This is where you start, ever so slowly, moving towards your goal. By doing the right things, and starting with small, easy wins, you’ll put yourself on the path to success – and start building the self-confidence that comes with this.
Build the Knowledge You Need to Succeed
Looking at your goals, identify the skills you’ll need to achieve them. And then look at how you can acquire these skills confidently and well. Don’t just accept a sketchy, just-good-enough solution – look for a solution, a program or a course that fully equips you to achieve what you want to achieve and, ideally, gives you a certificate or qualification you can be proud of.
Focus on the Basics
When you’re starting, don’t try to do anything clever or elaborate. And don’t reach for perfection – just enjoy doing simple things successfully and well.
Set Small Goals, and Achieve Them
Starting with the very small goals you identified in step 1, get in the habit of setting them, achieving them, and celebrating that achievement. Don’t make goals particularly challenging at this stage, just get into the habit of achieving them and celebrating them. And, little by little, start piling up the successes!
Keep Managing Your Mind
Stay on top of that positive thinking, keep celebrating and enjoying success, and keep those mental images strong. You can also use a technique like Treasure Mapping to make your visualizations even stronger!
And on the other side, learn to handle failure. Accept that mistakes happen when you’re trying something new. In fact, if you get into the habit of treating mistakes as learning experiences, you can (almost) start to see them in a positive light. After all, there’s a lot to be said for the saying “if it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger!”
Step 3: Accelerating Towards Success
By this stage, you’ll feel your self-confidence building. You’ll have completed some of the courses you started in step 2, and you’ll have plenty of success to celebrate!
This is the time to start stretching yourself. Make the goals a bit bigger, and the challenges a bit tougher. Increase the size of your commitment. And extend the skills you’ve proven into new, but closely related arenas.
Tip 1:
Keep yourself grounded – this is where people tend to get over-confident and over-stretch themselves. And make sure you don’t start enjoying cleverness for its own sake…
Tip 2:
If you haven’t already looked at it, use our How Self Confident Are You? quiz to find out how self-confident you are, and to identify specific strategies for building self-confidence.
As long as you keep on stretching yourself enough, but not too much, you’ll find your self-confidence building apace. What’s more, you’ll have earned your self-confidence – because you’ll have put in the hard graft necessary to be successful!
Goal setting is arguably the most important skill you can learn to improve your self-confidence. If you haven’t already read and applied our goal setting article, you can read it here.
Key Points
Self-confidence is extremely important in almost every aspect of our lives, and people who lack it can find it difficult to become successful.
Two main things contribute to self-confidence: self-efficacy and self-esteem. You can develop it with these three steps:
Prepare for your journey.
Set out on your journey.
Accelerate towards success.
Goal setting is probably the most important activity that you can learn in order to improve your self-confidence.
A fisherman wants to catch his own fish, not be handed one.
Everybody is a winner.
For decades now it has been the custom for educators to make kids feel good about themselves for no particular reason. This practice, which is not backed by any evidence, is based on the premise that high self-esteem leads to high achievement. Accordingly, participants in spelling bees and sporting events all come away with trophies so that no one feels bad about not measuring up. In the classroom, students read titles such as Everyone is Special and complete All About Me projects that catalog their fine qualities. Teachers refrain from criticism and take care not to tie praise to performance. The problem with gold stars, prizes for everyone and other bribes, however, is that they don’t work. Rather than bolster achievement the practice simply motivates individuals to accrue more rewards and instills a sense of entitlement.
I deserve to be rewarded even though I didn’t do anything.
Former DC School Superintendent Michelle Rhee, Tiger Mom, recently commented on the everyone-is-a-winner trend by noting that her daughters’ rooms are covered with ribbons, medals, and trophies, “Yet I routinely tell my kids that their soccer skills suck. If they want to be better they have to practice hard, [but that] still won’t guarantee they’ll ever be great at soccer. It’s tough to square this with the trophies.”
Though well intended, research shows that the self-esteem movement has hobbled the millennial generation. The habit of unearned praise interferes with learning, and giving an “A for effort” only succeeds in giving students an inflated sense of their abilities. A 2007 LosAngeles Times report on international student assessments across 30 countries, titled “F in Science, A in Self-Esteem,” showed that American students ranked 21st in science and 25th in math, prompting experts to declare that “Americans are unprepared to compete in the global economy.” Despite their dismal performance, American youths aren’t bothered by their ignorance. In fact, they don’t recognize their mistakes or get that they don’t know nearly as much as their peers in Finland, Canada, New Zealand, or Great Britain even though they think they do. They are hooked on praise instead. According to a recent paper in the Journal of Personality, young adults “prefer a boost to self-esteem over sex, food, drinking, and pretty much any other pleasurable outlet.” Should they need a pat on the back there is a smartphone app called iFlatter that will “brighten your day, make you laugh, and boost your confidence” regardless of your actual knowledge and skillset.
Tell me I’m the greatest
Competition is a fact of life, and yet the fear of making anyone feel bad has crept up the ladder to adult concerns. It is seen for instance in the Academy Awards in which the timeworn phrase, “And the winner is!” has given way to the bland but politically correct, “And the Award goes to.” The zero-sum premise is that every winner demands a loser and that personal accomplishment only comes at the expense of someone else. This is rubbish. But the thinking persists and would be merely annoying if its effects weren’t so corrosive.
Recently reviewer Kay Hymowitz wrote in the Wall Street Journal about the 15,000 studies that the movement has generated. “And what do they show?” she asks. “That high self-esteem doesn’t improve grades, reduce antisocial behavior, deter alcohol drinking, or do much of anything good for kids. In fact, telling kids how smart they are can be counterproductive. Many children who are convinced that they are little geniuses tend not to put much effort into their work. Others are troubled by the latent anxiety of adults who feel it necessary to praise them constantly.”
The solution to this muddle is actually simple: If you want self-esteem, then do estimable things. Accomplishments and know-how can’t be handed out or downloaded into someone’s brain like they are for the characters in The Matrix. They must be earned through individual effort. It is the endeavor that generates a sense of pride and inward esteem. Imagine handing a fisherman a prize catch. You may think you’re doing him a favor and saving him the trouble, but you are robbing him of the pleasure instead. A fisherman wants to catch his own fish, not be given one.
I caught it myself!
Numerous psychological studies have confirmed that satisfaction is an inside game. While it feels nice to be rewarded, the glow of the dopamine rush is short lived and doesn’t produce lasting change in mood or behavior. After the thrill of winning, for example, lottery winners and Nobel laureates revert to their previous temperaments. A look at accomplished individuals who regularly win awards and medals shows that they are driven by the effort rather than the result. It is the striving rather than the reward that is long-lived. Furthermore, the knowledge of one’s capability is continually satisfying throughout one’s life.
Self-esteem feels good because it calls on the emotion of pride. Pride in turn arises from one’s sense of confidence and capability. Esteem and related emotions instill a sense of success and the confidence that you can accomplish whatever you set out to do. In addition the feeling is fun. “She always seems to enjoy whatever she’s doing,” people say. Achieving such a state, however, is not possible without discipline.
My own effort.
Like capitalism whose riches cannot exist without the threat of bankruptcy or heaven without the possibility of hell, self-effort must be willing to risk failure. Failure, when it happens, is never the end of the world, and building up a tolerance for rejection builds up the courage to put many irons in the fire knowing that only some will come to fruition. The advantage of such a strategy is that it assures a continual string of positive results. When set back, as everyone is from time to time, you will be able to pick yourself up and try again or else move on to something new. Repeated achievement reinforces itself. It cultivates a mindset that anticipates success. To observers, it might look like you have amazing luck, but they’d be wrong. The circumstantial luck of fortune is passive and uncaused. What flows from the effort, acting on the opportunity, and following through is resultant luck. As Thomas Jefferson said, “I’m a great believer in luck, and find that the harder I work the more I have of it.”
Maybe your experiments for your Ph.D. project haven’t panned out this week—or this month, or even this year. Maybe you feel like you’re spending long hours in the lab but not making an important contribution. Perhaps the frustration you see among postdocs trying to figure out their next career steps is making you question the degree’s ultimate value. Or maybe seeing your nonstudent friends bring in salaries far above your stipend and move up in the corporate world has you wondering whether pursuing a Ph.D. is holding you back.
For many, frustration, burnout, and uncertainty are typical parts of the growing pains of getting a Ph.D. (and simply of being in your 20s and 30s). And many scientists have wrestled with feelings like these and gone on to complete their doctorates and establish successful careers. But for some, these concerns may hint at something deeper: Maybe getting a Ph.D. just isn’t the right call for you.
If you find yourself struggling with these kinds of feelings, you need to figure out which camp you fall into so that you can decide whether you should keep pushing forward or seriously consider exit options. The process is tough. But regardless of what you ultimately choose, putting time and thought into these difficult questions will help you move forward with purpose and confidence.
Assessing your options
Angst is a common part of the Ph.D. training process for many students, and it has been for years. Mary Ellen Lane, associate dean for curriculum and academic affairs at the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, says that the anxieties she hears from current Ph.D. students are similar to the concerns she and her peers had as cell biology doctoral students in the late 80s and early 90s.
To figure out whether you can categorize your feelings as “that’s normal” or “this is about something more,” you need to talk to people, career counselors advise. Talking to your peers, students ahead of you, and people who have earned doctorates in your discipline can help you realize that many others—including those who have successfully completed their degrees and moved on to satisfying careers—have had similar thoughts at one point or another. “It’s not just you,” says Anna Ballew O’Connell, director of the Biological and Biomedical Sciences Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who has advised graduate students for the past 10 years. “Everyone has trouble communicating with their PI; everyone feels that their experiments aren’t working and wonders if they’re good enough.” For some, knowing that doubts are natural may be just what they need to quell their uncertainties and confirm that they want to continue with their Ph.D. plans.
But if knowing that struggling is normal doesn’t calm your anxieties, or if the high points of research haven’t outweighed the failures and rejections, reflecting on the value of the Ph.D. for your career and life goals can help you critically evaluate whether pursuing a doctorate is time well spent, career counselors say. Think deeply about what you really want to do with your career, and whether you need the Ph.D. to do it.
In some fields, having a Ph.D. will give you greater opportunities for career advancement; in others, the degree doesn’t matter as much. If you want a career doing research, for example, you’ll climb higher with the Ph.D., says Lane, who was a biochemistry and cell biology professor at Rice University earlier in her career. If you see yourself leaving the lab in the future, the calculation is different. Over her 14 years of providing career advice, Lane has seen many students who wanted to eventually move into nonresearch roles in industry, such as in business development or customer service. They were able to find jobs—and well-paying ones, she adds—without a Ph.D., and to use those first jobs as entry points. Informational interviews with people and employers in the fields that interest you can help you determine how necessary the Ph.D. is for entering and advancing.
Depending on your comfort level, expressing your concerns to your thesis adviser can also be helpful. Your adviser could provide reassurance that you’ve only hit a rough patch, or an honest discussion about your career goals could lead to negotiating a plan to finish your thesis so that you can graduate and move on.
In many cases, however, advisers themselves turn out to be the source of students’ doubts, or at least contributing factors. Frustration with an adviser due to, for example, conflicting expectations or working styles, or a student feeling that their progress is being held back by an unavailable adviser, is a common source of trouble that O’Connell and Lane help students address. Approaching your adviser in these instances can be awkward and tense, but it frequently resolves the issue. “I sometimes feel like two-thirds of the problems that are brought to me disappear with the first conversation between the student and the adviser,” Lane says.
In other cases, changing labs may be the solution. Doing so midway through your program may feel like a setback, but the fresh start has been the right fix for students who see value in the degree. And even though the research is new, it’s not really starting over. Many of the lessons and skills learned before the move will still be applicable in the new lab, and changing labs doesn’t necessarily lengthen a student’s time in the program by much.
If you aren’t comfortable reaching out to your adviser, consider turning to other university personnel—such as your program director or manager, a member of your thesis committee, or career counselors at your institution’s professional development office—who can offer advice and refer you to the resources you need to move forward. For instance, they may help connect you to other students who have gone through similar experiences or point you to on-campus activities, such as student clubs or internship opportunities, that can help you determine your next step. If you feel depressed or stressed, your university’s mental health counseling services is another important resource. Speaking to a counselor can help you figure out whether your Ph.D. studies are the primary contributing factor and strategize about how to handle those feelings.
Seeking career advice and counseling from various sources can be useful at any time, and throughout your training, O’Connell says. Having a support network is critical for weathering the trials of graduate school. But the tipping point for when you really need to see someone is when your work is affected. If you’re making more mistakes than usual, you’re avoiding going into lab, or your anxieties are causing such emotional distress that your sleep and relationships are impacted, for instance, it’s time to start making use of the resources your institution has to offer.
In the end, the goal of this self-reflection and information gathering is to come up with an action plan or put together options that you can choose between so that you come out of this period of doubt with resolve. Spending the time to do so will help you make an informed decision, not a reactionary one or the one that takes you down the path of least resistance. Regardless of the outcome, the important thing is that you’re intentionally choosing a path, Lane says. If you choose to stay, it’s because you’ve decided that you can build a better career if you get your degree and you are committed to finishing, not because you couldn’t find something else to do. And if you choose to go, it’s because you’re leaving the program to pursue something more worthwhile to you, not because you’re running away.
Deciding to leave
The decision to leave a Ph.D. program—even if you know that it’s the right move for you to pursue your ultimate career goals—can be emotionally fraught, O’Connell acknowledges. There’s a loss of identity, especially in students who have been planning to be Ph.D. scientists for many years. There’s also the feeling that you didn’t cut it, compounded by the feeling that the time you spent training to become a scientist might now be for nothing. Be kind to yourself as you’re dealing with these feelings and figuring out your next move, she advises. You also need to dispel the lingering what-ifs and mentally accept your decision, Lane says. “If every time something bad happens in your life and you’re looking back and saying ‘Oh, this wouldn’t have happened if I stayed in grad school,’ you’re not going to have a good life,” she says. “You make a decision that you’re not going to regret your choice.”
It’s also important to recognize that the time you spent in your Ph.D. program—and the effort you put into making a thoughtful decision about leaving—was not wasted. There’s a lot of value in figuring out what you want to do, O’Connell emphasizes. Plus, you’ve gained valuable skills and experience that are relevant beyond science and research, Lane says. By troubleshooting experiments, you’ve learned how to solve complex problems. From giving seminars, you know how to propose arguments and present information visually. You can work in teams, and take in and synthesize knowledge. “These are really transferable skills,” Lane underscores.
What matters in the end is you: The decision to leave was right for you. “It’s is a valid decision. The Ph.D. is not for everyone,” O’Connell says. Your time in the program “means you learned something about yourself, and you made an informed decision, and that is totally OK.”
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