Strategies to improve self-confidence and self-esteem

We need both self-confidence and self-esteem since they are interrelated. Self-confidence, how we feel about our abilities, is possible to influence by doing activities that we like and where it is possible to measure progress in feelings/appraisal, concrete milestones etc. Having a habit of trying new things and practice being non-judgmental, supportive when learning are important keys.

The accumulated esteem of your confidence as well as giving yourself more love and compassion impacts your self-esteem which in turn improves your self-confidence. As your confidence rise so will likely your overall esteem. Hence, spending more time with yourself exploring activities and creativity are important for many reasons.

To improve your total value of yourself, your self-worth, it is also important to work with self-efficacy since this also can be influenced and is highly correlated to wellbeing. Self- efficacy enhances wellbeing, stress-tolerance and lowers vulnerability to depression. Perceived self-efficacy is often defined as a person’s beliefs about their capabilities to perform sufficiently in activities that have influence over important life events. Self-efficacy beliefs determine how we feel, think, motivate and behave.

When having high assurance in own capabilities, one approaches challenging tasks as something to be mastered rather than as threats to be avoided. This attitude fosters strong interests, deep involvement in activities, challenging goals as well as maintains strong commitment to these. In face of failure one heightens and sustains efforts, while after setbacks one quickly recovers one’s belief about self-efficacy.

Having strong self-efficacy often entails attributing failure to insufficient effort or deficient knowledge and skills, which all can be acquired – hence not connected to “permanent personal defects”. Instead, threatening situations are approached with assurance that they can get controlled, which in turn likely produces accomplishments. According to Bandura, self-efficacy have 4 main sources of influence that will be the topic of the next post.

#selfconfidence #selfesteem #selfefficacy