Struggling with confidence? Or perhaps you just want some confidence-building exercise to lift you? It’s no easy task as it needs constant practice even if you turn 50. There are times in our life when we feel down, but with these 10 exercises, you’ll remember why you’re in this game. These mental exercises are made for busy professionals but still can be applied even in your daily lives for that unshakeable self-confidence.
10. Start a Gratitude Journal
You hear this again and again, but there’s no better step to confidence than to recognize the good things about your life. Gratitude journaling involves a regular writing or typing down of things which you are grateful for in life. Shifting your perspective will have a positive impact when it comes to your self-esteem.
9. Practice Progressive Muscle Relaxation
Your body’s tension speaks to what you show to everyone. Progressive Muscle Relaxation (PMR) is a technique where you tense and relax different muscle groups. It helps you to release all that physical tension, but also calm your mind, which helps you overcome anxiety that’s accompanied by lack of confidence. By learning about this, you gain control over your body’s response to stress.
8. Strike That Power Pose
Changing your posture can magically change your life. Social psychologist Amy Cuddy has written an article about power poses that suggests applying an expansive and open posture can change your brain’s chemistry. She further suggested that they’re associate with an increase in testosterone or dominance hormone and decrease in cortisol or stress hormone. While there are some debates about this, the idea that our body language can influence our feelings makes this worth the try.
7. Reframe Your Negative Self-Talk
There’s no other biggest enemy than your inner critic. Negative self talk can undermine your self-belief as you become critical about your appearance and abilities. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) can be a powerful solution as you challenge your negative thoughts and replacing them with a balanced and constructive one. With this, you rewire your thought patterns by reducing the power of your inner critic.
6. Use Visualization to Mentally Rehearse Success
Some athletes practice visualization as it involves creating a detailed mental picture of yourself when you achieved your goal. Brain has actually a difficulty of differentiating real and an imagined event. Train your brain for success by visualizing yourself performing confidently and successfully. You reduce your anxiety and build your pathway to a great outcome.
5. Adopt a Growth Mindset
Stanford pschologist Carol Dweck started a research about mindsets. The fixed mindset is the belief that our abilities are already innate in us and unchangeable. Meanwhile, the gorwth mindset speaks on the belief that we can develop abilities through dedication and hard work. With that, we choose to adopt the growth mindset to build confidence and reframe challenges as our opportunity to learn and grow. When we believe that we can further improve, then we’re likely to put more effort to achieve this.
4. Take Action, Even When You’re Afraid
Confidence is not to remove the fear, but rather, your willingness to act despite that fear. According to neuroscientist Ian Robertso, confidence is linked to the brain’s action systems. It means that when you take action, you send a powerful signal that you are capable and in control. That’s actually a positive feedback as taking action leads you to accomplishment that builds your self confidence. Just start small and don’t wait until you feel confident.
3. Practice Self-Compassion
We all know that we are our own harshest critics. With that, apply self-compassion which is treating yourself with the same kindness and understanding you would offer to yourself. While self-esteem is based on external validation, self-compassion is a sense of self worth, even in failure. By applying this, you can learn from your mistakes and setbacks.
2. Affirm Your Core Values
When our confidence gets testes, it’s easy to lose sight of who we are. With that, you should always practice to affirm your core values to ground yourself. Identify what’s important about you and reflect why they’re meaningful. This simple act can make you overcome any threats directed to your self-esteem. Connect with your authentic self and build a foundation of your confidence that’s not dependent on external validation. It should be about an understanding of what matters to you.
1. Embrace Rejection
This is something that you hear everyday, but it’s something that we don’t apply often. In Jia Jiang’s “100 Days of Rejection” experiment, she shared the power of intentionally seeking out rejection for people to overcome fear of it. Through putting yourself in situations you’ll likely be rejected, you desensitize yourself for that emotional sting of the word no. This teaches you to that rejection is not really personal and that the world is kinder than you imagine it to be. Learn to free yourself from the fear that’ always holding you back.