Last update: 2023, June, 28th
Positive thinking and communication skills will change your assertiveness and self-confidence
Having a low level of self-esteem and self-confidence can be a burden in many personal and professional situations keeping you from achieving your best.
You might know how assertiveness and self-confidence are essential parts of your professional development and growth; but do you know how to increase their levels?
Because self-confidence will lead to improved performance, and a more successful life in general, we can all beneficiate to a higher level of assertiveness.
Why is Self-Confidence important?
What happens when you are assertive and confident? You can get what you want!
You are happier, motivated, more relaxed, and healthier. Being confident helps you improve your personal and professional relationships to achieve more. Self-confidence also helps you make the right decisions by choosing what’s right for yourself and simply by choosing yourself.
The more you make the right decisions aligned with your deepest desires and your core values, the faster you will achieve your goals.
Are you assertive and self-confident?
“These people just paid me a compliment, they don’t really mean it and are just laughing at me.” “My boss is never satisfied with what I do, no matter how many efforts I put into my work.” “It doesn’t matter if I’m trying to speak up during this meeting, no one will listen to me anyway. I’ll just say nothing.” “I’m just not good enough.”
Do you recognise yourself in one or all these statements? You might suffer from low self-esteem. The good news is that you can raise your level of assertiveness and self-confidence! It is not a 1-day process with a 1-time thing to do; however, with motivation and focus, raising your self-confidence and your assertiveness is easier than you think.
How do we form our Self-Confidence and Assertiveness?
In order to raise your level of self-confidence, it is essential to understand how we build our self-confidence.
Our level of confidence is influenced by the world around us as well as one’s inner perception of his or her ability to fulfill a particular job or role in society. In other words, self-confidence is both intrinsic and extrinsic.
No matter how much we want to believe in ourselves, if others don’t, it leads us to question ourselves.
One major source of self-confidence drop is being underestimated by others such as our peers, friends, family, or people we serve like bosses and managers.
Once our skills, talents, or abilities are questioned, it shakes our self-confidence.
Good news: building Self-Confidence is easier than you think and only depends on you!
You tend to think that your self-confidence depends on external factors.
Good news, it depends on you! You have the power. You are in charge of your happiness and wellbeing.
You have the power to:
Take actions,
Change your thoughts,
Be happy,
Decide,
Change your state of mind,
Change your vision of the World.
It is amazing news, as you can’t:
Change others,
Change the World
Have the perfect here and now.
What you can change is:
The way you react
The way you deal with a situation
The way you deal with emotions.
How can you develop self-confidence and assertiveness easily?
By following our easy tips, not only you can change the way you look at yourself but you will also help others to see you as a confident and assertive trustworthy professional and expert.
The 2 key ingredients to boost your self-confidence are positive thinking and communication skills.
Step 1: Positive thinking to boost assertiveness
Think of the way you look at events; are you a positive or a negative thinker? Do you focus on issues, concerns and problems? Or do you see challenges as opportunities to learn and grow?
What about your inner voice? Are you kind and encouraging to yourself or do you beat yourself down with non-encouraging thoughts?
Positive and negative thinking are both contagious; decide what you want to manifest.
Step 2: Develop effective communication skills to boost your self-confidence
Not knowing how to communicate your ideas will have an impact on your level of self-confidence. By developing your communication skills you will improve your relationships with others, as you will manage to share your thoughts and ideas more easily.
The first step will be to develop excellent listening skills in order to understand others and their ideas better. By doing that it will become easier to interact and communicate your own ideas to these people.
The second step will be to prepare any important and challenging situation of communication; preparation is key to success!
Finally you will practice as often as you can to get used to challenging situations.
As an example, if public speaking is a regular part of your role but you struggle and loose your sleep over it every time you need to pitch; joining a Toast Master local group will assist you and give you a chance to practice and improve your public speaking skills.
Boosting your Self-Confidence: A lifetime effort
The most important factor for becoming more self confident is to simply want to develop greater confidence in yourself, and to be decisive about taking action to do so, regardless of whether anyone else wants you to become more self confident or not.
We do not become assertive and confident overnight; it is a lifetime effort.
To boost our level of self-confidence we need wins, positive feedback and reinforcement regularly.
9 Additional ideas to raise self-confidence
Be nice to yourself
Visualise yourself as you want to be
Challenge yourself, try new things
Put yourself in winning situations and celebrate victories
List your achievements and successes as well as your qualities and competencies
Set yourself up to win
Help others
Care for yourself
Focus on what you can change: remember that everyone makes mistakes and nobody is perfect