Sometimes, a lack of confidence can hinder our lives, preventing us from achieving our full potential. It’s easy to blame genetics, but the truth is that our personality is shaped by a combination of factors, including our environment, culture, upbringing, and experiences. By changing our beliefs and behaviors, we can boost our confidence and accomplish more in life. Are there any habits we should avoid to become more self-assured?

1. Don’t waste time with self-pity

Self-pity or feeling sorry for yourself is one of the most useless activities you can engage in. It can never lead to anything good. It is self-destructive. It leads to negative emotions where you are setting yourself up as a victim of circumstances. It puts you into a passive mode and can act as a self-fulfilling prophecy. As a self-perceived victim, you won’t be doing your best, so your problems will increase. Because you are in a brooding mood, you stop seeing the good things in life, which will reinforce all the negativity inside you. Self-pity is a waste of time and a waste of your mental energy.

“Self-pity is one of the most useless activities you can engage in. It is self-destructive. It puts you into a passive mode and acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

If you catch yourself feeling sorry for yourself, stop. Accept whatever happened and focus on finding ways to make sure it doesn’t happen again, or if that is not under your control, focus on ways to mitigate its impact on you in the future. By adopting an active response, you stop seeing yourself as a victim and stop focusing on the past altogether. Help others, exercise, or get a new hobby. Change in your behavior will make it easier to change your attitude. Once you break the vicious cycle, focus on gratitude, as acknowledging the good things in life is the best antidote to self-pity.

2. Don’t hide from change

Change is hard. Change can be painful. But change is inevitable and can have a positive impact on your life. Everything in the universe keeps changing. There is no point in denying change or fighting it. Embracing change is a way to go towards a more fulfilling life. Is it scary and risky? It can be. But it is less risky than not accepting the changes in our lives and ourselves.

“Change can be painful, but it is inevitable. Everything in the universe keeps changing, and there is no point in fighting it.”

Fear and unwillingness to get out of one’s comfort zone are the most frequent reasons people don’t want to change. The price you pay for not changing is huge. You get stuck in a rut while the world moves on. You won’t learn anything new and stop growing as a person. Others around you will become better, more successful, and happier with their lives, while you will increasingly feel sorry for yourself. Your life, attitude, behavior, and health will start deteriorating, so the longer you postpone whatever change you should make, the harder it gets.

To get started, set a goal of what the change should bring. Break it down into smaller achievable steps. Identify things that could derail your effort and develop mitigation strategies. Figure out how you will measure your progress and keep yourself accountable. Get going. Celebrate successes along the way.

3. Don’t worry about taking risks

Risk aversion is arguably the most significant thing holding many of us back. You daydream instead of taking action. You keep postponing an important decision that could lead to change. You feel you would enjoy getting more excitement into your life but chicken out at the last moment, coming up with lame excuses why not to do something. You give others the power to make decisions for you, so you can avoid making them yourself. In the background, it is all various types of fear. Fear of change, fear of failure, fear of ridicule.

Unfortunately, you need to take risks to have measurable success in life. Not crazy gambling risks. Calculated risks. Balancing your emotions and logic in the right way allows you to combat your irrational fears with a bit of rational logic. Life will get a bit riskier, but the potential benefits will dwarf the perceived risks.

“To have any measurable amount of success in life, you need to take risks. Not crazy gambling risks. Calculated risks.”

Consider the risks, the worst-case scenario, and the most likely benefits of any significant decision. If there are risks, consider whether you can mitigate them and seek out alternatives. Think about your life in a couple of years if you took the risk and succeeded or failed. The chances are good that any failure would be only a short setback if you allow yourself to learn from it and try again.

4. Don’t expect instant results

Patience is a virtue. It may not sound cool in the fast-paced life of instant gratification, but it has its merits. Nothing great happens overnight. If you want to achieve something meaningful, you must work hard. It is going to take time. If you get quickly frustrated when things don’t go as planned and quit, you are doing yourself a disservice. If you take shortcuts when trying to learn a new skill, you are just cheating yourself and preventing yourself from being truly good at the skill you picked. If you can’t delay gratification, you focus on short-term consumption instead of long-term creation. You are preventing yourself from reaching your long-term goals.

“Nothing great happens overnight. If you want to achieve something meaningful, you must work hard. It is going to take time.”

Learn to set realistic expectations. Things will take longer than planned, your skills are not as good as you thought, and all that will make achieving your goals more complicated than you initially thought. Most successful people in business, art, or politics got where they are through many failures. They didn’t give up at the first sign of adversity but kept going. If something didn’t work as planned, they tried something else. If they didn’t have the skills and failed, they tried again until they got the skill. They learned from their failures. They persevered. No success happens overnight.

Learn to enjoy the journey. Have a clear idea of what you want to achieve but have some milestones on the way and learn to enjoy achieving them. Too often, people focus solely on the ultimate goal. They then struggle to motivate themselves along the way and ultimately are disappointed that they are unable to reach the goal. Even if they reach it, they are disappointed with how little positive feeling it brings them. Learn to enjoy all the small steps along the way.

5. Don’t repeat the same mistakes

I like the saying, “There are no failures, only learning opportunities.” It is okay making mistakes. We all do make mistakes all the time. It is not fine making the same mistake over and over again. Successful people learn from their mistakes and move on. It doesn’t mean they wouldn’t make new mistakes. They would. But the new mistakes would be different from the mistakes they have made in the past. Making mistakes is a side effect of taking risks or learning new things. It is natural. Making the same mistakes is a side effect of unwillingness to admit that you made mistakes and unwillingness to learn. It is a sure way to be stuck where you are without the ability to move forward, grow, and succeed.

“By repeating the same mistakes, you start thinking that no amount of hard work will move you forward. You may even start believing that you can’t succeed.”

By repeating the same mistakes, you won’t reach your goal. You won’t learn anything new and won’t solve the problem you are trying to solve. What is worse, you condition yourself with the wrong mindset. You will start thinking that no amount of hard work will move you forward, so you will stop trying and give up. You may even slide into a fixed mindset, believing you can’t succeed.

When you make a mistake, follow a simple plan. Admit you made a mistake. Analyze what exactly went wrong. Create a plan for how to fix it. Create a plan to avoid repeating the same mistake by identifying any triggers that would lead you on the same path again and implement mitigation strategies.

To put it all together

You could do many more things to build more confidence, but the basics are simple. Start with changing your mindset. Don’t dwell on your past mistakes, and don’t get stuck in self-pity. Embrace change and start taking calculated risks. Expect failure to happen, and don’t assume a quick victory. When you make a mistake, accept it, figure out how to fix it, and make sure you have a plan to avoid repeating it. Over time you will gather a string of successes and become more confident.

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What are your thoughts on the things to stop doing to build more confidence? What are the things and activities that lower confidence? How to avoid them? How do you build confidence in yourself?

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