The Confidence Checklist: 7 Ways to Feel More Worthy

When people say confidence is key, they mean it. Having confidence in yourself can change your entire life. It helps you feel more empowered and make better choices to achieve your dreams. Surprisingly, research shows confidence is something we can lose if we don’t stretch ourselves more: so we need to use it or lose it.

When I say confidence, I mean the genuine “I believe in my worth and feel good about myself” kind. Not the arrogant “I am better or of more value than people” kind.

It is actually a high balance of confidence and warmth that can make you more charismatic and likable. Too much confidence with little warmth can make you come across as arrogant, and too much warmth with little confidence could lead to your perception as too much of a “nice girl or a nice guy.” Too little warmth and too little confidence can make you come across as unfriendly/distant.

Given findings have shown those with higher self-esteem have more success, better relationships, and improved mental and physical health that persist from adolescence and into old age — I have worked hard to create regular strategies to maintain positive self-esteem and self-confidence.

So below is the confidence checklist with seven daily strategies to boost your confidence:

Practice self-acceptance: It’s true! The more you accept yourself, the less external validation and acceptance you will need. So practicing self-acceptance can look like realizing your weaknesses and embracing them since we are all humans and have flaws. It can look like not needing to defend yourself when someone criticizes you because you accept and understand yourself enough to not need to prove yourselves to others all the time. It can also look like checking yourself out in the mirror and smiling back at your beautiful body. Whatever it looks like, unconditional self-acceptance will increase your confidence significantly.
Know your needs: You gain confidence when you also know yourself enough to know what you want and what makes you happy. This insight and awareness will make help you feel more empowered to get your needs met. You have to know your needs to express them, and your personality needs make up who you are. So do you need to do an act of achievement every day to feel good? Do you need to talk to friends often to get your emotional connection needs met? Do you need to play video games to meet your high need for comfort? We all have personality needs and knowing and fulfilling your needs regularly will make you happier and boost your self-confidence!
Change your inner dialogue: “Pay attention to what you pay attention to.” It’s true, your inner dialogue and thoughts really affect your mood and day. Focus on your inner dialogue and change your thoughts to become more empowering. This may take some time, but be patient with yourself. For example, if you mess up, stop yourself from being critical and instead give yourself encouragement like you would have wanted as a younger kid. Focus on creating an inner dialogue that is a supportive best friend or parent, and less of a critical enemy. Again, this takes time (some say at least 21 days) to completely change your inner dialogue, but it can be done with practice and consistency.
Engage in the practice of increasing self-worth: What would you do if you thought you were worthy? Would you advocate yourself in your workplace more? Would you buy yourself flowers? Would you practice your hobby more? Would you take the risk you want to do? Take time to engage in practices that increase your self-worth. Self-worth is a reflection of the behavior you give towards yourself, and it is important to engage in behaviors that show yourself you have high self-worth. Whether that’s pampering or advocating yourself, treat yourself like you are inherently worthy. Even Oprah said you are!
Understand your past to work to reprogram any existing wounds: Our past heavily shapes us and until we become aware of any pain points in our past/childhood, we will keep on being hurt by those wounds. It is important to look at any pain points and reprogram them. A good starter is looking at the enneagram which explains how we all have different childhood wounds and how we can heal them. A review about a course by the Personal Development School is here if you want to get deeper and really free yourself from any painful limiting beliefs, especially in your relationships. There are also popular books like this here or here to help start your journey.
Surround yourself with good people: You end up becoming the sum of the people around you. This has been backed by data that shows our social networks greatly influence who we become. So if you want to be more self-confident, then surround yourself with self-confident people.
Use your love language on you: You may have heard of love languages but essentially it’s the way we feel loved by people and there are five main ways we all feel love. To gain more self-confidence, spend some regular time showing yourself love by using your top love language(s) on yourself. More ideas on how to do that are here.

I wish you so much joy and love as you work on building more confidence! You deserve to feel amazing, and taking active steps towards self-confidence shows yourself that you believe you are deserving.

What makes you feel confident? And can you do that today? 🙂

❤,

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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