Learning how to believe in yourself is critical for achieving your personal goals, reaching success, and living a fulfilled life.
What is self-belief?
Self-belief is the confidence an individual has in their abilities and strength to achieve. Self-belief not only helps in building an individual’s perception of themselves but also how they see themselves in the world. Where self-belief is the notion of recognizing your abilities and leading yourself with confidence; self-doubt – the antithesis to self-belief – can surface feelings of underachievement and low self-esteem. Getting caught in the negative cycle of self-doubt can hugely impact your confidence and self-belief.
Why is it important to believe in yourself?
Because if you don’t, who will? Though we may encounter people in our lives that build us up when we’re not feeling our best – believing in yourself is what’s key. Not relying purely on validation from others, but knowing that your truest self – the real you within, is capable, worthy, and limitless.
Self-belief is an important factor when it comes to achieving your goals and leading a fulfilling life. Strong self-belief leads to higher motivation for success. Whereas a lack of self-belief may cause low self-esteem and self-doubt, naturally inhibiting your drive to push forward on your goals.
How to believe in yourself
In this article, we’ll share 8 simple yet effective strategies to start believing in yourself. These strategies will allow you to look inward, and truly understand what’s getting in the way of your confidence. If you combine self-reflection with goal-setting and positive thinking, then you’re on the right track to start believing in yourself. After all, self-belief is a mindset that you can learn and improve. If you want to learn to believe in yourself, keep reading!
1. Identify your strengths and weaknesses
Understanding your strengths and weaknesses is step one of building up self-belief. Truly understanding your capabilities and setbacks is what will help you see the big picture of where you are today, and where you want to be. This includes your strengths and weaknesses from a hard skill point of view (ex. I’m great at cooking, but not so great at sports), as well as from a soft skill point of view (ex. I’m a great story-teller, but I’m not the best listener. I think I interrupt often.)
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Do a Self-assessment
Self-assessing your strengths and weaknesses involves reflecting on past experiences and looking at your current behavior pattern.
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- What are you good at? What needs improvement?
- How do you respond emotionally to tough situations?
- How would other people describe you?
- What have you been given really good feedback on?
- What have you been given negative feedback on?
Spend some time reflecting on your past experience, your day-to-day thoughts, and observe your reactions in different situations. Alternatively, you can take a personality test – there are plenty available online. These tests can help you understand your strengths and weaknesses if you’re feeling stuck.
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Focus on your strengths
Once you’ve identified your strengths, take a moment to acknowledge them. Feel pride surrounding your strengths, and then see where you can continually improve them. This is key to believing in yourself. You will start to feel that confidence go up as you really hone in on the things you’re good at.
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Work on your weaknesses
Getting real about your weaknesses isn’t an easy step. So kudos to you! We all have weaknesses and areas we can improve. Being honest about this is what will help us understand what obstacles we put in on own way, and how we can overcome them. Figure out what weaknesses you want to work on, and do it with a positive mindset. None of us are perfect, so don’t feel threatened by your weaknesses.
2. Surround yourself with positivity
Surrounding yourself with positivity can help you start believing in yourself and gain confidence by creating associations with people who encourage and support you. This might result in modelling positive behaviors, avoiding negativity, and increasing your personal motivation. Cultivating positive relationships and developing a positive inner dialogue will also help you build up your self-belief.
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Value people who support and encourage you
The company of supportive and encouraging people, whether family or friends, is essential for believing in yourself. Sharing your time with them can help you build self-esteem and provide motivation. Very few people will support you, so appreciate them; as positive relationships are important for building self-belief and confidence.
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Boost your self-esteem and confidence through self-care
You can increase your self-esteem and confidence by prioritizing yourself through self-care. This might be treating yourself to something nice, blocking off time in your calendar to read your favorite book, setting goals you can actually achieve, etc. Self-care can be a guiding light in how to believe in yourself: after all, it’s you making time for you.
Let’s talk about how to self-care, through self-love.
3. Practice self-love
Self-love is all about being kind to yourself. If you become too hard on yourself and constantly engage in negative self-talk, it becomes difficult to focus on the good things about yourself. Avoid judgmental self-criticism and instead find ways to constructively give yourself feedback. Build yourself up, don’t tear yourself down. Self-love can increase self-esteem and confidence by being more accepting and kinder to yourself.
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Steps for self-love
A few examples of self-love in theory includes: engaging in positive self-talk where you can appreciate yourself, making time for you, setting boundaries, and showing gratitude for the people and things in your life. These small actions can help you believe in yourself, reminding you that you’re worthy and abundant.
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Self-love activities
To practice self-love, you can engage in activities such as meditation or mindfulness, exercise, dancing, spending time in nature, etc. These activities can help boost your mood, improve your health, allow you to connect with yourself and the world, and provide opportunities for self-expression and reflection. When you make it a habit to genuinely express yourself, you start to slowly feel more comfortable in your skin, helping you to believe in yourself.
4. Reframe negative thoughts
Reframing your negative thoughts is an important step if you want to work on believing in yourself. As a start, identify the negative thought patterns you’re experiencing, challenge their validity, and counter the thoughts. Reframing those negative thoughts with a positive spin will help you immensely. This process takes time and effort, but you can increase your self-esteem and confidence by replacing negative thoughts with positive ones.
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Challenge negative self-talk
A common pattern you might notice when it comes to negative thought patterns is negative self-talk. To learn how to believe in yourself, you need to learn how to challenge negative self-talk. It’s imperative to recognize and challenge negative self-talk, by replacing these words with positive affirmations. For example, “Ugh. I hate my legs” might become “Wow. I can’t believe how many places my legs have taken me. They’ve walked and hiked hundreds of miles throughout my lifetime, and have always been there for me. I am so grateful for the function of my legs and how they serve me — I don’t know what I’d do without them. I LOVE my legs!!!”
5. Focus on Progress
Focusing on progress gives you confidence. Concentrating on how far you’ve come will motivate you to achieve more. As you focus on progress, you’ll constantly strive to self-improve, developing and learning more skills and abilities along the way. This compounded growth will help you start believing in yourself and prove that you can achieve and grow in any area of your life if you put your mind to it.
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Progress, not perfection, is the key to success
Remember to focus on progress rather than perfection. As we know, perfection simply does not exist. It’s not just about the end state, but how much you’re progressing to get to that end state.
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Celebrate your progress
Always celebrate your successes, big or small. These milestone celebrations will keep you motivated, encouraging you to achieve more and building up your self-confidence. This helps you affirm your value and worth, shifting the focus from the destination, to the journey.
6. Be kind to yourself
Sometimes when we lack self-belief, we become hard on ourselves – our own worst critic. Sometimes we even start to blame ourselves for things we’re not responsible for. Recognizing this pattern through self-awareness is step one to breaking this self-sabotaging habit. Be kind to yourself.
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Treat yourself with the same kindness that you show others
Giving yourself the same level of care and compassion that you provide others is an important step to start believing in yourself. You can increase your confidence in your abilities and strengths by treating yourself with kindness.
7. Learn from your failures
No one is successful without failure. And these failures shouldn’t hold you back from believing in yourself. It’s natural to want to give up and get upset at yourself when facing failure. These emotions can erode your self-belief, which is why you need to remind yourself that failure doesn’t have to be a negative experience.
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Failure is a natural part of growth
Learning from failure is crucial when it comes to how to believe in yourself. It involves looking at failures as opportunities for growth and reflecting on the causes of failure rather than being taken over by them. Failure can also present the opportunity to improve your problem-solving skills, helping you foster a growth mindset (which we’ll get to in the next step). By learning from failures, you can become more resilient and confident in your ability to overcome tough situations. It’s getting comfortable with being uncomfortable.
8. Develop a growth mindset
A growth mindset is essential for believing in yourself as it paves the way for continuous learning. Having this mindset allows you to view challenges and failures as opportunities for growth, leading to more progress. With a growth mindset, you become more than willing to adopt change and take risks which can lead to abundant success in your personal and professional life.
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Believe in your ability to grow and change
If you have a growth mindset or believe in your ability to grow and change, it will help you become a successful person. This perspective will help you embrace challenges by seeing them as new learning opportunities. By viewing setbacks or problems as opportunities for growth and development, you’ll start to increase your confidence and self-assurance.
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Develop a positive outlook for the future
If you don’t know how to believe in yourself, you will always look at the future with bleak hope. That’s why it’s especially important to have a positive mindset for the future so you can focus on future goals, dream big, and surround yourself with positivity.
Resources
Here are a few resources to help you on your journey to start believing in yourself (and how)!
Journals to help you learn how to believe in yourself
- 90 Day Mindset Makeover
- If you’re in need of a mindset refresh this guided workbook will help you transform your thoughts and level up your mindset. This workbook is made for anyone that’s looking to take control of their thoughts and connect deeper with themselves over the next 3 months. There are 9 mini-lessons with accompanying daily exercises covering topics like self-confidence, boundaries, growth vs. fixed mindset, and so much more.
- Good Vibes Journal
- This journal was designed to bring joy and calm to your everyday life. With mood trackers, gratitude sheets, journaling prompts, self-care ritual tracking, coloring pages, and more – learn to release the energy that’s been holding you back, and make room for abundant thinking with this digital journal.
- 90 Day Self-Care Journal
- Prioritizing your well-being is one of the most productive things you can do, which is why a little self-care goes a long way. This journal is just what you need to kickstart your self-care journey over the next 3 months. With 90 days of self-care challenges and check-ins, you’ll be feeling rested, rejuvenated, and revitalized in no time.
Books to help with self-belief
Disclaimer: These books contain affiliate links, meaning if you purchase something, we may receive a commission at no additional cost to you. For more info, you can read our full disclosure.
Video: A guide on how to believe in yourself
This TED talk is a great reminder of why it’s so important to believe in yourself.
Read more:
- How to Have a Successful Year Ahead
- How to Change Your Life in 90 Days
- 7 Steps to Get Your Life Back on Track When You’re Stuck
- How to Create a Vision Board to Manifest Your Dream Life
- 10 Daily Habits to Improve Your Life Right Now
