Why is it so important to improve self confidence and what can we do about it ? Improving self confidence is key to succeeding in any walk of life and an important pillar in your personal development effort. People with self confidence are appreciated more in today’s society. They tend to achieve their goals relatively easily compared to others. In contrast, people who lack self confidence often end up struggling to survive the hardships of modern life. So self confidence is vital if you want to do well in today’s world.

Points to help you improve self confidence:

Confidence Tip 1 – List your accomplishments: People with high self esteem recognize their self worth, and act almost always, with a high self confidence. A good way to improve your self confidence is to make a list of your accomplishments every day. You will be surprised to know how many positive acts you perform every day in life, that you don’t notice. Once you start looking at this list, your self confidence will start improving.

Confidence Tip 2 - Engage a Mentor: Find a mentor or a coach who can help you to improve self confidence. Most achievers have mentors who have traveled the same path on which they themselves are traveling today. Meet up with your mentor regularly, and work on his/ her advice and support. You will find that you are learning something valuable almost every day and all this can help in your quest to improve self confidence.

Confidence Tip 3 – Chunk Down: Always split your large goals into smaller, manageable chunks. Appreciate yourself every time you reach a minor target. This will help you in not only improving your self confidence but also in achieving even greater goals.

Self Confidence Tip 4 – Choose Your Friends Wisely: Surround yourself with people who can help you improve self confidence. Reciprocate – give them the same support and respect that they give you. At all costs, avoid people who are always negative and critical. Such people tend to erode your existing levels of self confidence. They make you focus on your negative self, rather than your positive self. After some time, you may get completely wrapped up in their cynical and negative world-view. Nothing can be more damaging to self confidence than that. Get rid of such “friends” as soon as you can.

Tip 5 To Improve Your Appearance: Pay attention to your appearance. Wear good, well-fitting clothes and always look well groomed. It will also make you feel good. People will start looking at you differently. Remember that almost everybody yearns for the company of smart, intelligent and successful people. If you radiate a positive, confident look, you will soon become a centre of attraction in any crowd. This can very easily make all the difference between a brilliant success or a miserable failure.

How else can you improve self confidence?

Confidence Tip 6 – Learn To Handle Failure: Never be afraid of failing.  If you fail, get up immediately. Take it in your stride and move on. Change your self talk. Tell yourself that you will certainly succeed the next time. If you make the mistake of allowing your failures to overwhelm you, they will force you into a shell, and destroy your self confidence. The best way is to shrug your failures off as something insignificant, and move on to a new challenge or target. NLP says there is no failure, only feedback. Learn from your mistakes, and be realistic about your abilities. Don’t over-reach.

Self Confidence Tip 7 -  Stay Fit: Keep yourself fit by exercising regularly and controlling your diet.  A fit and healthy person is much more dynamic and achieves more in his/ her life. So physical fitness has a direct link to a healthy self image.

Tip 8  – Widen Your Horizon: Develop a wide range of interests, and take an active interest in what’s going around you. Meet and talk to as many people as possible. Instead of focussing all your attention on your daily work and/ or on your problems, divert your attention and focus on new interests. This will keep your mind activel and also will improve self confidence.

Confidence Tip 9 – Do What You Love: Engage in activities that you are good at and that you love doing. You may have been good at things in the past and then may have given them up due to various reasons. Get back to those activities again and see your self confidence grow.

Tip 10  – Get a New Hobby: Pick up a new hobby or start a new project that interests you. It will keep you occupied. It will also help you increase your self-confidence as you become more skilled at it.

Take consistent action to improve self confidence

Building self confidence, like any other aspect of self improvement, takes long-term commitment. You should be ready to learn and also take action on a consistent basis. But the best part is, there are a number of tried and tested tools and techniques available out there that can help you in your journey.You could try out powerful tools like self hypnosis and NLP to improve your self confidence levels. Other approaches like Meditation, Letting Go (or releasing), EFT etc also have been known to produce powerful positive changes in people.

The key here is followthrough, commitment and perseverance. Like any change, the first few days will be the hardest.

Once you start achieving higher levels of confidence, you will be surprised at how quickly your life will change for the better.

So practice these steps diligently and consistently. They will help you improve self confidence and gain mastery over your future.