Having low self-confidence can affect all of us, and no one is an exception.
It can impact everything; our relationships, health, wealth, success, and most importantly, our happiness.
In an age fuelled by social media, with its filtered images and glamorous stories, it can be easy to fall into the trap of losing our own self-worth. Our accomplishments can seem small in comparison, making it easy to lose confidence in ourselves.
The tiniest of blemishes can send our minds quietly spiraling under the radar into fits of inadequacy and a lack of confidence.
It comes down to how you think and approach setbacks with full confidence. You are about to learn six simple—yet underrated—methods that you can use to take the feeling of failure and reframe it to your advantage and step into your full, confident self.
Where does Lack of Confidence Come From? (And Why Is It There?)
Instead of acknowledging how smart, strong, and resilient we are, most of us spend the majority of our time comparing our weaknesses to someone else’s strengths. We keep reliving moments of defeat or developing an unhealthy attachment to an idea of who or what we want to be like.
You may find this hard to believe, but you’ve probably been gradually conditioned to behave this way.
You see it all over the media: millionaire CEOs turned into celebrities, the glamorization of influencers with millions of followers, and hustle-culture workaholism being praised in the spotlight.
All of this sends us a subliminal message of toxic productivity and misleading beliefs of what success and confidence should look like.
With such pervasive messages, it’s so easy to assume it to be true for you too.
It’s easy to lose sight of your own confidence, strengths, and goals, and be tricked into following the crowd playing this toxic game: a rat race of achievement hoarding and unrealistic busy schedules.
How Low Self-Confidence Can Affect Your Life
It’s undeniable that a lack of confidence can be difficult to deal with.
Whatever life throws at us—such as a relationship breakdown, a business or job loss, or a loss at something that we were working hard to win—all these things can be difficult and can knock the wind out of us, which in turn, affects our confidence.
Guilt and shame over your perceived failures can also give rise to the fear that internally whispers, “You will always be a failure.”
These “whispers” are what Marisa Peer calls our inner critic.
Marisa Peer, Britain’s #1 voted therapist, defines the inner critic as, “An annoying little voice of self-doubt inside your head that always seems to highlight your flaws and wipe out your confidence.”
All the things you say to yourself about not being smart enough, good enough, or brave enough make you lose confidence and trust in your own abilities.
It is important to note that these thoughts aren’t painting a perfect picture of reality; however, in the moment, it can feel very true to you. You make them true the more you say them to yourself, blurring the lines of what is real and what is exaggerated negative self-projection.
Even the smallest adjustment to your perspective can have mind-altering shifts to your confidence and how you begin to think of yourself.
How Your Mind Works and Why It’s Your Master Key
Your mind hates change. That’s because it only knows what worked before to keep you alive. It doesn’t like to deviate away from that, even if it’s good for you.
So if you’ve been living routinely convincing yourself that you’re not very good, your mind will do everything it can to make that your reality. It’ll make you lazier, demotivate you, and give rise and more power to your inner critic. It will keep you exactly where you tell it you want to be.
“Your every thought and word form a blueprint that your mind and body work to make your reality.”—Marisa Peer
Since your mind responds to the thoughts and words you tell it, then, by definition, it will project them and make it a reality. With this logic, you can deduce that your reality isn’t what’s out there, but what’s in your mind.
6 Simple Methods to Shift From Feeling Like a Failure To Having Ultimate Confidence
1. Make smart, positive choices
Making a small conscious choice to do something positive can cause a huge ripple effect of positivity in your life.
Simple (smart) choices + consistency + time = radical life changes
“Your thoughts control your feelings. Your feelings control your actions. And your actions control the outcome of your events. So if you change your thinking, you change everything.”—Marisa Peer
Just like how you can get sucked into a downward spiral of negative thoughts, you can also elevate your mind into an upward spiral momentum of positive thought.
2. Practice positive affirmations
We often tell ourselves that we’re “not smart enough, good enough, or deserving enough,” but we never consider those to be negative affirmations. We just thought it to be true.
You simply need to replace that thinking pattern with a positive one that empowers, inspires, and drives you toward growth, leaving you feeling good about yourself. Even in the worst of times, this is the place where you will be operating from.
When you get negative thoughts about yourself, don’t judge them. Simply write them down on a piece of paper. Then identify the disempowering word, and replace it with the opposite one that you would like to embody.
Try this practice for at least 21 days, and you’ll be surprised at just how easy it is to reprogram your mind towards confidence.
To have the maximum transformation, you need to uncover your most deep-rooted limiting beliefs at a subconscious level and remove them altogether. Then by replacing these blocks with empowering new beliefs, you can live the life you deserve. Marisa Peer teaches you the exact steps on how to reprogram your mind in her live 21-Day Confidence Challenge here.
3. Make what is familiar unfamiliar
Most of us make decisions out of habit or familiarity. In order to harness the power of positive choices you make, you need to be willing to become more mindful and make conscious choices.
You do that by making the familiar unfamiliar, and the unfamiliar familiar.
Apply that formula to reprogram your mind. You will be able to stop whatever old (negative) habits your mind regularly gravitates towards and make a way to build new (positive) ones.
4. Drop perfectionism and focus on incremental progress
Most of us are trying to create a radical change by sticking to it with willpower. In reality, it can be compared with trying to bench press 100lbs on your first day at the gym. It’s a formula for disaster.
What you want to focus on is the “progress” toward your change, and not the change itself.
With a 1% compounding increase every day, it ends up doubling every 72 days. Meaning in under three months, you double your progress to success—whatever that means to you.
Remember: small changes over time = huge changes later.
5. Awareness can be healing—practice it
Practicing awareness is like growing a muscle. The more you practice paying attention to what is happening around you and within you at a given moment, the more the muscle grows.
When you bring awareness to that, it can help you let it go and stop it from holding you back. Be patient with yourself. If you miss a day or two, it’s fine.
6. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday
When we decide to become successful and confident, we often look up to others that “have it all.” We pick up our success goals from what they have already achieved. This way is prone to disappointment.
Comparing ourselves with others, however, can become overwhelming, slowly nipping at your confidence and belief in yourself.
The best person to compare yourself to is your former self. To make this approach easy and attainable, you need to define what a 1% better version of yourself looks like and you can do this in the 21-Day Confidence Challenge.
Becoming Unstoppable
The way you respond to life is all within your control. After all, you have the power to become the best version of yourself.
Working with clients from royalty and rockstars to CEOs over three decades, Marisa Peer has built a stellar reputation for impacting millions of lives, and has shaken up the therapy industry by creating powerful, rapid therapy techniques.
Thousands of people have been transformed by her 21-Day Challenges—breaking free from seeking other people’s approval, rewiring their minds for unshakable confidence, and becoming unstoppable in every area of their lives.
Most of the time, we are unaware of what creates our self-confidence blocks. Our conscious minds can’t access that part of our thinking, which is why we repeatedly go over the same thought patterns, no matter what we try and shift externally.
When you join the 21-Day Confidence Challenge not only do you get to the root cause of any blocks you have through Marisa’s powerful meditations, you will also find that you tap into your unstoppable self—firing up the belief that you are worthy and deserving. Marisa’s challenges enable your mind to open up brand new neural pathways so that nothing can hold you back and confidence becomes your new reality.
The challenge is designed to be actionable from the very start to help you profoundly increase your own sense of self-worth and bring back the super confidence you were born with.
It could also help you understand and rewire negative thoughts and behaviors so you can make a profound and positive change in your life.
In addition, you will join a thriving community, all ready to help keep you accountable in your confidence path. Marisa will guide you through the proven tools and techniques to be able to love yourself, feel good about your life, and believe in your potential.
It’s time for you to have the phenomenal confidence that you deserve.If you’d like to take a deep dive into gaining that unwavering confidence in your life, you can try it for yourself by joining the 21-Day Confidence Challenge here.
