We are forever being sold stuff with the promise that the product will ‘make you feel confident’. I love a new pair of shoes, I feel fab in them! But by the time I’ve worn them in, they’re just another pair of shoes. Many of us might stroll out in our finery and receive compliments about how we look, yet half of us don’t know how to accept those compliments, because although we may have ‘dressed confident’, we’re not confident inside.

And what about the world around us? Many of us feel it’s gone totally mad in recent years, whatever our feelings and experiences regarding Brexit, Covid, and inflation, things seem to be changing at an alarming rate, and things we never thought would happen, are now happening with little comment. How on earth are we supposed to feel confident, when so much is being hurled at us on a constant basis and we don’t feel in control of our lives anymore?

The truth is, we have no control over our lives, and whatever we wear, drive, or have done at the hairdresser is just an external imitation of confidence, not the real thing.

Confidence is an inside job, it’s about what’s going on in your mind. It comes from how you see the world, the beliefs you have, the identity you’ve adopted, and the words you say to yourself. Confidence is about loving our imperfection, rather than striving for perfection. It comes from being our own cheerleader through the good times and the bad. Having confidence allows us to fall flat on our faces, and pick ourselves back up again, rather than living only half a life, because we dread that happening. Confidence is being able to say, ‘I’m going to do this, if it all goes horribly wrong, I’ll be a mess for a bit and then be OK again’.

So how do we achieve confidence? Well, it’s about being kinder to yourself. Yes, I know that sounds a bit weird, but that is how you do it. When we start a new job, we believe we’ll feel more confident at it once we’ve learned the ropes. This is actually competence – a knowledge of how to correctly complete the tasks required. Confidence, is about how well we believe we’ve done that. If we have a kind boss, they will give us good feedback and praise – that is what we need to start doing for ourselves.

How does being nicer to ourselves create confidence? Well, the part of your brain that that governs how you feel about stuff has no idea whether the messages you receive from the outside world are objectively true or not, it just accepts all information as fact. Imagine you had a friend who was constantly telling you you were a bit fat, or a partner who kept calling you ‘silly’ – would you feel confident around them? These negative messages can come from outside, like magazines and social media, and they need to be controlled. I felt so much better when I stopped reading Cosmopolitan 10 years ago, and I filter out as many beauty and clothing ads from my screen as I can. Much more importantly though, it’s about the messages you receive from yourself. If you are self-critical, and most of us are, it’s like having that horrid best friend and undermining partner living with you 24/7. Even worse, they can say what they like, because no-one else can hear. It’s certainly true that some of the most awful and toxic things that have ever been said to us have come from our own minds, and if we hear them often enough, we start to believe them.

So, if you want to start building real confidence inside, start to notice the negative messages that are coming in, and where you can, make them kinder. For example:

Instead of looking in the mirror and criticising every part of ourselves, we can look instead for the positives and talk about them to ourselves. If we are struggling in our businesses or at work, instead of saying ‘I’m no good at this’, we can say, ‘I’m learning more every day, I’ve made a success of things before, and I’ll make a success of this too’.

There are loads of things like this that we can do to reprogramme our minds to feel confident – they all boil down to self-compassion and kindness to ourselves. If we feel inside that we have our own back, that we will love ourselves whether we succeed or fail – we will be unstoppable!

For more tips on how to feel confident and manage your mind, check out my YouTube channel x