7 Easy Tips to Achieve Long-Lasting Confidence

For this month’s blog post, we wanted to focus not only in women empowerment, but also in empowering everyone’s confidence and self-esteem. So, read on below on some of the tips we gathered on how to achieve long-lasting confidence! 

1. Visualize your better self.

Visualization is the technique of seeing an image of yourself that you are proud of, in your own mind. When we struggle with low self-confidence, we have a poor perception of ourselves that is often inaccurate.

Practice visualizing a fantastic version of yourself, achieving your goals. From there, you can establish a goal where or what you wanted to be.

(Featuring the Demi Shirt - Child of Athena)

2. Know where you are now.

Now that you know where or what you wanted to be, think about where you are now. Think of it as if we are coming from point A to B. 🤔

What are your passions? What are you good at? What are the things you like? What are the things that you don’t like? Start from those things to identify where you are now. 💭

When you think of it, there might be a little voice that tells you you’re killin’ it or not. During this time, take an effort to be kind to yourself and, if you do slip up, try to challenge any negative thoughts.

A good rule of thumb is to speak to yourself in the same way that you’d speak to your friends. This can be really hard at first, but practice makes perfect.

3. Identify your competencies and develop them.

Self-esteem is built by demonstrating real ability and achievement in areas of our lives that matter to us. If you pride yourself on being a good cook, throw more dinner parties. If you’re a good runner, sign up for races and train for them.

In short, figure out your core competencies and find opportunities and careers that accentuate them.

3.1 Do what makes you happy.

If you spend time doing the things you enjoy, you’re more likely to think positively. Try to schedule in a little you-time every day. Whether that’s time spent reading, cooking or just conking out on the couch for a bit, if it makes you happy, make time for it.

4. Believe and be kind to yourself.

An important step in creating greater self-esteem is to believe in yourself. It’s your responsibility to take charge of your own self-concept and your beliefs – including belief in your worth, your talent, your abilities, and your potential. Make a list of qualities you have that are meaningful in the specific context.

For example, if you got rejected by your crush, list qualities that make you a good relationship prospect (for example, being loyal or emotionally available); if you failed to get a work promotion, list qualities that make you a valuable employee (you have a strong work ethic or are responsible). Then choose one of the items on your list and write a brief essay (one to two paragraphs) about why the quality is valuable and likely to be appreciated by other people in the future.

Do the exercise every day for a week or whenever you need a self-esteem boost. The bottom line is improving self-esteem requires a bit of work, as it involves developing and maintaining healthier emotional habits but doing so, and especially doing so correctly, will provide a great emotional and psychological return on your investment.

4.1 Nobody’s perfect, and so are you. And that’s alright.

Always strive to be the best version of yourself, but it’s also important to accept that perfection is an unrealistic goal. You’ve got to make mistakes in order to learn and grow, so try not to beat yourself up if you forget to hit the Attach button on a super-important email report. Remember that everyone makes mistakes. Everyone’s been there. 👍

(Featuring the Demi Shirt - Child of Hades)

5. Set yourself up to win.

Too many people are discouraged about their abilities because they set themselves goals that are too difficult to achieve. Start by setting yourself small goals that you can win easily. Once you have built a stream of successes that make you feel good about yourself, you can then move on to harder goals.

Make sure that you also keep a list of all your achievements, both large and small, to remind yourself of the times that you have done well. Instead of focusing only on “to-do" lists, we like to spend time reflecting on “did-it" lists.

Reflecting on the major milestones, projects and goals you’ve achieved is a great way to reinforce confidence in your skills.

5.1. Focus on what you can change.

It’s easy to get hung up on all the things that are out of your control, but it won’t achieve much. Instead, try to focus your energy on identifying the things that are within your control and seeing what you can do about them.

6. Help someone else.

Helping someone else often enables us to forget about ourselves and to feel grateful for what we have. It also feels good when you are able to make a difference for someone else.

Instead of focusing on your own weaknesses, volunteer to mentor, assist or teach another, and you'll see your self-confidence grow automatically in the process.

Being helpful and considerate to other people will certainly boost their mood, but it’ll also make you feel pretty good about yourself.

7. Care for yourself.

Self-confidence depends on a combination of good physical health, emotional health and social health. It is hard to feel good about yourself if you hate your physique or constantly have low energy.

You should exercise less self-sabotage. Most people’s worst enemy are themselves. By raising and keeping your self-esteem up you’ll feel more deserving of good things in life.

And so you’ll go after them more often and with more motivation. And when you get them then you’ll be a lot less likely to succumb to self-doubt or to self-sabotage in subtle or not so subtle ways.

7.1. Celebrate the small stuff.

You got up on time this morning. Check! ✔️ You poached your eggs to perfection. Winning! 👏 Celebrating the small victories is a great way to build confidence and start feeling better about yourself. 

7.2 Surround yourself with a supportive squad.

Find people who make you feel good about yourself and avoid those who tend to trigger your negative thinking.

(Featuring the Demi Shirt - Child of Athena, Apollo, and Calypso Logo)

Bonus Tip – 8. Smile. 😊

Okay, so maybe this one is a bit of a cliché, but it really works.

You see us humans are social beings, we thrive on social interaction, specifically positive social interaction. It can make us feel happy, confident and contented.

Think about how your mood changes when someone smiles back at you, or even how it changes when you just crack a smile to yourself.

Next time you feel low in confidence, try smiling. It doesn’t matter whether it’s at yourself or someone else, you’ll soon be feeling better.

So, there you go! Hope you had some take-aways from these tips and helped you even a little bit. It’s alright and normal, that in the beginning it is hard, since it is a process.

It is a slowly but surely process. So, don’t give up on improving yourself! Always take in mind that a journey starts from a single step.

Happy National Women’s Month to all ladies out there! Cheers! 🥂