It’s hard to feel confident in yourself when you’re constantly denying yourself.

Some self-denial is perfectly healthy. But if you’ve gotten into the habit of always denying your own wants and needs, it shouldn’t be a surprise that you don’t feel very confident ask...

When you respect yourself enough to maintain good boundaries, confidence is the natural result.

Confidence rests on the foundation of self-respect. And self-respect comes from setting (and enforcing!) healthy boundaries that protect your wants, needs, and values. But enfor...

Your feelings will lead you in the wrong direction at least as often as the right one.

Listen to your emotions, but don’t trust them blindly.

Treat your emotions like a friend. When they give you advice, listen to it. But be prepared to reject it o...

If you’re constantly reliving past mistakes in your head, it’s going to be tough to feel confident about yourself in the present.

Give yourself permission to let it go. And then work like hell to keep letting it go, each time it comes up. Forgiveness is a commitment, not a ...

A good way to never feel confident is to always be failing. And a good way to always be failing is to always be trying to control the uncontrollable.

Of course, it’s often hard to distinguish what we can control from what we can’t—especially if we really want to be able to control it…

If you want to feel more confident, start thinking about what habits you have that are interfering with your confidence, then work to remove them.

• Coping with anxiety
• Reassurance-seeking
• Catastrophizing
• Not asking for what you really want
• Trying to contr...

When you immediately try and get rid of your anxiety by applying coping skills to make it go away, you teach your brain to view anxiety as dangerous.

So stop coping with your anxiety and learn to accept it.

You can be critical without criticizing.

When you criticize yourself in response to a mistake, you create an unrealistic view of yourself that’s almost always too negative. And, unsurprisingly, this isn’t great for your confidence.

3. Put the breaks on catastrophizing

Even if you know intellectually that the worst case isn’t likely to happen, if you constantly tell yourself it is, that’s how you’ll feel.

It’s difficult to feel confident if you’re constantly worryi...