Trusting your feelings

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.

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...

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.

• Low confidence leads to second-guessing, but second-guessing also leads to low confidence.
• Stop second-guessing yourself in the moment and schedule time to do it deliberately.
• Confidence and humility are not mutually exclusive.

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...

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 always outsource your emotional struggles to others, you deprive yourself of the opportunity to be confident.

A big part of emotional maturity—and the confidence that results from—comes from taking responsibility for your own feelings.

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 ...

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...