Feeling confident is a very subjective feeling. You know when you feel confident and when you don’t. But what does it mean for you concretely?
If you’ve been struggling with low self-confidence or self-esteem for a while, you probably have already tried something to overcome them. Many women read books and attend workshops looking for confidence tips and I think it’s a great first step. I also know that as much as reading books is great, it won’t be enough to solve the problem. Because we can only solve the problem if we work on it (more on this in my approach to solve low self-confidence). So with this exercise I want to help you to get some clarity on what low self-confidence is for you.
First of all, your goal should be realistic in terms of expectations. Answer the questions:
- In terms of results, what is realistic for you?
- How long do you think it’ll take you to get there?
- How much time, energy and money are you willing to invest to achieve this goal?
- Are you willing to keep doing the work even when it’s challenging?
- What motivates you? What makes this goal important?
- How will your life be different when you’ll have achieved this goal?
Once the goal looks more concrete, detailed and measurable, it will be easier to get there. So have a look at what you wrote and see if what you wrote seems realistic to you (hint: feeling confident in anything you’ll do is not realistic, but feeling good enough is). It’s important to keep in mind that while self-esteem is a general feeling, self-confidence is always related to a specific field and competences are to be taken into account as well. Let’s continue with some more questions:
- When you say you want to be confident, what do you mean exactly?
- In other words, what does being confident mean to you?
Think about a specific situation when you felt confident:
- How did you experience confidence?
- Is this the way you normally experience confidence or would you define it differently?
- Internally, what do you think or feel when you are confident?
- Externally, what can others notice when you feel confident?
- Can you write down in one sentence the final result you want to achieve?
You have a goal now, defined in internal and external indicators of success. Now what makes this goal important? What motivates you to get there?
- What makes this goal important for you?
- And what will be possible in your life when your goal will be achieved?
- Is it something important for you? How important is it, from 1 to 10?
YOUR FINAL RESULT
It should be much clearer at this point. It should sound more as a project, not only a dream. Let’s sum up what you discovered:
- You want:
- In this amount of time:
- You will call it a success when:
- When your goal will be achieved, this is what will be possible in your life:
- The advantage of achieving it is:
- The advantage of not achieving it is:
- The investment that you are ready to make for it in time, energy and money is:
Now you’re ready to get started. Your goals should feel a lot less overwhelming and much more actionable.
