How to become more self-confident

Once you’ve identified the source of your low self-confidence, it’s time to give your inner critic a new script, based on positive encouragement and self-belief

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After speaking to Dr Trent, I spend some time thinking about what’s holding me back. It’s a mix of things, and having this sense of why I struggle with self-confidence is helpful. But, once we’ve identified why we may have reduced levels of confidence, what can we do to get more of it?

I have a fascinating conversation with Jo Emerson, a coach specialising in confidence, where we talk about ideas we can all use for increasing our self-confidence. ‘Without self-confidence, we’re doing things in fear, or we’re doing things half-heartedly, or we’re not bringing who we really are to a situation,’ Emerson tells me. It’s clear that working on our self-confidence has a range of benefits. ‘It underpins how we parent, how we dress, how we work, how we interact with other people, how we feel about ourselves, even little things like whether we decide we can cycle up a hill or not,’ Emerson says.

After speaking with Dr Trent, I’ve identified self-limiting beliefs as a big reason I struggle with self-confidence, so it’s no surprise that when Emerson tells me about the importance of positive self-talk, her words really resonate with me. Rather than the inner voice that comes from a place of fear and panic and tells us what we can’t do, we should shift our focus. ‘If we’re listening to and believing a negative, fearful voice day in day out, then our experience of life is going to be negative and fearful, and it’s going to destroy our confidence,’ Emerson says.