1. Sit straight with your head up
If you'd heard countless times in your childhood that its best to sit straight with your head held high and you didn’t heed the advice, it's time to start. According to Amy Cuddy, a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, sitting upright can have a biological effect on the body that helps improve self-confidence.
In her study, Amy saw found that when sitting upright with the body occupying a larger space, cortisol and testosterone levels in the body rise, which leads to an increased sense of self-confidence. So, if you want to feel confident in a short time, place your shoulders back, lift your head, and sit or stand straight. Your body will do the rest of the work.
2. Stand or sit in a "power position"
Aside from sitting upright, Cuddy recommends two additional positions which can stimulate the body's hormones that will help you gain self-confidence in just a few moments. The first is the Wonder Woman stance where both hands are placed on the hips while you stand upright. The second pose includes sitting with your legs on a table with both hands folded behind your head and your elbows pointing sideways.
To feel the effects of these postures on your self-confidence, you may want to hold them for two whole minutes so that the hormones will start to increase in your body. You can use these poses before you do important and stressful things, such as a job interview or an important meeting.
3. Be honest and gentle with yourself
Faking self-confidence with compliments in front of the mirror is easy, but does this action have a real impact on your true feelings? The answer is no as paying yourself empty compliments will not help you feel good about yourself. Instead, you should recognize reality and be easy and gentle with yourself when you’re not feeling your best.
In a study by Dr. Kristin Neff, a professor of Behavioral Psychology at the University of Texas, subjects who had to imagine a scenario in which they made a mistake were examined, and self-confident subjects were not embarrassed by possible scenarios of error but rather showed compassion for themselves, which enabled them to cope with the situation. If you want to strengthen your self-confidence, stand in front of the mirror and be honest with yourself by recognizing that you make mistakes sometimes. This will help you develop self-confidence over time and realize that you are not perfect and that you’re not supposed to be.
4. Don’t feed yourself negative sentences
"It happens to me all the time" or "Story of my life ..." These are two sentences that can destroy your self-confidence and make you think that you are in a circle of negative events that you can’t control. Dr. Jonathan Fader, a psychologist for the New York Mets, says that a defeatist attitude leads to a wave of losses and a significant decrease in the self-confidence of players he has worked with.
When you take a deterministic approach and set definite facts that your destiny is to fail in what you try, your confidence will drop and you will start behaving accordingly. Therefore, take negative words out of your vocabulary and adopt a healthy approach that recognizes that things don’t always work out the way we want. In this way, your self-confidence can be restored and you won’t feel that the ground beneath you is shaky and will fall whenever you want to do something positive.
5. Focus on the excitement you feel and not on the anxiety
Anxiety and stress are two factors that can destroy self-confidence because when they attack us, we forget what we wanted to say or do. To prevent these feelings from worsening, Martha Beck, a life coach, recommends trying to neutralize them by focusing on another aspect - excitement.
When you focus on the excitement you feel at moments that can be stressful, your body will release a burst of adrenalin that will not only allow you to get through them safely, but will increase your self-confidence immeasurably.
6. Go exercise
The list of benefits of regular physical training is especially long, and if you need another reason to get up off the couch and start exercising, add self-confidence to the list. Studies on the subject have shown that exercising regularly balances our bodies and allows us to feel high self-confidence and also believe in our abilities far more than a stationary lifestyle.
Therefore, it is strongly recommended that you incorporate enjoyable cardio exercises into your daily routine not only to benefit from strong health, but also to strengthen your confidence.
7. Make yourself familiar and beloved signs
In an interesting study on self-confidence in the workplace, subjects wearing a lab coat while performing tasks made 50% fewer mistakes than those who did not wear one. The reason behind these results is psychological and stems from the fact that people have connected lab coats with increased abilities, so they felt safer and did their jobs well.
The results of the study can be applied to everyday life with signs that make you feel confident just by them being in your environment. Items can be a favorite object, words of a song that makes you feel confident in yourself, an image that inspires you and anything else that increases your confidence. Whenever you feel your self-confidence drop and you can’t continue the task at hand, use your sign to turn the tables around and increase your self-confidence.
8. Have a pleasant smell
The way we look at and perceive ourselves has a tremendous impact on our self-confidence, with smell playing a key role in our self-perception. In a small study of men in the UK, researchers examined whether body smell had an effect on the behavior of the participants. Half of the men used an anti-bacterial deodorant with a pleasant fragrance while the men in the second half sprayed a fragrance-free deodorant on themselves. Afterwards, the men were photographed in regular pictures and also in soundless videos, which were presented to women who were asked to identify which men had high self-confidence.
Surprisingly, the men who sprayed deodorant with a pleasant smell were overwhelmingly perceived as having high self-confidence, even though the women did not even hear their voices. The researchers concluded that the men who smelled pleasant felt more self-confident, which was translated into safe behavior that the women could recognize. So the next time you leave your home, spray yourself with a perfume or deodorant that makes you smell and feel good so you can be sure of yourself and act accordingly.
