A lot of things can weaken a man’s confidence. And, having problems with confidence can cause a rolling snowball of issues in all aspects of a man’s life.
Fortunately, there are some things that you can do to keep your confidence in check and – if necessary – privately and anonymously connect with a mental health professional.
Working with Self-Confidence
Self-confidence is a tricky thing. There’s a sort of “zone of confidence” that we want to occupy with ourselves. If your self-confidence is too low, you may be afraid to take advantage of opportunities in life that would be good for you. If your self-confidence is too high, you might dive head-first into projects that don’t work out.
If you’re reading this, it’s probably because you’re self-confidence is a little low right now. And, that’s okay. For many of us, self-confidence is in a state of constant correction. It gets too high, we make a mistake, and it humbles us a little bit. Or it gets too low and you realize that it’s time for a change.
For many people, the first step to regaining your confidence is identifying when it started to dip.
Improving Your Self-Confidence
Before we talk about fixing self-confidence, let’s talk about why it’s important. After all, lacking self-confidence keeps you from failing, right?
That might be true. Self-confidence can keep you from getting into trouble sometimes. But, it also prevents you from succeeding.
Worse than that, low self-confidence can also be self-perpetuating. We need successes in our lives to make us feel better. When low self-confidence keeps us from challenging ourselves, the resulting lack of advancement can make our self-confidence go down even more.
Did Something Get You Down?
Any time that you feel down, consider asking yourself ‘When did I start to feel this way? What happened?’. When you come to the conclusion, think about that event and your involvement in it.
Often you’ll find that it wasn’t your fault that things didn’t work. Maybe you did your best but some external system stacked things against you.
Or, maybe it was your fault. Maybe you went into something without doing the research, or you thought you were ready for something that was just a bit too big for you at the time.
Either way, try to learn from it and pick yourself back up. Just be sure to bring those lessons with you. And remember, not everything is someone’s fault. Some things just aren’t “meant to be” and if you hang up on these things instead of moving forward you’re setting yourself up for problems.
Did Someone Get You Down?
This method is good, but it doesn’t always work for everybody because our insecurities don’t all come from the same places. For many of us, self-confidence issues come from events – for some of us, self-confidence issues come from people.
Have you ever known someone who just seemed to exist to bring you down? You didn’t even need to do anything wrong for them to say something or do something to make you feel bad? Most of these people are in positions that should exist to lift us up. They might be a boss, a significant other, a sibling or a parent.
Everyone says things that they shouldn’t if they’re having an off day. But, if someone acts this way towards you all the time, it could be what’s called “emotional abuse.”
There are a lot of reasons that people engage in emotional abuse. If they’re a boss or a parent, it could be that they feel that they need to act that way to maintain power over you. If it’s a sibling or a significant other, it could be that they have their own self-confidence issues and making someone else feel bad makes them feel better.
However, it’s not your job to “fix” people. If someone in your life has such a strong negative influence on the ways that you think and feel that it’s preventing you from living your best life, try to get out of the situation. Even if it means ending relationships with people that you are close to, at least temporarily.
Do You Put Yourself Down?
You can’t emotionally abuse yourself, but you can engage in “negative self-talk.”
We’re thinking all the time, but most of the time we’re not even aware of it. But sometimes, if something interrupts your train of thought, you might catch yourself putting yourself down. It can feel kind of like only becoming aware of a dream when you wake up. Many of us don’t even realize that we’re our own worst critics.
However, there is a way to interrupt this process. It’s called “mindfulness.” In mindfulness, you try to keep a head clear of thoughts for a few minutes at a time each day. It won’t work, but that’s the point. It’s not really about training yourself to keep a clear mind, it’s about training yourself to be more aware of your own thoughts and feelings – the things that you usually tune out.
As you become more “in tune” with your thoughts and feelings, you become more able to identify negative self-talk so you can interrupt it with more positive thoughts instead.
If You Need Help, Find Help
These tips and tricks can help most people to recover their self-confidence. But, what if it’s not enough for you? It doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with you. It just means that you need some help. A counselor or therapist can provide that help.
You can even meet with counselors remotely for affordable, convenient, and anonymous help. With BetterHelp, you can even select counselors so that you can pair yourself with a male counselor who is likely to understand your experiences and aspirations.
-Johnathan Jaehnig
