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How to Build Your Confidence (and Why It’s So Important)

The twenty-something years are a decade filled with constant uncertainty and self-doubt that could make any person persistently question their path in life and the confidence to pursue it. These crucial, defining, and fragile years meet to ask the question: how can we build our confidence and why is it important?

Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit. – E.E. Cummings


The twenty-something years are a defining decade for multitude of reasons. It’s a stretch of ten years where young adults are caught between growing out of adolescence and into adulthood. It’s a demanding time in which twenty-somethings often transition from college, to grad school, to post-grad life, to career, to marriage, and to parenthood in the same stretch.

The twenty-something years are a decade filled with constant uncertainty and self-doubt that could make any person persistently question their path in life and challenge their confidence to pursue it. These crucial, defining, and fragile years meet to ask the question: how can we build our confidence and why is it important?

What Is Confidence?

Confidence is defined best by Merriam Webster’s Dictionary as “a feeling or consciousness of one’s powers or of reliance on one’s circumstances.” In layperson language, however, we often think of confidence as knowing what you’re good at, believing in your valued skills, and acting in a manner that conveys this message to others.

Confidence is walking into a room to deliver a speech in front of an audience. Confidence is eating at a restaurant alone. Confidence is interviewing before a panel with a dozen eyes staring back at you. Confidence is pursuing your goals without distraction or self-doubt because you refuse to allow anyone or anything to sidetrack you.

We are all equally capable of completing the aforementioned actions. The concern is not whether we can physically act in these manners, but whether we actually will. Too many of us don’t feel confident in everyday situations. We struggle to bring our goals to fruition because of the natural fears of failure, embarrassment, and/or mockery that flood our visions, blinding us. We allow our potential confidence to take a backseat as fear consumes the forefront.

How do we find our inner confidence?

This notion of fear that causes us to hesitate is normal and expected. Yet, we must learn to combat our fears and exude confidence.

Authentic, organic self-confidence is the best quality to help us pioneer our twenty-something years. Confidence is so important because it means twenty-somethings have a sense of control over their lives. Self-confidence in twenty-somethings results in putting tentative plans into real action in a way that forces millennials to achieve their goals.

Holding the importance of self-confidence in mind, here are a handful of practical ways to become more confident:

1. Establish your principles and live by them. 

What principles do you want to live by? Are the principles of growth, happiness, passion, and power important to you? Establish your principles and build on them. Your principles become your foundation of self and give you direction.

Living in accordance with what you believe in and acting in a such a way that upholds them will empower you, giving you the sense of self-confidence that guides you onward.

[Tweet “What do you stand for? Your principles are your foundation.”]

2. Practice positivity everyday. 

Your scale of confidence is bound to tip up and down from time to time. Uncontrollable external factors have the potential to impact us negatively, tipping our confidence scale in a downward motion. Remember, though, that negativity breeds negativity. Even at your lowest low, try to find the good in every situation you’re in. Focusing on solutions instead of problems will increase your positivity in life and give you a confident perspective.

[Tweet “Even at your lowest, focus on the solution instead of the problem.”]

3. Take action. 

A practical way to become a more confident person is simply by taking action. Whether it be a small, easy action or something of larger and more important stature, taking action will yield results.

Rather than imagining an illusion of what could be, acting on goals and seeing plans through will result in accomplishments. Achievement of any importance is bound to boost your confidence in the right direction!

4. Face your fears. 

You might fail. Others may mock you, laugh at you, or question your competence. You might regret taking action the moment you do it. But what if you don’t? What if you don’t fail, or face mockery, or regret? Face your fears!

Stand in front of the audience and speak fiercely into the microphone. Eat at a restaurant alone because it’s perfectly acceptable. Believe in yourself enough to take risks and confidence is bound to bloom inside of you.

[Tweet ” Believe in yourself enough to take risks and confidence is bound to bloom inside of you.”]

5. Visualize. 

Mentally visualize what a confident version of yourself would look like. Not an arrogant version, but a humble, confident version of yourself. Do you have that image locked in sight? Okay, now go out there and BE it. Be the confident version of yourself you visualize. Put the illusions, dreams, and desires into practical life. You may discover that your illusions and visualizations are reality. You can be that humble, confident version of yourself.

Confidence: it isn’t an easy feeling to come by, but it is a sort of consciousness that brings meaning to our strengths. We all have confidence bottled up inside of us, in varying amounts.

Tip your scale of confidence in  the right direction by following these GenTwenty tips. By establishing your principles, practicing positivity, taking action, facing your fears, and visualizing your confident self, nothing can stop you. Go be that humble, confident person you really are. We believe in you!

 

 

About the Author

Rachael Warren (Tulipano)

Rachael is a University of Southern Maine graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in Communication and a minor in Sociology. She remotely works full-time as a Senior Content Marketing Specialist for Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont. In her leisure time, Rachael enjoys traveling with her husband, finding the next Netflix series to binge, and taking too many photos of her dogs Jax and Kai. Rachael is obsessed with chapstick, favors the Oxford comma, and is a proud Mainer. You'll likely find her exploring New England + beyond.