This is a guest post by Nader Mowlaee
Your low self-esteem is a temporary condition. You will rebound from it, just as surely as you gravitated into it. As Jim Rohn once said:
“Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day, while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day.”
If you’re aiming to develop your inner confidence, then you must accept the fact that confidence is the byproduct of consistently implementing a set of actions and behaviors that create self-worth. These actions and behaviors will cause your character to transform and you will become a more confident version of yourself because you have increased your perception of yourself.
Here Is the List of Four Behaviors You Must Give up in Order To Create New Levels of Confidence:
1. Eliminate Negative Self-Talk
Most of what we suffer from, emotionally and mentally, comes from how we talk to ourselves in our own head; this is called negative self-talk. Whatever you believe in will happen. So you really only have one of two choices to make.
If you want a positive outlook on life, then you must have positive thoughts about how you view yourself, and if you want to have a negative outcome, then you must have negative thoughts. This should be an easy choice to make, but often what happens to us proves otherwise because as our life story unfolds, we constantly narrate what’s happening to us, in our head, as those events unfold.
So the solution is to tell a story about ourselves, to ourselves, that always has a positive outcome. In that story, there is absolutely no possible outcome that we fail at when accomplishing a task we set our mind to. We must view ourselves as powerful beings who are capable of achieving anything we choose to achieve.
2. Stop Doubting Yourself
Self-doubt is part of our daily life and what we experience every day. There are many cases where even a little self-doubt can become dangerous. If you keep ignoring that fear, it will fuel your self-doubt and will drive you off the road to progress.
This is the biggest energy leak ever and only forms in our minds because we are not putting in the work that is required for making new progress. Remember that the work we put in instills our self-worth. Lack of it puts doubt in our minds. If you are struggling to make progress in one area of life, consider developing progress and creating success in another area, as this will help eliminate your self-doubt.
Remember that you cannot solve a self-doubt or self-belief problem while you still have the same negative mindset that created that self-doubt. Serving and helping others is among the best solutions for eliminating those negative thoughts about yourself. Allow someone else to thank you for the work you have done for them, and in turn you will stop doubting yourself.
3. Stop People Pleasing
This is one of my biggest time-wasters. It’s the toughest one to quit for many of us engineers because of the type of job we have and the way we were raised. We grew up to be — and became — problem-solvers, and make people happy by taking their pain away.
For me, the need to help others originates from self-worth issues. I was not able to stop people-pleasing until I accepted this fact. The thoughts and hope that saying yes to everything that is asked of me will help me feel accepted and appreciated contributed to my tendency to constantly say yes to everyone and everything that’s asked of me. Over time, people-pleasing became a way of life and led to many emotional setbacks.
Chances are that you also have been burned many times by many people in whom you invested time and energy, and felt like they just don’t care about you after they got what they wanted from you, leaving you emotionally stranded. It is time to quit this type of behavior.
4. Crush Your Fear of Failure
If you fear failing, you will. If you picture winning, you win. We literally become what we visualize, so why not think of a successful engineer who won’t let anything stop him/her? The fear of failing has been so instilled in us while growing up that we never want to feel it again. This is especially common among the engineering community because of the challenging course work we’ve had to grow through, and the shame we felt when we didn’t get the results we were expecting on a calculus exam or in a physics lab.
For some of us, failing feels like such a massive psychological threat that our drive to avoid failure in a particular task is much stronger that our motivation to succeed in it. This fear of failure results in us unconsciously sabotaging our own chances of success, and we will do whatever it takes to not make any forward progress.
It’s time to stop thinking about what others think of you if you fail. It is also critical not to attach failure to being incapable. Frankly, in real-life scenarios, people see you trying and equate that to someone who doesn’t give up. That is a quality of a capable engineer who, no matter what happens, will pursue the goal in mind.
About Nader Mowlaee:
Nader is a career coach who believes you can get everything you want in life if you just help enough other people get what they want. He is inspired by motivating confidence in engineers and helping them take calculated actions to move forward towards their career and life goals. His mission is to enable engineers to break away from their fears and create the ideal lives and careers they desire. You can learn more about Nader through his LinkedIn account.
We would love to hear any questions you might have or stories you might share about behavior changes that create confidence.
Please leave your comments, feedback or questions in the section below.
To your success,
Anthony Fasano, PE, LEED AP
Engineering Management Institute
Author of Engineer Your Own Success
