Hesitation can be experienced when you lack confidence or have low self-esteem concerning something you desire. You fundamentally believe the outcome will be negative if you try which can cause you to stop and do nothing.
This is where experiencing boredom, anxiety and an increasing lack of self-confidence can come into play.
When you do nothing, you choose:
- Boredom
- Anxiety
- lack of fulfilment and unhappiness
- to encourage Low motivation and self-esteem
- Feeling unfit and unhealthy
- A lack of career success
Psychologists have identified a positive relationship between confidence and the reduction of feeling fear. Hesitation is rooted in fear of failure.
Confidence encourages you to face any hesitation; it gives you a choice. The foundation for building confidence comes from the decision to choose to commit to trying.
Once you have decided to try, the good news is that you can learn how to be more confident.
7 areas you can focus on to improve confidence
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Work with your values and strengths
Values and strengths are fundamental to feeling confident. Ensuring your actions are in line with your values and focusing your energy on activities that lie within your strengths and developing them, can make you feel good about yourself immediately.
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Allow your emotions to help you
In building confidence, the focus is largely on becoming the ideal or best self, however, inevitably there is a gap. It is important to recognise this so that when negative emotions arise, you can catch them and deal with them.
Suppressing them is not the answer as they contain a message needed for change to happen.
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Visualise yourself being confident
Visualising yourself embracing your hesitation and acting with confidence will train your subconscious to accept this as true. Just as limiting beliefs can be programmed, so can positive beliefs.
The more you believe, the more your brain will believe it to be true and increase the likelihood of you taking action.
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Act confidently now
Start acting as if you had the courage and confidence you desire. What does your confidence you look like? Smile, walk tall, move, and act with confidence.
The way you feel will represent how you will act. Use gratitude to boost your mood each day to help you smile and stand tall. The more you practice gratitude the better you will feel and consequently your confidence will improve.
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Accept the unknown
The journey of change involves accepting there is an unknown entity. You have a vision, however, the road to get there may be unclear.
It is important to recognise and accept the fear of the unknown because it tells you that you care about your vision and that it is worth pursuing.
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Appreciate the roadblocks
Appreciate that roadblocks help and not hinder you. Just like fear, roadblocks are there to make you pause and assess. There may be something you need to learn to help progress you to the next stage. Whilst it might cause a delay or brain pain, in the longer term it will serve you well to challenge it by asking yourself “what is the message in this roadblock?”
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Be kind to yourself
Have a positive attitude and be kind towards yourself. Accept that there will be good and bad moments. See the “bad” as a learning opportunity. Think back to some “bad” moments and reflect. When you put the emotion to one side, what did the experience teach you? It can be an enormously powerful exercise and set you free of guilt or bad feelings. Inevitably there will be low energy days. Respect the message from your body which says, “I need rest”. Give yourself kindness and give yourself what you need.
Using these steps, you can begin to create positive mental scripts that help you embrace fear and build confidence to make changes.