You’ve likely heard the term “self-confidence” tossed around frequently. Parents advise their children to “be confident,” bosses encourage their employees to “show some self-confidence,” and teenagers often lament their perceived lack of it. But what exactly is self-confidence? Where does it spring from, and how does it shape our lives? 

Join us as we delve into the world of self-confidence, exploring its essence, origins, and transformative power. 

Life’s Ongoing Challenges

Life is hard. It is a continuous chain of challenges: it is hard to make and keep friends, hard to achieve in school, to find a job, to perform at the job, to find a partner, to raise a family, and juggle work, family, and fun… it is even harder to combat your fears, to remain honest, to act with integrity, to say NO, to stay true to what you believe in and stick to your values. 

The journey is filled with heartbreak, tears, sweat, and doubt. Wouldn’t it be perfect if we could just spare our children and loved ones the heartache? 

If we could engineer everything around them so they are only surrounded by joy, love, and success?

Unfortunately, no one has ever managed to do that, it is not attainable. And coming to think of it: Maybe this would be indeed nice, but it would certainly not be life. 

True happiness can only be appreciated after you have been made familiar with sadness… success is only possible to achieve with struggle and sometimes failure to learn from.

How do we help our children endure life?

How do we help them turn tears into laughter, failure into success, and loneliness into strong, rewarding relationships? How do we prepare children for life? What does it take to make it?

There are certainly a lot of things that could help along the way: a good education, good communication skills, courage, hard work, and persistence. At the heart of all the skills, knowledge, and attitudes you need is, I would say, self-confidence. 

Perhaps no other psychological term has gained so much attention and has been used as often by lay-people as the term “self-confidence”: we hear parents tell their children: “You have to be confident”, bosses telling their employees “Show some self-confidence”, and teens complain “I have no self-confidence”.

But what exactly is self-confidence? And where does it come from? How does self-confidence affect our lives? How can we gain (or sometimes regain) our self-confidence?

What exactly is self-confidence?

Like a lot of terms used in the world of psychology, self-confidence does not have one definition that is agreed upon unanimously. 

To avoid a tedious, unnecessary search for commonalities between the tens of definitions out there, self-confidence can be defined simply as trust in oneself, or an overall belief in one’s ability to face life and the challenges of the future, based on one’s general view of the self as “capable”,  a view of the self as generally “fit” for life and its challenges. 

An important term often confused with self-confidence is self-esteem. While close in meaning, self-esteem refers to viewing oneself as worthy. If you have strong self-esteem, you value yourself and believe you are worthy of appreciation and respect.

To sum up, self-confidence refers to trust in oneself and in one’s ability to meet the challenges of life,  while self-esteem is the value one places on oneself and views self as worthy of.

Related: Early Childhood Care and Development To Start School

How to Be Confident?

But how does one grow to be confident? Is it a skill we learn? Or is it an attribute dictated by our genetic make-up? Maybe it is something completely different?

I would say self-confidence is a conclusion one makes about the self, based on life experiences, particularly those of childhood: A child who is given chances to explore and to experiment will inevitably experience some successes (and some failures). 

When those experiences are met with praise, encouragement, and acceptance (of both the successes and failures), the child concludes that it can learn and achieve. More experimentation and success help the child develop trust in his abilities and help the child know that he can face life, even when success is attained only after several failed attempts. 

The praise, encouragement, and positive regard of the parents and teachers help the child develop strong self-esteem: the child has learned it deserves no less than to be appreciated and respected. 

A child who is denied the experimentation and is either overly protected or neglected, as well as a child who is overly criticized and constantly belittled, is deprived of the chance to develop into a confident teen or adult who believes him/herself to be worthy of respect. This can have devastating effects.

Research has shown that self-confidence correlates with:

• Self-esteem: 

Obviously, if you don’t trust yourself and your abilities if you don’t believe you have what it takes to make it in the world, you will probably not give yourself much worth. And that’s self-esteem! A confident person knows his/her strengths and difficulties, trusts himself, and expects to be respected and appreciated for all that he/she is.

• Mental health: 

People with solid self-confidence are less likely to struggle with negative thoughts. The possess generally positive beliefs about themselves and the world.  A higher possibility of depression, anxiety, and stress-related disorders has been found to correlate with low self-confidence and low self-esteem.

• Decision-making skills: 

If your trust yourself and your ability to understand the world around you, you are more likely to be confident in making important decisions, whereas self-doubt results in indecisiveness leading to procrastination and missed opportunities.

• Academic achievement:

Does confidence affect academic performance? To learn you simply need to believe you can learn (in addition to other things of course). Low academic achievement (that can not be explained by overall intelligence) has been repeatedly shown to correlate with low self-confidence.

• Professional development: 

When going to a job interview, offered a promotion, required to do a new task, or when an opportunity presents itself for a new position with more responsibilities, a mild to moderate level of anxiety is crucial for you to prepare yourself well and do what it takes to land the job, nail the task, or achieve the goals. 

If you are not self-confident though, if you are full of doubts, and if you, deep inside, do not believe you have what it takes to make it, your anxiety is likely to shoot so high that it overwhelms you. You might fail to “Impress” enough, or you might even choose not to try in the first place, choosing to remain within your comfort zone, even if it means wasting a chance at growth and development.

• Successful communication in interpersonal relationships: 

Relationships can be quite intimidating… the closer a person is to you, the more likely it is that this person will get to really know you for who you are. Confident people can allow others to do that since they believe they are overall good and capable. They also believe they are worthy of love, respect, and appreciation. 

A person in self-doubt, a person with low self-confidence and little self-esteem often fears people coming close enough lest they would see the unfortunate truth about him/her… he or she might not allow others into their lives for fear of being exposed, thus suffer the loneliness of a life void of strong, deep, meaningful relationships. 

Even when they do allow themselves to be in a friendship, a partnership, or a marriage, people with low self-confidence often feel that they are “blessed” and are not really deserving, tending to fear loss of the relationships to an extent that pushes them to avoid expressing their own opinions, needs, feelings, or wishes (which they don’t trust in the first place). 

Guiding Your Child to Self-Confidence

In a nutshell: allow your children to “discover” that they are capable… let your children experiment and experience success over and over again until they believe they can! And that’s start also what Early Years Foundation Stage include.

Now this will require:

Careful planning on your part at times: 

You need to make sure your child is provided with opportunities and challenges that are not too easy and that can be turned into a success with an appropriate amount of effort. 

Self-restraint: 

You need to resist your instinctual desire to help your children and to make things easier for them. Remember: you would be making them happier instantly, but you would also be depriving them of much-needed opportunities to test themselves and prove to themselves (and to you) that they can!

Positive attention: 

You will need to acknowledge your children’s efforts and their successes. You will need to reward and praise success, as well as normalize and accept failure as an important step towards learning and achieving.

Helping your children focus on their achievements: 

Whether those are social, academic, artistic, or any other achievements, your children will benefit from helping them notice and celebrate their smallest achievements. They need to be reminded of them in moments of self-doubt and struggle so they can find the power and will to continue trying and eventually succeeding.

Remember:

We cannot protect our children from life… we can only hope to help prepare them for it!

Help them acquire the self-confidence… the backbone of psychological well-being!