It can’t be overstressed how important it is to have faith in yourself. Being confident in yourself can help you to achieve your goals and overcome challenges.
No amount of motivation and push can help if you do not have faith that you have what it takes to reach your objectives. Setting goals can be a frightening thing if you lack self-confidence.
What makes having faith in yourself so important, however, is not just what it can help you achieve on your own, but also how it affects your relationships with others.
Then there is the consideration of whether others have faith in you. You may wonder if the way others see you has any effect.
People, for the most part, are sociable. We crave interaction with one another. Although we are capable of keeping to ourselves and surviving with just food and water, we need more than that to live our lives to the fullest and experience much of what our world has to offer. Think of the movie The Martian staring Matt Damon. It’s difficult to be without social interaction.
Keeping to ourselves stifles development, and when things get to the point of not caring about other people, we have completely lost touch with our humanity.
This doesn’t mean we need to go out and make connections with anyone and everyone we meet. We simply need to create healthy relationships with others. The fewer the better because friendship, companionship, love and other things we develop with others are much more real and substantial.
What Happens When You Don’t Have Faith in Yourself?
- You can be hesitant to partake in opportunities that come your way due to self-doubting of whether you can do a good job and are ready for the task. Opportunities—which are rare to show up—are lost. And by not accepting the challenge, you miss a chance to know how great you really are at things. In the same vein, even when you have good ideas, lacking faith in yourself can make you unwilling to speak up about them because you fail to see value in them.
- We support our fears, especially the fear of being judged. This is one of the main reasons people who lack self-confidence often hide in a corner. By so doing, they fail to build relationships with others, approach people for help, and they are not brave enough to let others know how they feel.
- We miss out on realizing just what we’re actually capable of. Like a child who is terrified of learning to swim, once she faces her fear of drowning and lets her instructor take her into deeper water, she sees for herself that she can stay above water, if we don’t allow ourselves to “test the waters” of the unknown, we never grow; we never learn our true potential. Just remember that everything is frightening when we’ve never done it before.
- Others may never know your skills and potential, which can lead to being excluded from activities that could be of benefit to you. The intelligence and power you have within you are useless if the world is unaware of them and they are not put into practice.
How Others Can Lose Faith in You
Imagine yourself as an aspiring entrepreneur. You have a dream, but to make this dream a reality, you need to work with established companies, investors and other entities. These people need to understand where you are going with your ideas and plans and will ask questions as you pitch them.
If you don’t have and show confidence, you will have a hard time handling their considerations (worries) and convincing them that their investments of time and money are a smart move. People who have little faith in themselves will most likely break under pressure. The lack of trust that they can actually deliver on their promises will be noticeable, and the questions they are asked can sound more like interrogations rather than attempts to gain a clearer picture of things.
People lacking faith in themselves appear more like someone who is disorganized, uncertain with what they’re doing, and may fail to convince their audience that they know what they’re doing.
Be Confident but Open to Criticism
To win in such situations, you need to be confident about your plan, but leave room for input and criticism that can help you grow. It is your idea, own it without the fear of being ridiculed, and take charge as your listeners need you to explain more. However, don’t be overly confident; in other words, arrogant or cocky. This can be a turnoff to others and come off like you are “tolerating” them with unexpressed resentment.
In Business
If you have successfully established your business, it is imperative to then build relationships with whoever is directly affected or can directly affect your business operations. This requires you to know your products and/or services and how much value they have. Your potential customers will see the value you attach to them yourself through your advertising, pricing and the excitement you have about them.
Low Self-Esteem
Failing to have faith in yourself also affects your social and romantic relationships as people who lack confidence tend to self-sabotage and allow people to mistreat or abuse them. Some romantic relationships fail because someone’s low self-esteem gets them questioning whether they can be genuinely loved and treated well.
Once they meet people who love them unconditionally, the first question that comes to mind is, “How will it end, and when?” Or, “What hidden agenda does s/he have?” This often results in holding back, and eventually, doubts grow on the partner’s side, questioning whether the other will ever change for the better. They may conclude that it isn’t worth the prolonged struggle that will only end in failure.
Low self-esteem also results in selling yourself short. People respond with the level of self-worth that you have presented to them. This includes what your boss thinks you can or can’t do at work, the salary that you get, the type of people interested in dating you, and the respect that you get in your social places … among other things.
Whatever you do and wherever you are, people will treat you according to what you think of yourself. If you have little faith in yourself, they will too, and it influences how much power they believe they have over you. You can very easily become the person who is sent to do petty things at the expense of your own plans. If you never speak up or show them how much you value your own plans and time, they will keep on doing it.
If you want to be valued, just have faith that you are valuable to others, and you deserve to be respected. Valuing yourself begins with trusting that you have something special in you and are as important as everyone else. Only then will you believe that you do have something to share with and do for the world, and the world needs it.
Conclusion
Having faith in ourselves is something that we all have to work on. There is nothing more difficult than confronting our self-criticisms and working through them.
Believe in Yourself
No one else believes in you if you don’t believe in yourself. Once you have faith that you can achieve your goals, then you will have the confidence to follow through with whatever needs to be done to achieve your goals. Your faith in what you can do will grow.
Face Any Fears and Insecurities
The best way to overcome a lack of faith in yourself is to look fear right in the eye. In other words, face them instead of backing away from them.
Focus on the Possible Gains
When it comes to your goals, don’t worry about “What might happen if I were to…?” Instead, focus on the positive possibilities!
Don’t Suffer in Silence
When we face our fears, we make progress by building faith in ourselves. But why make it harder by doing it alone? Have a close friend, family member, partner … to talk to who can be supportive. Encouragement is extremely powerful. And having a trusted person by your side makes things easier to face.
Have More Faith in What’s Possible
Realize that things are within your power of choice to make happen. You have to trust yourself and realize that making mistakes is okay and to be expected on your journey. Trust your instincts. Focus on what you did, not what you did wrong.
If you believe that things are out of your control, you will have a difficult time focusing on a particular goal and trusting your instincts. Get used to saying, “I CAN DO THIS!” You will become motivated to get started on your path to success.
Don’t hold yourself to unreasonable standards. Avoid becoming overwhelmed with a goal by setting smaller tasks you know you can achieve. Take a win with EVERY achievement, no matter how small. Success is, in fact, a series of small achievements over a period of time.
Have faith in yourself!
—Blanca
