You Can't Have Self-Confidence Without This

To feel satisfied and be truly successful in life, a person needs a healthy sense of self-esteem and self-confidence. Let’s look at what these qualities are and how they work together. 

“Esteem” in Latin means to appraise, value, rate, weigh, or estimate. Simply stated, your self-esteem reflects what you believe about yourself – positive, negative, or neutral. 

Your beliefs in turn influence the quality of your emotions. And, in many cases, it is the quality of both your beliefs and emotions that strongly influences and shapes your actions. 

Self-esteem generally covers two primary types of belief. The first involves beliefs related to self-efficacy. This fancy word means the degree to which you believe you can succeed at something or accomplish a certain task. 

For example, if you have a strong sense of self-efficacy and your boss assigns you a difficult project you may think, “Wow, this won’t be easy, but I can get it done.” Weak self-efficacy responds, “There’s no way I have what it takes to complete this assignment.”  

Self-esteem also involves having respect for yourself as a human being. It may involve how you perceive your position or status in life or the belief that you live your life consistently with your values, dignity and honor.  

If you do not possess both self-efficacy and self-respect, you will not have a healthy self-esteem. 

Self-Confidence and its Relationship to Self-Esteem 

The word for “Confidence” in Latin means to trust. Self-confidence is the feeling of trust in your abilities, aptitudes, qualities, and judgment. It helps you feel ready and prepared to take on new challenges, confront difficult situations, embrace new opportunities, and assume responsibility when things don’t go as planned. 

Ideally, genuine self-confidence is a product of the rational, realistic, and positive self-beliefs that comprise your self-esteem. 

So, confidence is a feeling. Feeling confident is critically important for making and following through with good decisions. But as great as it is to make positive decisions, a decision is useless until it is backed up with action. 

When you feel confident that you can complete a task, solve a problem, or try something new you are also likely to feel motivated, inspired, eager, and energized – feelings you need to fuel action.  

When confidence motivates you to act and you make progress towards your goal it reinforces and strengthens your confidence even more by generating more positive emotion such as satisfaction, joy, gratification, etc. 

You’re probably thinking that in some areas of your life you see yourself as capable and competent and able to make good decisions and exercise sound judgment. However, there are other important areas where these beliefs are not as strong, or perhaps absent altogether. 

Keep in mind that possessing self-confidence doesn’t mean that you think you are limitless in what you can do, but rather it reflects a certainty that if something is important enough to you and realistically achievable, you can work towards gaining the necessary knowledge and skill to accomplish it. 

When you evaluate yourself and your life as objectively as possible – taking in to consideration your strengths and weaknesses – you will be able to assess what you can do to build your self-esteem and your self-confidence. 

If you have been struggling with the pain of low self-esteem and self-confidence, we encourage you to invest in yourself today by downloading our newest resource 30 Days to a More Confident You!

We will also soon be announcing how you can sign-up for one of our FREE upcoming confidence-building webinars.

In just a few short weeks, we will be launching our Confidence in Mind course and opening up enrollment for a limited time. This will be your opportunity to begin your journey towards building and maintaining unshakable self-confidence! 

With Your Confidence in Mind, 

Dr. Todd and Kristen 

P.S. To help you in your confidence building journey, don't forget to download our free resource – 30 Days to a More Confident You!