What Is Self-Confidence?

Easy to identify, yet probably difficult to define, conceptualize and measure, what does self-confidence mean?

One of the main requirements to success, happiness and reaching your goals is confidence. Having enormous self-confidence will also be useful in just about every part of your life.

Lets get straight to the point, you were not born with self-confidence. That is, self-confidence is not something innate this can be taught, nurtured and built over the years, at any stage in life.

Confidence is the personal ownership of no one; the person who has it learns it and goes on learning.

Your degree of confidence is truly the outcome of how you perceive yourself - which is eventually how people will perceive you. How people interrelate and respond to you is a reflection of how you perceive yourself.

Therefore, if you don't have a high degree of self-confidence or a huge deal of self-esteem then its mostly because you are concentrating on your negative traits and on what you are doing wrong.

In other words, you are being your own worst enemy! The good thing is that you can alter this and improve your self-confidence.

The most talented person on earth has to build confidence in his talents from the foundation of faith and knowledge, like anybody else. The device will be different from one person to the other, but the necessary job is similar. Confidence and attitude are accessible to all of us according to our skills and requirements not somebody else's as long as we make use of our talents and develop them.

Self-confidence is an approach which lets individuals have positive yet reasonable viewpoints of themselves and their conditions.

Self-confident people trust their own skills and abilities, have a general sense of influence in their lives, and believe that, within reason, they will be able to do what they desire, plan, and anticipate.

Having self-confidence does not necessarily mean that people will be able to do everything.

Self-confident people do have expectations and standards that are realistic and reasonable. Even if some of their standards are not met, they remain to be positive and to accept themselves.

People who are not self-confident rely extremely on the consent of other people in order to feel good about themselves. They have a tendency to prevent taking risks because they are afraid to fail. They usually do not expect themselves to succeed.

They often place themselves down and tend to disregard or overlook remarks and praises paid to them.

On the other hand, self-confident people are willing to risk the disapproval of others because they normally believe in their own skills and abilities. They tend to accept themselves; they don't feel they have to conform in order for them to be accepted.

Self-confidence is not essentially a general trait or characteristic which permeates all aspects of a persons life. Usually, people will have some aspects of their lives where they think they are quite confident, for instance, academics and sports, while at the same time they do not feel confident at all in other fields, for example, personal appearance, social relationships, among others.