True confidence can only come from yourself.

True confidence can only come from yourself. If you need outside validation of who you are then you can have your confidence taken away from you in the blink of an eye. Or the spiteful remark of any stranger.

So how do you instill confidence in yourself? You have to make it your mission for a month or two to increase your confidence. This means that you concentrate on this task as a conscious part of your day. Every day you need to get out of bed and look yourself in the eye and praise you! Every night before bed you have to look yourself in the eye and praise YOU! This will be very hard to start with. But it will get easier. And don't lie to yourself! You'll KNOW!

Each day make a list of things you like about yourself. Each day as you get more practice at this and go deeper and deeper into your own personality you will find more and more things about yourself to like.

The next step is to admit your faults. Once you have the list of your faults and you can look at that list without flinching you can start to improve on any qualities you feel you need to.

Every day make a list of things you did that day that you can be proud of. This will help you to start being more and more conscious of the decisions you make. As you make a decision in your day (knowing you will be accountable to yourself later on) you can start to feel more and more confident of yourself in each moment.

So once you have started to praise yourself you will find things that you have done or things you've been told about yourself in the past that bring you down. As these thoughts are noticed you will need to be kind to consciously put them aside and take away their power by saying to yourself. Just because someone says it, doesn't make it true. I am in charge of my destiny and only I know the truth of who I am. I don't care what other people think of me.

Getting an attitude that you don't care what other people think of you will definitely start improving your self confidence. Remember you can't please EVERYONE all of the time! So no matter how hard you try you'll never be the perfect person for everyone else's tastes.

Once you have praised yourself and have a "I don't care what other people think of me" attitude you next need to learn how to 'FAKE IT!' So pretend you're a confident person. Try it out. Next cup of coffee you buy walk into the coffee shop with the thought in your mind "I am a confident man/woman". You'll walk more upright and hold your head at a different angle and you'll look people in the eye and hold their eye as you speak to them. The more you practice this the more comfortable you'll become with your new confident self.

Be kind to yourself throughout this process though. You're probably trying to un-learn many years of conditioning and you will forget to praise yourself, forget to make your lists and forget to 'fake it' occasionally. Just remember to start it again. If at the end of the first month you don't feel you're more confident then keep going. If at the end of the second month there is no improvement you will need to seek the services of a professional counselor or psychiatrist as your lack of confidence is deep rooted and may need more intense work.

Kyra Patterson.