Building Self-Confidence From Self-Doubt
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
Building Self-Confidence from Self-Doubt
So you know you need to boost your self-confidence. And you’ve heard about using affirmations because human beings need to be affirmed and one’s existence is relative to one’s affirmation. Blah, blah, blah.
But for some reason, it’s not working for you. You’re not feeling any better about yourself. You are not becoming more successful in your endeavors. Your world is not turning around, as promised. And you’re not building self-confidence at all. What gives?
You’re missing a vital piece of the puzzle.
Affirmations alone will not boost your self-confidence
Simply creating an affirmation and repeating it a million times is not enough. The affirmation has to be a state of mind. You have to live your affirmation and be open-minded enough to do the things that would help the affirmation become a reality. You have to feel it and apply it in your life, actively building self-confidence.
Of course, that’s often easier said than done.
For instance, I’m very left-brained in my approach to life. So when I started learning about affirmations and the law of attraction, the science made sense to me. I could accept the proofs I was given. But I couldn’t get my past my own logic and rationale to tap into my subconscious and actually induce change.
For me, trying to do affirmations felt like standing in the middle of a garden chanting, “There are no weeds. There are no weeds.” My brain would just scream, “THERE ARE WEEDS! They’re right there in front of your face and just saying some crazy words isn’t going to make them disappear!”
Have you been there? When messages of affirmation come from you, they are harder for your brain to believe, making it nearly impossible to boost your self-confidence. But when you reverse these affirmations, despite your brain’s perceived reality, you can still access the power of your subconscious mind.
Reverse Affirmations are the Key to Building Self-Confidence
Let’s just take a popular affirmation as an example of how to use reverse affirmations to boost your self-confidence.
“I am confident, successful and happy.”
Close your eyes and say it aloud right now. Say it five or six times, slowly and deliberately. Think about building self-confidence.
How does it make you feel? Can you connect emotionally to that statement?
At my lowest point in life, when I wasn’t feeling confident, successful OR happy, I could still use this affirmation because I could remember a time when I actually was confident, successful and happy. I could go back to that place with my affirmation, using my past track record as positive proof of who I really am as a person.
This is building your self-confidence by feeding on what is already there and what you already believe.
But what if you’ve never truly felt confident or successful or happy? Or what if the memory of that time isn’t strong enough to transcend your rational mind right now? Then you need to use a reverse affirmation to create that emotional connection to boost your self-confidence.
“The world sees me as confident, successful and happy.”
This is how you boost your self-confidence with reverse affirmations.
This technique is extremely powerful! It is even more effective than positive affirmations, even when you actually believe the affirming statements!
Why do reverse affirmations work so well? Because…
You are not who you think you are. You are not who other people think you are. You are what you think other people think you are.
Bypass Your Brain to Boost Your Self-Confidence
With regular positive affirmations, the message about yourself comes from yourself. “I am confident, successful and happy.” For many of us, the brain is not ready to accept this truth. In fact, it often completely rejects it because it rationalizes that you can manipulate your own thinking.
However, in a reverse affirmation, the message about yourself comes from others. “The world sees me as confident, successful and happy.” The brain is much more receptive to this because it knows logically that you have no control over what others think.
This is the secret to building self-confidence from self-doubt. The more you believe your reverse affirmations, the more you’ll grow to believe the positive ones. And the more you believe it, the more you’ll see evidence of it in every area of your life!
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