Having confidence in yourself brings many health benefits. It can support your memory, improve immunity, and increase your strength and endurance. Using mindfulness to boost self-confidence can help you take on the challenges you want.
Midlife is a time that many women want to try new things. Start new hobbies, change jobs, work for yourself. It is a great opportunity to re-evaluate who you are and what you want. However, the peri- and menopause can also bring about a loss of confidence for some, with increased anxiety and loss of self-esteem.
At this time, mindfulness can help you increase your inner calm, become more curious and less fearful in your responses, and promote the self-acceptance so important for dealing with new situations.
How to use mindfulness to boost self-confidence
Mindfulness encourages you to watch your own thinking, and to ask questions, to get curious, about the way you talk to yourself. It is often useful to ask yourself what is the worst that could happen if you try something new? And what is the best thing that could happen?
Being curious about future outcomes helps combat fear. It allows you to draft a plan, to work out what steps you need to take. Just the act of planning how you are going to get from where you are, to where you want to be, encourages your brain to view your desired outcome as already achieved.
Sometimes it is hard to get started, particularly if your goal seems a long way off. Mindfulness encourages you to start where you are, in the present moment, and work out what the next single step is. This can reduce overwhelm and prevent the overthinking and over-planning that can increase anxiety.
Wanting everything to be perfect can also impact your self-esteem. With mindfulness, you give yourself permission to try, experiment and to learn. Failing is not final. In fact, failing is often part of the journey to being successful. And failing and trying again can increase your strength and resilience when you bring mindful self-compassion to your activities.
Using the attitude of trust to help you
Trust is one of the nine attitudes of mindfulness. It encourages you to trust yourself and your own wisdom. The Buddha said no one should believe something just because he said it. He encouraged his followers always to test his teaching against their own experience.
What has worked for someone else may not work for you. Here are some ways to bolster trust in yourself and increase your confidence.
- Reflect on your hobbies and interests – do you already do things that took time to learn? Can you remember what it was like to try and fail? Did you show patience and resilience to gain new skills? If you have done it before, you can do it again.
- Slow down – anxiety and fear can overwhelm you because you are reacting to emotions and feelings without understanding them. Learning to observe thoughts and feelings without getting caught up in them allows you to gain confidence that you can cope. Slowing down, not reacting, is a core part of this. And the more you practice it, the more trust you develop in yourself.
- Take on small tasks – when confronted with a big change, it’s tempting to think you must leap the metaphorical chasm in one go. You do not need to. It is often better to identify small steps you can take on your way to a goal and start taking them. One at a time.
- Have a plan – thinking about the practical steps to achieve what you want encourages your brain to produce more dopamine, a chemical which boosts happiness and therefore confidence. It does not mean your plan has to work out exactly the way you want – life is not like that – but having a plan helps you trust your abilities and perseverance.
- Adopt a confident posture – contracted poses, head lowered, arms crossed, shoulders hunched, tend to reduce confidence. Standing straighter, looking up and out, can signal a more relaxed, confident attitude from body to brain.
You can use mindfulness to increase trust in yourself. Mindfulness is simple, but not easy. Regular practice is the key. Be patient with yourself. See the gifts page for guided meditations to practice. And the blog on fear of failure for other ways to use mindfulness to boost self-confidence.
