Self-confidence chat!

June 23, 2021

Self-confidence is a process that takes time to build

If you knew me in high school… you don’t know me!

Let me paint a picture for you….

High school Mags was a shy person who just wanted to blend in, kept her head down, and tried to please everyone around her. But what that version of me really wanted was to be outgoing and confident in myself.

Over the last two years, my self-confidence has grown a lot. Life threw me into an incredibly difficult situation, but that situation forced me so far out of my comfort zone that I grew to be confident in who I was in the process. Since then, I have taken what life has thrown at me and tried to rock it as well as I can.

I’ve done a lot of thinking on this topic; here is my take on how I became a more self-confident person and what self-confidence means to me.

For me, it stems with being happy within yourself, with who you are…

…but not in the sense of thinking that you are the greatest or thinking that you have it all figured out. Being happy from within means that you are aware of the fact that you are human, that you are constantly learning, evolving, and trying your best. It means accepting yourself as you are.

I’m not saying you have to be 100% happy with yourself. Actually, I’m saying the opposite! Love who you are but love the process of growing into a better person with every new day that comes.

“I am who I am.” We are all unique and we are all different, but to me, that is the most amazing thing! Embracing those differences is what allows our world to be so rich. Think of how boring the world would be if we were all clones of one another.

Embrace your uniqueness and embrace the things that make you stick out, that make you weird, that make you YOU. Trust me, the process of growing more and more confidence in yourself is AWKWARD. It’s HARD. It’s WEIRD. Pushing yourself out of your own little bubble is NOT COMFORTABLE. 

This is why I push the idea of self-care so much. The more we spend time with ourselves, the more we are in-tune with who we are and we learn about all of our own amazing qualities. Self-care allows us to fall in love with ourselves. 

Confidence is definitely something that starts from a young age and I personally think that the way we are raised has a massive impact on our level of confidence. If you were raised to share your opinion, share your thoughts, you were heard and listened to, that automatically builds foundations for more confidence growing up. If you were told to be quiet, to keep your mouth shut and listen to what others were saying, and to keep your thoughts to yourself, that automatically makes you feel like you have less of a voice, hence making you less confident. 

Another key element in become more self-confident is to become your own number one cheerleader. You have to be proud of yourself and you have to want to make yourself proud! Do it for you. If love yourself and are happy with who you are, the love of others is just a bonus.

If you think that you’ve got this, YOU’VE GOT THIS! Don’t prioritize the voices of those around you, prioritize your own voice.

Being confident doesn’t mean that you have to show your entire life off to the world. You can be very confident in who you are, yet be quiet and private. Some of the people who post the most on social media are the least confident!

If I had one piece of advice for how to break that barrier of being shy around others, it’s this: at the end of the day, people are all just people. We all wake up in the morning, breathe the same air and go to bed at the end of the day. All this to say, that the person (or people) that you are intimidated by are just like you! Once you are able to understand that, being confident around others becomes much easier.

Learning to be more self-confident is a process that takes time. But putting in the work to grow as a person is always worth it, in my opinion.

Know yourself, know your body & until next time!

Mags