How To Build Confidence and Reduce Anxiety | Know the Right Ones

I am one of the people who got affected by anxiety due to too much caffeine. While it seems weird, anxiety happens when your brain goes into overdrive telling you thoughts that drive your confidence down. That’s what happened to me. My anxiety raced in my mind giving me thoughts about how lacking I am. Thus, I lost my confidence. However, right now, I can safely say that I am slowly getting my confidence back. Thus, I want to share what worked for me. This article is about how do you build confidence and reduce anxiety.

Basically, the thing you need to do to build confidence and reduce anxiety is to start finding things to be grateful for. By doing this, you would start appreciating yourself more often which builds confidence. Furthermore, it is also necessary to practice removing the inner chatter that is always negative about yourself.

While that is the summary of how you would build confidence and reduce anxiety, that is hard to apply without a proper guide. Thus, this article would give you a 9 step easy guide to building true confidence. We won’t be talking about self-confidence pose here because we are looking for something more realistic. I will explain more about this later.

But for now, here is a step-by-step guide to build your confidence and remove anxiety.

1. Practice the Habit of Self-Reflection

If there is just one thing that helped me get back on my feet, it is when I learned how to properly do self-reflection.

While it may seem quite bothersome and sort of a hassle to do, it is what helped me overcome my anxiety and slowly built my confidence.

Basically, the goal of practicing self-reflection especially if we’re talking about self-confidence is that we need to find out where we are right now, and what are our goals.

The reason is simple, you won’t know how to get to your goals if you don’t know where you currently are.

By doing self-reflection, we can learn where we are right now, and where do we want to go.

Basically, you can’t build your self-confidence if you don’t know what your self-confidence level is. Or you can’t remove or reduce anxiety if you don’t know what your level of anxiety is.

Furthermore, self-reflection also helps you know the root cause of your anxiety which is very important if we’re talking about building confidence.

That’s why I explained the relationship between anxiety and confidence in another article. They are extremely tied with each other and solving one could fix another. You can check the article here if you’re interested in knowing more about anxiety: Is Anxiety a Lack of Confidence?

But here’s the point.

The goal of doing self-reflection is to find where you are and where you want to go. Knowing where you want to go would motivate you into building yourself. Furthermore, knowing the root cause of your anxiety is important so we know what needs to be addressed.

If you need help in doing self-reflection, I have a simple and practical step-by-step guide that can help you in doing self-reflection. Here is the link: how to develop a self-reflection practice

2. Start a Gratitude Journal

The next thing you have to do o gradually build your confidence is to build a gratitude journal.

What we are going to do here is to write things that we are grateful for. There is a reason why we need to do this.

Ultimately, our goal is to build more things to be grateful for our achievements. This would build true confidence instead of confidence that can only come from pose or stance.

No amount of self-confidence tricks can replace true confidence which we are going to build.

However, there are times where we really have something to be confident about or something that we should be grateful for.

The problem is that we usually don’t see them.

For me, one of which is that I have no problems financially which is big, I am in good health, and many more things to be grateful for.

The amount of confidence this will bring would be used to build more confidence in the future. That’s why we are starting to build a list of things to be grateful for in our gratitude journal.

Think of this as a headstart that would give results faster.

What you have to do is select a specific period each day, usually after waking up or before going to sleep. Have a pen and paper then start writing down 3 things that you’re grateful for.

Some say having 5 is better. But I know how hard this practice is right at the start so I think 3 is fine. I am also listing 3 things I’m grateful for each night before sleeping.

The time of the day would completely depend on you.

Write things that you would be grateful for. This includes even the small ones. Remember that there are things that we take for granted which is actually a dream for some people.

This might include having 3 meals a day, having a roof above your head, or having a supportive family.

The goal of making a gratitude journal is to make us aware that there are things that we could be grateful for. These things make us appreciate life more which would bring us more confidence in the future. Plus, we would have something to hold on to when working with anxiety.

3. Find the Things You Have To Do To Achieve Your Goals

Right now, we would come back to our self-reflection.

In the section in self-reflection, we talked about knowing where we are right now, and where we want to go in the future. These are very important for this section.

At the latter parts of your self-reflection, you would need to put some actionable steps you can do to reach your goals.

For example, if you want to improve your confidence, then start working on your goals so you can slowly reach them. Reaching your goals, no matter how small, gives us a reason to trust ourselves which results in confidence.

Now that you already know where you are and where you wanted to go, it is time to think of actionable steps to reach that goal.

For example, my confidence went up when I was able to prove to myself that I can build my business online despite having 2 failed websites before. The reason I succeeded is that I took the actionable step which is to publish content as frequently as possible.

Our goal here is to find our true confidence which is way better than any other tricks out there that talk about fake confidence.

Fake confidence happens when your confidence has no strong support. What this means is that you are just faking your confidence simply because that’s the fastest way to “gain” confidence.

The truth is, that is not the right way to do things. I also did those confidence poses, affirmations, but it never worked. Later did I realize that the reason for that is because it’s fake.

We have to build our confidence by the results we did. By the things, we’ve accomplished.

That’s why we should work on our confidence instead.

What’s great is that the happiness you’ll feel when finished working is 100x better than confidence poses and such. Simply because you know you’re the one in charge of your life.

4. Start Taking Action

Right now, you have the things you need to do.

The only thing to do here is to start taking action.

This has a separate part because I believe that the hardest is always when we are starting.

To give an example, my first blog post took me 4 hours to write and it was only about 800 words.

Right now, I can make an article 2,000 words long in about an hour and a half.

The reason for that is because starting is hard and I want you to start doing the things you’ve planned.

This is the time to use your gratitude journal. You can use some motivation that you’ve got from your gratitude journal.

For example, you might be doing this because you’ve seen in your gratitude journal that your relatives are there to support you. Or you feel like you’ve already achieved much and it would surely not hurt if you try getting your confidence up.

Start lowering down your anxiety and increase your confidence. Planning is one thing, but action is the most important part.

Do not stop in the planning phase. Start doing it. Use whatever means you can to force yourself to start.

5. Take Action Consistently

There are some who would start taking action for their own selves. The problem is that after a week of doing, or just a month, they would stop taking action.

Remember that it would usually take time to see results especially if your confidence is so down or your anxiety is severe.

Furthermore, the best results usually happen after a long time of doing the work.

It doesn’t matter how big or small your daily tasks are. What’s important is you do it consistently.

James Clear, a famous blogger said that just 1% better each day would make you 37% better in just a year.

If you get one percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done.

JAMES CLEAR from Atomic Habits

Just 1% every day.

Just working consistently. Work for yourself. If you can work for others, why can’t you start working for yourself?

Remember that most good things in life come to those who persevere. It took me 3 months to see obvious progress within myself and I can’t forget the happiness I’ve felt the moment I saw the results of my work.

6. Celebrate Your Victories, Even Small Ones

I know how hard it is to stay consistent in fixing your anxiety and building confidence. So here is a good tip in order for you to persevere and continue.

Sometimes, people don’t continue because they are just too hard on themselves.

When you have small achievements, why not give yourself some break and treat yourself?

It can be something as simple as buying yourself some drinks or treating yourself in your favorite restaurant.

I remember when I first felt that I am building myself, even if it’s not that big, I bought myself some beverage to celebrate.

It doesn’t need to be anything fancy, we just want to give ourselves some motivation to continue. I find the best way to continue is by making yourself happy from time to time.

That means celebrating your victories even how small it is.

If you’ve successfully got out of bed to work on yourself, that’s already a victory.

I know the feeling of anxiety where you just want to stay in bed because it seems like isn’t going well for us.

Thus, the simple act of deciding to improve ourselves and getting out of bed to work is already a big deal.

Trust me, I know.

7. Do Some Self-Care Habits

All of those tips above are actually enough for you to start building yourself. Those are the ways in which you can build your confidence and reduce your anxiety.

However, I also know that there are things that you can do to achieve results faster. Thus, I also included these steps.

One of which is to do some self-care habits.

Sometimes, we are not confident with ourselves simply because we don’t think we deserve self-care. By doing self-care such as treating yourself, eating right, having enough sleep, and more, you would realize how good it feels to start taking care of yourself.

In my experience, I find it really refreshing and fun to take care of my body such as taking care of my hygiene.

Furthermore, you would look a lot better if you started self-care. I started to look much better since I always try to get enough sleep and eat right.

I would also try some perfume and facial wash to keep my face fresh.

These are really simple, but if you do these for quite some time, you would see your worth. You would start feeling that you are worthy of something and would increase your confidence.

Isn’t that what we are aiming for?

8. Ask Others for Some Help

If you remember the gratitude journal, we talked about some things you can write there. One of which is if you have a friend or family that truly cares for you.

Sometimes, we just can’t handle things alone.

We are social creatures and we live happily with others.

Even introverts like me like to have a chat with people we truly care about.

Sometimes, we can ask for help. You might be keeping this to yourself but sometimes, it is good to let go of your hard feelings by sharing things with people you love.

You may even visit experts that can help you vent off your feelings. It doesn’t even need to be an expert. Think of the community.

Perhaps, the only way I would stop you from asking others for help is if you’re becoming too dependent on them. If that’s the case, don’t. The reason for that is if your confidence would depend on other people, they can easily break it leading to back to square one.

Thus, only do this to stay motivated, and vent off feelings. But remember that your success fixing anxiety and increasing confidence is all on you.

9. Decrease Your Internal Chatter

This is the one that bothered me the most when I had anxiety thus, it deserves a special mention.

Actually, the reason why anxiety is linked to confidence is that people with anxiety are just prone to these internal chatters.

There are just things our brain says to us that are just toxic. “Things such as you’re not enough” or “you’ll never get by in life”.

Those are all toxic things that you can tell yourself.

What happens is that over time, even if how mentally strong your will is, it can break down because of this small internal chatter.

That’s why some people practice meditation to quiet this internal chatter down.

In my opinion, meditation has some benefits when it comes to decreasing mental chatter. However, it is hard to do it at the start.

For me, the fastest way to deal with internal chatters is to just practice correcting your internal chatter or not minding them at all.

You need to accept this internal chatter since it is a part of you. But you need to be aware that they could do harm if you listen to them all the time.

Learn to not care what it’s saying and start doing things.

Only by achieving things using your own energy would you truly build confidence and reduce anxiety.