Being resilient is one of the most important personal characteristics for getting through life’s inevitable changes and transitions with ease. It is not how often you are taken to your knees that counts because we all know that some people are faced with more than their fair share of adversity. What matters is how well you bounce back each and every time. Let’s explore why confidence is key to making a successful comeback when your world is turned upside down.
What is Confidence?
Having confidence, especially in yourself, means that you have faith in your abilities. In other words, you believe that you can take on any challenge or task and find the resources to do it well. Your self-esteem is high. Being confident shows inner strength and self-reliance. As you build confidence, you also bolster your inner strength. Consequently, one feeds the other and you are self-assured about facing even the toughest times in life.
That’s not to say that confident people don’t get derailed when life happens. For sure they do! But they are more likely to use the inner strength they have built-up to move through adversity with more ease because they have done it before.
It’s like building core muscles that hold you upright—the more you flex them, the quicker you can get up and the longer you can stand.
Confidence also comes from knowing who you are and how you want to show up in the world. Loving yourself is key to living with confidence. And, confidence is key to bouncing back from adversity with resilience.
The Partnership Between Confidence and Resilience
Picking yourself up and dusting yourself off is not always easy when life events happen. Some might be happy events while others can take us down a sad and dark road and linger for a long time.
Having a first child, which most people consider a joyous occasion, can turn your world into chaos and you don’t know who you are anymore. Likewise, the loss of a loved one, whether expected or sudden, brings a depth of grief and numbness that changes how you see your world.
Regardless of the life change you are experiencing, there comes a time when you need to sort through the chaos and loss to find your way to a new normal. This takes a level of confidence that you can move in that direction and land with both feet on the ground.
You may not be sure how you’ll get to that place of terra-firma. Nor might you have all the knowledge you need or the skills to overcome the challenge ahead. But still, you are sure you can do what is needed because you are resourceful. Perhaps you have done something like this before and can tap into the lessons you learned to help you this time. That’s confidence.
From that place, you can start down a path of acceptance and adapting, which turns chaos into calm and loss into coping. As you work through this phase of the challenge, you are changing. You are building inner strength and self-reliance. Your confidence increases.
When you can bend without breaking, you are becoming stronger and able to bounce back better than before. They go hand in glove—that’s why confidence is key to being resilient.
If Confidence is Key, How Do You Build It?
There are so many ways to build confidence, actually, and none of them are very hard or require an advanced degree. Anyone can do it. In fact, if you try just one or two of the simple ideas below, you can start right this very moment.
Some of these ideas may work better for you if you ask a friend or coach who can bring an objective viewpoint to the activity to help you. While others can be done on your own or with someone else.
Working with Others to Help You Build Confidence
- Make a list of all your strengths and achievements. Think back to when you were young and more daring and include successes from your work and personal life. Ask someone to help you with this. Reading these lists will awaken the confidence you were born with.
- Write all the positive words that people use to describe you. Send a quick email to five of your closest friends and family and ask this question: What are three positive words you would use to describe who I am and what I mean to you? Watch what comes back and compile one list of all those words. Repeat them aloud.
Self-improvement Ideas
- Show up in the way you want to be seen. If you want to be seen as being confident, caring, and compassionate, dress the part, walk the part, be all those things. At first, it might feel like playing a role, but when you start to see yourself as confident, caring and compassionate you won’t be acting at all. You will just BE.
- Take care of yourself. Feeling confident and having resilience both take a healthy body, mind, and spirit to be them authentically. Get enough sleep, eat balanced meals, take brain-breaks, and surround yourself with positive people in uplifting environments.
- Do something you have never done before. Kick down the wall of your comfort zone and try something new. Stretch more than you think you can reach and notice how good you feel about the fact that you can do it.
- Learn to set boundaries. One of the easiest ways I know to wreak havoc on your confidence is to always say “yes” when you want to say “no.” Creating limits on your time and energy will help to preserve your inner strength, of which you need an ample supply to remain confident and resilient.
- Go with the flow. Yes, easier said than done sometimes. However, when you stop fighting the change that is happening, you can breathe easier. This allows you to be more flexible and bend, rather than break from the effort of fighting.
- Learn something new. Set a challenge for yourself to learn something new every day for a week or month (or however long you choose). It could be a new word to use in your daily vocabulary or research a topic that you are interested in and learn one new thing about it each day. This increases self-confidence in a fun and easy way.
Reach Beyond Yourself
- Reach out to lift up someone in need. Helping others and being the recipient of their gratitude is an amazing way to lift your own spirit and self-esteem.
- Ask for help. The days of the lone wolf are long gone. Collaboration beats competition any day of the week. Don’t try to build your confidence all by yourself. What fun is that? If no one else has the pleasure of experiencing your renewed energy for life and love for yourself, what’s the point? Engage with others as you seek to improve yourself. Reach out for help to make the journey easier and more rewarding.
The link between confidence and resilience is strong and when you work to build one the other naturally follows. When you are confident, you believe in your ability to bounce back when life happens. Resilience happens when you’ve done the bounce-back thing often enough that you know you can do it again. That’s why confidence is key to being resilient. And, vice versa.
When life-changing moments flip your world upside down, I create a bridge so you can walk from chaos to calm. You build resilience along the way and learn to live a life guided by your own values and vision. Are you ready to take the first step onto your bridge? Do you want to explore how change can impact you? Would you like to learn how to move through it with more dignity and grace? I’m here to help. Get my free ebook From Darkness to Light: Learning to Adapt to Change and Move Through Transition.
Very good article! Thought provoking and not “lofty “
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Thank you for your thoughts, Marlene. Watch for my inspirational emails coming your way. With gratitude ~Maria