“Build your self-confidence by training. Confidence is a skill that takes time and practice to fully develop. Just like critical writing or thinking skills, all it takes is practice, practice, practice.” –  Dr. Maja Jovanovic, PhD.

I saw this quote on Twitter and it really stuck with me. If you follow my blog regularly you would know that I enjoy sharing my perspective on self-confidence. By writing about self-confidence to you, my reader, it enables me to remind myself how to I can work on boosting my levels of confidence. Some days my confidence is through the roof, and others it barely comes out to say ‘hello’.

Confidence takes practice

Imagine this, we’ve been practicing our confidence skills for years. When we were little we had to become more confident in everything from crawling, to walking, to eating with a spoon. Then we had to become confident in learning how to spell out our own name, ride a bike, and decide to go to the bathroom before we peed our pants. Now we often work on body-confidence, confidence in knowing things will work out, and confidence in our skills and/or abilities.

To this day I still work to develop my confidence skills. For example, I have to practice my confidence in presenting in front of a group of people. As a graduate student I have to present in front of my peers, and I’ve noticed that over time I have become more confident with this due to the many opportunities to practice presentations for class. More recently I have had to practice my body confidence skill. Practicing this skill is really learning to love myself and accept my body, which I spoke about in How Amy Schumer Helped Me Realize That ‘I Feel Pretty’ and highly recommend you check it out if you’ve experienced any lack of body confidence.

Train yourself to think more confidently

Just like self-love, confidence is an active practice. You have to train yourself to change your mind-set and view new things as an opportunity versus a challenge. Be confident in yourself! If you look in the mirror and criticize yourself then that is not helping, but if you look in the mirror and think positively about what you’re about to accomplish then you’re one step closer to gaining greater confidence.

So two things to take aways from this post:

1. Confidence wasn’t built in one day – it takes time and practice
2. Train your mind to be confident in yourself

More self-confidence will help you live your life to the fullest everyday!

-Liv