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6 Practical Ways to Build Your Self Confidence
No affirmations required
I was a self-confident kid. I had lots of friends, good grades, and was happy with my appearance and personality. Through the end of middle school, my self-confidence was rock solid.
Then we moved the summer before I started high school. Suddenly, I was starting a new phase in my life and had to make new friends — and the area we moved to had very different people than those I’d been friends with before. That alone made my self-confidence a bit shaky.
Then I was bullied on the bus. My self-confidence was now a table with only three legs. In the years after high school, as I started having adult relationships with men who didn’t always act like adults, my self-confidence slowly disintegrated until I really had none left.
It was years before I would even admit to my lack of self-confidence and longer before I finally started working on rebuilding it. And it held me back in so many ways. To this day, I often wonder how my life might be different if I’d taken action sooner.
Not even the most significant leaders can escape periods where they lack self-confidence. Your self-confidence isn’t a static quality but rather a mindset that, when the going gets rough, takes some effort to maintain. It is something that must be learned…
