Confidence is something many people struggle with.

The self-help article tells you "Fake it til you make it"

The confident friends tells you "Just be confident".

Your mom can't understand why you call her before every big decision.

That is confidence in the works, and when you don't have a lot of it, it can be extremely exhausting.

You can be a perfectly capable adult who handles bills, solves problems, takes care of other people, and manages responsibilities all day long, then suddenly forget how to function because someone gave you a funny look.

You know what you meant to say, but now you're wondering whether you sounded stupid. You made a decision that seemed perfectly reasonable yesterday, but today you're questioning your entire thought process. Someone disagrees with you, and instead of considering that two people can have different opinions, you're halfway through reconsidering yours.

It's exhausting. And the really frustrating part is that you can know, logically, that you're overthinking something and still find yourself doing it.

Confidence gets talked about as though it's a personality trait. Some people have it, some people don't, and the rest of us are apparently supposed to fake it until something magical happens. But confidence is a lot more complicated than being outgoing, speaking loudly, or walking into a room as though you own the building.

A big part of it comes down to how you treat yourself when things get uncomfortable.

Can you make a decision without needing everyone to agree?

Can you survive an awkward moment without turning it into a character assessment? Can you admit you got something wrong without deciding you're bad at everything?

This is the true test of confidence.

The first step to understanding how to be confident, is challenging the things that are preventing you from being confident.

1. Your Thoughts are Not Reality

Your brain can come up with some remarkably convincing stories when it has very little information to work with.

Someone doesn't respond to your greeting with their usual enthusiasm. Obviously, something is wrong. A friend cancels plans. You're probably annoying them. You offer an idea at work and nobody immediately jumps in to praise it. Well, that was embarrassing.

Meanwhile, the person who seemed distant might have slept three hours last night, your friend might have a sick kid at home, and your coworkers might simply be waiting for the meeting to end so they can go eat lunch.

You don't actually know what's happening. Your brain just hates an unanswered question and would apparently rather invent an explanation than sit with one.

This is where confidence and self-awareness come together.

You need to recognize that a thought can feel convincing without being accurate.

When you catch yourself making assumptions, separate what you know from what you assume.

Someone didn't reply to your message. That's what you know.

They've decided they no longer want anything to do with you. That's a thought.

A thought is your perception, your emotions or feelings, or your perspective.

What a thought is not, is guaranteed fact.

You might be surprised how much mental energy you've been spending responding to situations that haven't even happened.

2. You Are Allowed to Have a Different Opinion

There's a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from asking six people for their opinions, receiving six different answers, and somehow ending up less certain than when you started.

You wanted to know whether to take the new job. Now you're questioning your salary expectations, your commute, your career goals, your ability to make good decisions, and whether your cousin's neighbor might have a point about the economy.

Advice can be valuable. Other people may notice things you haven't considered, and some decisions deserve a good deal of thought. But there's a difference between gathering information and looking for someone to take responsibility for your choice.

Sometimes, you keep asking because you're hoping somebody will make the uncertainty disappear.

They can't.

Even a well-researched decision comes with unknowns. You can choose the job that best fits your goals and still discover that your new manager is a nightmare. You can buy the car that makes the most sense for your budget and later wish you'd chosen a different color. You can make a thoughtful decision and still get an outcome you didn't want.

That doesn't mean you made a bad choice. It just means life happened.

Start by making smaller decisions without asking for outside approval. Choose what you want to eat. Decide how you want to spend your weekend. Pick the option that fits your needs instead of trying to identify the one that nobody could possibly criticize.

For bigger decisions, gather the information you need, think about what matters to you, and make your choice.

Then give yourself a chance to live with it.

You can change your mind when circumstances or information change. You are allowed to change your opinion.

What you don't need to do is rethink every decision simply because you feel nervous about having made one.

Confidence grows when you learn that you can make your own choices and handle what follows without letting it determine your value.

3. It's Okay to Be Embarrassed

Remember that time you waved back at someone who was waving at the person behind you?

Congratulations. You're human. 🎉

Unfortunately, your brain may have decided that this moment deserves permanent residence in your memory, complete with occasional reruns when you're trying to fall asleep.

Embarrassment has a way of making ordinary mistakes feel much bigger than they are.

You stumble over your words, forget someone's name, misunderstand a joke, or say something that comes out differently than you intended. Suddenly, you're wondering whether you've always been socially awkward and simply failed to notice until now.

Here's something worth remembering: you experience your own awkward moments from the inside. You feel the pause, notice every stumble, and remember exactly what you meant to say. Everyone else has their own thoughts, conversations, errands, and embarrassing memories competing for attention.

As much as you fixate on how much you "messed up", they do too. And I promise, they're thinking about their mistakes a lot more than they think about yours.

That doesn't mean nobody notices when you make a mistake.

Of course they do. People notice things. Sometimes they even remember them.

You can survive that, too.

If you've hurt someone's feelings, apologize.

If you've given someone incorrect information, correct it and let them know you made a mistake.

If you've accidentally called your new coworker by your old coworker's name for the third time, well, you may need to put a little more effort into learning their name.

Handle the situation that actually exists, not the one you assume exists.

Being confident doesn't mean you never feel embarrassed. It means embarrassment doesn't get to dictate how you handle other situations.

4. Not Everyone is Going to Like You

There's a particular kind of people-pleasing that can sneak into almost every part of your life.

You agree to plans you don't want to attend because declining feels rude. You soften an opinion until it barely resembles what you originally thought. You volunteer to help when you're already overwhelmed, then feel resentful when people take you up on the offer.

And when someone seems disappointed with you, you immediately start looking for a way to fix it.

The problem is that other people's approval can become a moving target. One person wants you to be more assertive. Another thinks you're too blunt. Someone appreciates that you're always available, while someone else complains that you never make time for yourself.

You can spend an extraordinary amount of energy trying to become the exact person everyone around you wants, only to discover that their expectations contradict one another.

At some point, you have to decide whose judgment matters most when you're making choices about your own life.

That doesn't mean ignoring other people's needs or refusing to compromise.

Relationships require consideration, and sometimes the right thing to do is inconvenient. It means recognizing that being a good friend, family member, partner, or coworker doesn't require you to agree with everyone or make yourself endlessly available.

Try saying, "I can't make it this time." You aren't required to give an excuse you really can just say no. Share your opinion without apologizing for having one. It's okay to feel slight guilt or uncertainty, but it is not your job to manage the feelings, or expectations, of others.

You may find these moments uncomfortable at first, especially if people are accustomed to you saying yes.

Let them adjust.

You can care about people and still make choices they wouldn't make themselves. You can listen to criticism without accepting every part of it. You can be a decent person and still be someone's least favorite person in a particular situation.

Confidence becomes much easier to maintain when you stop making universal approval a requirement for feeling good about yourself.

5. It's Okay to Mess Up

It's easy to feel confident when you're doing something familiar. You know the routine, understand the expectations, and have enough experience to anticipate most of the problems.

Then you find yourself in unfamiliar territory.

Maybe you're the oldest person in a training session and everyone else seems to understand the technology immediately. Maybe you're starting a new job after years in a different field. Maybe you're trying to learn something you've always wanted to do, only to discover that being a beginner is surprisingly humbling.

You might find yourself avoiding situations where you could look inexperienced. You wait until you know more before asking a question, put off trying something new, or decide you're simply not good at a particular skill after one frustrating attempt.

It's an understandable reaction. Nobody particularly enjoys feeling out of their depth.

But if you only do things you're already good at, you give yourself very few opportunities to discover what else you're capable of.

Start letting yourself be a beginner.

Ask the question. Take the class. Try the unfamiliar software. Learn how to do something you've been relying on other people to handle. You don't have to announce a grand personal transformation. You just have to be willing to look a little inexperienced while you learn.

Pay attention to what happens next.

You ask a question, and the world keeps turning.

You make a mistake, correct it, and understand the task a little better.

You struggle with something that seemed easy for everyone else, practice, and gradually improve.

Those experiences give you something more valuable than a temporary feeling of confidence. They give you evidence that you can handle unfamiliar situations.

You don't need to know how everything will turn out before you begin. You need to develop enough trust in yourself to believe you can learn what you need along the way.

Bonus: Change How You Talk to Yourself

Imagine a friend comes to you upset because they made a mistake at work. They explain what happened, and you immediately tell them they're incompetent, should have known better, and probably shouldn't be trusted with anything important.

You'd be a pretty terrible friend.

Yet plenty of people speak to themselves this way without giving it a second thought.

You forget something, and you're an idiot.

You struggle with a task, and you wonder why you're so bad at everything.

You have a difficult day, and somehow the conversation in your head turns into a review of every decision you've made since 1998.

You might even convince yourself that being hard on yourself is the only reason you get anything done. It's not. No, really.

There's a difference between holding yourself accountable and making yourself feel terrible.

One helps you identify what needs to change. The other? Leaves you feeling like shit.

Pay attention to what you say to yourself when something goes wrong. Instead of stopping at "I'm terrible at this," get specific.

What went wrong?

What do you need to learn?

Is there something you can do differently next time?

Specific observations give you something to work with. Insults don't.

And give yourself credit when you handle something well. You can acknowledge that you did something you were nervous about. If you handled a difficult conversation thoughtfully, recognize that. If you made a good decision, let yourself feel good about it instead of immediately searching for a reason it might have been the wrong one.

Your internal commentary influences how you see yourself over time. If every mistake becomes evidence against you and every success gets dismissed as luck, you're making it very difficult to develop a fair view of your own abilities.

You deserve to be a friend to yourself, just as much as you are a friend to others. And when it feels like you can't overcome the negative thoughts, give yourself grace. You can't change a lifetime in a month.

Confidence Takes Practice

You may still feel nervous before a difficult conversation. You may occasionally replay an awkward interaction or wonder whether you made the right decision. You're still going to encounter people who disagree with you, situations that challenge you, and moments when you wish you'd handled something differently.

That's part of being a person.

The difference comes from what you do with those experiences. You can question a decision without assuming you made the wrong one. You can acknowledge a mistake without deciding you're a failure. You can hear someone's criticism without handing them complete authority over your opinion of yourself.

Start paying attention to the small moments when you abandon your own judgment, assume the worst about yourself, or let the possibility of embarrassment keep you from doing something you want to do.

Choose one of those moments and respond a little differently next time.

You don't have to feel completely confident before you act. Sometimes, you act while you're uncertain, discover that you can handle the situation, and feel a little more confident the next time around.

Over time, you begin to understand something important: you don't need to get everything right to trust yourself.

Frankly, making mistakes is how you learn to change the outcome next time.

Confidence comes from knowing you'll experience discomfort, awkwardness, and mistakes, but have the ability to deal with it.

Up Next: Confidence influences how much you trust yourself, but self-respect influences what you're willing to accept from yourself and others. In the next article, we'll look at recognizing your own worth, setting boundaries, honoring your needs, and making choices that reflect how you believe you deserve to be treated.

Pardon our ads, they allow us to keep our site running and keep our helpful content free to access.