Tips on how to regain Self Confidence

As usual, I was surfing the net and I came across this wonderful article so I decided to share it here..Please read and share. Someone might just need this to bounce back.

TIPS ON HOW TO REGAIN SELF CONFIDENCE:

General Advice:

 1 Take stock of yourself. If you chronically lack confidence, it's probably very easy for you to catalogue your faults and failures, but that's not the primary purpose of this step. While you should acknowledge areas where you're not your strongest, you also need to start focusing on your positives. Using knowledge of what you like and dislike, what you're good at and what you're bad at, you can get a sense of how your personal positive and negative traits relate to your life choices and environment. Contemplate not only what you feel, but why you feel the way you do. Begin to understand your true self, and allow it to exist. If you're not as good at handling some things as you are at others, or if there are things you like or dislike for no logical reason, don't feel bad about it – acknowledge and live with it. You don't need to have an excuse for everything you think, say, and feel.

 

2. Stop carrying the weight of the world. By understanding how you fit in to the world around you, you can begin to see that not every bad event in your life is your fault. It's important to understand that sometimes, no matter how good you are at something, you'll fail; that no matter how much you love something, it may not be there forever. As long as you do your best to improve your faults and learn from bad experiences, there's no reason to punish yourself when such things happen. Chances are, the outcome was never completely under your control to begin with. 

 

3 Acknowledge your potential. It's easy to pick at your faults and flaws, but this time, try picking at your merits and abilities instead. Nobody else matters right now; don't be embarrassed worrying about what people would think if they knew you were trying to feel good about yourself. They'd probably be thinking “it's about time,” anyway. List out and embrace everything you're proud of about yourself, even if you don't feel like you should have the right to be proud about it. You do have the right, no matter what anybody else says. It can help to actually sit down and write out a list as things come to you. Feel free to expand on your list by adding detail into more general items. For instance, if you're secretly proud of your sports ability (even if you haven't played sports in a long time), you might expand that item by writing about specific games and team positions you always thought you had a bit of talent for.

 

4 Review your life. Using your points of pride as a guide, look back from your early childhood up to the present day. Remember everything you used to be proud of or excited about, and understand that you never lacked confidence until the world slowly drained it out of you. Accept that you have been a bright, hopeful, confident person in the past, and it becomes easier to believe that you can become that way again. Maybe you were never very outgoing with other kids, but you were richly imaginative and playful at home; maybe you never did very well in school, but you practiced hard to develop other skills. Whatever the case, you had confidence, and the only thing keeping you from getting it back is your worries about what everyone else thinks of you.

 

5 Fake it 'til you make it. Confidence doesn't happen overnight, but now that you have a good sense of who you are, what the scope of your responsibilities should be, and why your confidence disappeared in the first place, you can put up a good front. Happily, just the act of trying to appear confident will actually increase your confidence, as you begin to see how it affects those around you. Use your body language to project confidence. Stand and sit with a straight back. Walk with easy, full strides. Make plenty of eye contact when you meet people, and if you're nervous, smile instead of looking away.
Smiling is at least as contagious as yawning. If you give someone your best smile and he doesn't smile back (and let's face it, “not smiling back” is almost exclusively a male thing), he isn't worth your time. Dress sharply and maintain good grooming habits. There's no overestimating the confidence boost you get from knowing you look your best. Speak more rather than less. Let your voice ring out loud and clear when you talk; don't mumble. If you're nervous or shy, channel that stress into talking even more. It doesn't matter if you end up babbling a little; you'll come across as open and engaged, which will make you seem (and feel) more confident.

 

6 Take chances. You already know that some things are out of your control. Accept that the world around you is a big and uncertain place by taking a chance on something new. You'll be surprised by how often you succeed when you're proactive – as the old maxim goes, “fortune favours the bold” – and when you fail, you'll be able to see that your life continues on anyway. Whichever way you cut it, taking a few risks and trying new things is arguably the best way to rebuild your lost confidence. Strike up a conversation with someone on the bus, submit a photo or story for publication, or even ask out your secret crush. Just choose something that puts you a bit outside of your comfort zone and jump in headfirst with the knowledge that your life will go on no matter the outcome.

  

7 Keep working at it. Building confidence takes time, because each rush of confidence you achieve is temporary at first. You've got to keep at projecting confidence and taking chances in order to build up a real sense of self-confidence. Luckily, since the positive outcomes will tend to outweigh the negative ones, these practices should become habits within a few months at most, and you won't need to pretend any longer. 

Gotten from..... http://www.wikihow.com/Regain-Confidence 

I hope you have learnt a thing or two... Don't forget to share coz you can never tell who is going through low self confidence/esteem.