You Are What You Think: Being Confident

How do confident people talk, walk, look, behave, manage situations? Here are 10 ways for you to begin thinking and practicing confidence.

1. Only you can measure your confidence. Don't even judge yourself based on other people's opinion of you. You'll find yourself guessing about what they're guessing.
2. Learn to hear, trust, and follow your internal signals. Feelings are the perfect navigation tools.
3. Challenge and failure are not "bad". Challenges and failures are opportunities for learning. Learning is a vehicle of growth.
4. Right here, right now! Hope and planning for the future is a fine thing, but what's happening NOW?! Pondering or regretting past can be helpful, but what's happening NOW!
5. Throw out self-defeating thinking. Replace negatives with positives.
6. Check your expectations. You can't expect people to know who you are if you aren't sure you know yourself. Only you can decide what you like, want, need or think.
7. Give something new a try and be glad you did.
8. Stop asking for permission to exist. For example, intead of "can I get my mail, please?" say "I'd like to get my mail, please".
9. External measures of success are always temporary. Be careful not to get lost in accumulating. Success, progress, value, and growth are found in your perspectives, attitudes, and presentation ot the world.
10. Experience your life as a miracle to be savored and enjoyed. You, yourself, are a miracle. Other people can value and enjoy whatever you choose to share with the world.

Adapted from Your Erroneous Zones and Pulling Your Own Strings, by Wayne Dyer, Ph.D.