Why Confidence Is One of The Most Important Traits to Our Evolution

According to recent research, confidence motivates us to take action in the face of uncertainty. So the more confident we are, the more motivated we are to face life’s challenges and fight for the resources we need to survive and flourish.

Throughout our evolutionary history, individuals without confidence were much less likely to survive and reproduce.They didn’t take action. They let life’s opportunities pass them by, and thus they missed out on gaining the resources they needed to be successful and happy.

Of course, the truth is life is filled with uncertainty. We never really know how the future is going to turn out. And often due to this uncertainty we go into new situations fearing mistakes, rejection, and failure.

Confidence is what ultimately inspires us to overcome these fears in the face of uncertainty.

In today’s world, we face different types of “risks” than we did in our evolutionary past, but the same principles still apply.

We might be deathly afraid of being rejected by at a girl at a bar. So instead of taking the risk and starting a conversation, we just hang with our friends and never approach her.

Or maybe we are afraid of starting a new career because we don’t think we will be any good at it. So instead we stick with our old job, even though we hate it and get paid half the salary.

Lack of confidence can cause us to sabotage ourselves in all sorts of ways, before we can even give ourselves a chance to succeed.

Let me ask you a question. Do you think guys like Michael Jordan, Bruce Lee, and Tiger Woods got to where they are without believing in themselves? Of course not! They believed they were capable of great things, and that belief motivated them to work hard and make it happen.

That’s the whole purpose of confidence – to motivate and inspire us to move forward and make the most of our lives, even though we never know for sure exactly how things are going to work out.

Of course, sometimes due to years and years of being down on ourselves, it’s hard to find confidence. Here are useful tips to help build more of it in your life, but remember it takes time and practice.

Healthy tips to build more confidence in yourself

• Reflect on your strengths and values. Create a list of your strengths and things that you care about your life, then save it somewhere as a positive reminder in the future.
• View obstacles as learning experiences. Learn how to reframe any experience into something positive and growth-oriented.
• Repeat positive affirmations about yourself that resonate with you and boost your mood.
• Practice a small self-love meditation to send yourself good intentions and feelings of comfort and warmth.
• Find a positive and supportive social circle. The people you surround yourself with (both online and offline) have an influence on your attitude, whether you realize it or not. Cultivate the right environment for success by surrounding yourself with more people who inspire you.
• Practice power posing. Often times mirroring “confident” and “dominant” body postures can help create a more confident attitude.
  

• Identify positive role models in your life who embody confidence and self-esteem. Ask yourself what makes them a confident person and how you can apply it to your life.
• Exercise and stay healthy. If you treat your body right, your mind will think better of yourself. Start with an “everything counts” mindset to start being more physically active in your daily life.
• Reflect on your past accomplishments and success stories. Try creating a jar of awesome that you can pull from whenever you need to remind yourself that you can be awesome and achieve wonderful things.
• Visualize a more confident version of yourself. Use your imagination to think about what your ideal future self would look like. This is a great way to get your mind thinking in a new and more positive direction.
• Find meaning and purpose in your life as well. Often living a meaningful life (including one where you have a sense of purpose) can be a great boost to your self-esteem, especially when you are going through a difficult time.
• Learn how to downplay your negativity by making small changes in how you talk about yourself and your problems in life.
• Practice being more forgiving to yourself, especially when you make mistakes or disappoint yourself. Forgiveness can often be a necessary first step to authentic confidence and self-worth.
• Use the power of writing and story-telling to paint yourself as the protagonist of your own heroic story. Often how we think about our past is influenced by how we view these events in the grand scheme of things.

Most of these are simple and commonsense. But if you actually practice them, you will gradually see more confidence in your life. It’s a process though, so you must be patient with yourself and give yourself time.

If there’s one thing I’ve discovered from studying psychology and self improvement, it’s that there is nothing more important to our happiness and success than how we think about ourselves.

This is because confidence and self-esteem can often become a self-fulfilling belief. When we have positive beliefs about ourselves, that influences us to act in ways that make us more likely to get the results we want in life. This is true for all areas of our lives: work, relationships, love, hobbies, passions, etc.

The advice and tips above are a great way to spark this positive feedback loop and build more confidence in your life. Don’t wait to start making a change.

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