Nick Wignall
Self-confidence is often about what you need to do less of, not more of.
See, most people don’t actually lack confidence. It’s just that they’ve accumulated a bunch of bad habits that interfere with their natural levels of confidence.
If you can identify and reduce these five bad habits in your life, your natural confidence and emotional security will rise.
1. Criticizing Others
Criticizing others is often a defense mechanism used to temporarily alleviate our own insecurities.
Of course, we’re all critical sometimes. And it’s not always a bad thing to think carefully and critically about the world around us.
But too much criticism — especially the habit of being critical of others — can lead to the opposite of objectivity: it can make us narrow-minded and blind, especially to ourselves.
One of the reasons it’s so easy to slip into habitually criticizing others is that it makes us feel good:
When you point out to yourself that someone else is dumb, you’re also implying that you’re smart. And that feels good… temporarily.
When you criticize someone else for being naive, what you’re really doing is telling yourself that you’re sophisticated. And that feels good… temporarily.
When you silently chuckle to yourself about how terrible someone’s fashion sense is, you’re telling yourself how refined your own taste is. And that feels good… temporarily.
Helpful criticism is about making the world better. Unhelpful criticism is about making yourself feel better.
While being critical might temporarily make you feel good about yourself, it usually makes you feel worse about yourself in the long-term. It’s a quick fix that we only feel ashamed about in the end.
Without knowing it, people who are constantly critical of others are only making their own insecurities worse in the long run.
“Often those that criticize others reveal what he himself lacks.”
2. Asking for Reassurance
Reassurance-seeking leads to temporary relief from anxiety at the expense of long-term confidence.
In the face of uncertainty, it’s natural to feel anxious. And anytime we’re anxious, it’s natural to want to stop feeling so anxious!
The problem is this gut instinct to alleviate our anxiety shifts our focus from the real problem to the secondary problem of feeling bad.
When your main focus becomes feeling less anxious, a common coping strategy is to seek reassurance from other people — a spouse, best friend, coworker, even a child. And like most coping mechanisms, they unfortunately work.
Why unfortunately? Because they don’t really work, not in the long-term.
Coping strategies like reassurance-seeking temporarily make us feel better by alleviating our anxiety in the moment. But they also tend to make us more anxious and less confident in the long run because they train our minds to believe anxiety itself is dangerous.
If every time you feel anxious you immediately try and run away from it or eliminate it, your brain is understandably going to treat it like a threat the next time. And what happens when your brain perceives something is a threat? That’s right: it shoots you up with a bunch of anxiety. Cue the vicious cycles…
The problem with reassurance-seeking is that it teaches your brain to fear your own emotions.
And as hard as it is to feel secure and confident when you’re anxious, it’s even harder when you’re anxious about being anxious!
Think about it:
If you’re telling yourself you’re confident, but then compulsively asking other people for reassurance, your mind is going to be skeptical and decisions will become more and more anxiety-producing.
On the other hand, if you’re willing to feel anxious and make good decisions anyway, you’re training your brain to see that, while uncomfortable, anxiety is not dangerous.
And when your brain really believes that, that’s when real confidence arrives.
3. Passive-Aggressive Communication
Passive-aggressive communication is when you want something but are too afraid of conflict to ask for it directly. So you try to make people give it to you through subtle manipulation tactics instead.
This is the worst way to communicate because it combines passivity and the fear of asking for what you want with aggression and the attempt to control other people.
Passive-aggressive people disguise their aggression so they don’t have to take responsibility for it.
For example:
Routinely showing up late to things is often a form of passive-aggressiveness because you’re trying to get what you want (more time for yourself) without taking responsibility for it and avoiding criticism (“the traffic was awful!”).
But like so many of the habits in this article, being passive-aggressive only “works” in the short-term.
Sure you may end up getting what you want from people now, but eventually, people get tired of it and stop playing your game altogether:
You never get the bonus at work you’re expecting.
You stop getting invited to events and social gatherings.
Your relationships never seem to last or stick.
Passive-aggressive people usually end up lonely, resentful, and insecure.
They may blame other people, deep down, they’re really resentful of themselves for not having the courage to be honest and direct with people.
Combine loneliness and self-resentment and insecurity is sure to follow.
The good news is, you can learn to be less passive-aggressive by practicing assertive communication. It’s a highly trainable skill, especially if you start small and work your way up slowly.
“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”
― Abraham Lincoln
4. Saying Yes All the Time
One of the biggest reasons insecure people stay that way is because they are afraid of saying no and setting boundaries.
For example:
You’ve been burnt-out and stressed at work because of too many projects. Your manager stops by your office and asks if you can take on a new account. Because you’re afraid to lose your status as “The guy who gets stuff done,” you say yes and your stress only gets worse.
The problem with never saying no is that you end up living other people’s lives instead of your own.
And if you go long enough not living your own life, how could you hope to feel confident and secure in yourself?
Each time you say yes to someone else at the expense of yourself, you’re telling your mind that what you want isn’t that important. If this becomes a habit, it shouldn’t be surprising when your mind doesn’t value itself!
“It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.”
― J.K. Rowling
5. Choosing Feeling Over Values
Most people understand most of the best things in life require struggle:
To save up enough money for a comfortable retirement, you have to be willing to feel the disappointment of putting 10% of your paycheck into savings instead of spending it now.
If you want to learn to play the piano, you must be willing to endure the boredom and difficulty that goes along with practicing your scales.
In other words:
The best things in life require the willingness to feel bad.
Of course, this is harder than it looks.
To thrive in our modern world, we have to learn how to override many of our initial instincts and desires, including many of our emotions and feelings.
But this idea of overriding your emotions flies in the face of a lot of our cultural messaging. We’re constantly told, for example, to “follow your heart,” “find your passion,” and — my personal favorite — “go with your gut.”
If you think about it, emotions give you bad information just as often as they give you good information. The trick is to be neither dismissive nor naively accepting of your emotions.
Listen to your emotions, but don’t follow them blindly.
Instead, when you feel the pull of a strong emotion, ask yourself this question:
Does this feeling align with my values — the things that are most important to me?
It’s rarely easy, but the ability to choose values over feelings is key to self-confidence and feeling more secure.
You’ll feel a lot better when you start making decisions based on what you value instead of how you feel.
