The way you engage with the world affects how the world treats you. Developing a strong sense of self and feeling good about who you are gives you the wherewithal to withstand outside influences and face life on your terms. What are the factors that affect self-confidence, and how can you develop them?
While some aspects will always lie outside your control, taking charge of what lies within your ability to manage can transform your life. Here are the factors that impact self-confidence and how you can rebuild it regardless of your circumstances.
What Are the Factors That Affect Self-Confidence?
Multiple external factors affect your self-confidence. While it may seem like some circumstances lie outside of your control, falling prey to a victim mentality prevents you from making improvements. Blaming others and not taking responsibility for your actions can hold you back.
Your challenge is to find ways that you can better how you feel about yourself by honoring and validating your lived experiences and championing your strength. Although much of this process is internal, it often results in noticeable, material changes in your circumstances.
1. Your Upbringing
According to psychologist Tim Fletcher, all humans have 12 basic needs, including love and security. When these needs go unmet in childhood, complex trauma can result, which affects your worldview and self-confidence.
For example, those who were rarely offered empathy, encouragement or forgiveness as children may react with suspicion when others display these qualities. The problem compounds if they also weren’t taught emotional regulation or permitted to create healthy boundaries. They may unfairly accuse others of trying to take advantage of them and behave in ways that drive away other people who could help them improve their lives.
Taking an honest look at your upbringing isn’t easy. However, recognizing that your childhood wasn’t perfect doesn’t need to mean blaming your parents or cutting off contact. It’s your responsibility as an adult to examine the spoken and unspoken lessons you learned in youth and let go of those beliefs that don’t serve you. Examining and solidifying your belief system empowers you to create a healthier ongoing relationship with your folks and others in your life.
2. Your Financial Circumstances
Unfortunately, finances are a factor that can impact self-confidence in societies where many people measure your worth by your earning capacity. It’s easy to say that loving what you do matters more than the paycheck until you survive the embarrassment of sleeping in your car because you can’t afford rent.
Sadly, those who lack self-confidence are more likely to fall prey to scams. They’re also more likely to listen to folks who might not be malintentioned but motivated by their own need for a paycheck when giving advice. For example, going back to school could give you a headstart on a new career — or leave you buried under a mountain of student debt for relatively little payoff, salary-wise. Research the enrollment counselor’s claims before signing those loan papers.
Conversely, self-confidence can look like walking into a business and speaking to the owner about job opportunities or discussing your need for advancement with your boss. If the position you desire requires a degree, ask for tuition assistance or reimbursement in exchange for doing the work. The worst they can say is no — now you know where you stand. Mustering the courage to pose the question builds confidence and lets you move forward with less uncertainty.
3. Your Physical Abilities and Health
Your physical wellness may impact your ability to work, and lacking a paycheck can harm your confidence. However, feeling insecure about your health also subtly affects self-confidence in less obvious ways. For example, failing to correct your nearsightedness with glasses can leave you uncertain about how others perceive you. Was that person across the room smiling and waving at you or someone else?
Unfortunately, obtaining medical care isn’t necessarily easy, depending on what country you live in. Fortunately, information about how to take better care of yourself and improve your overall wellness, including easing many chronic symptoms, is readily available, often for free. For example, learning how to improve your daily diet and addressing suspected food allergies is enough to transform how some people feel, and you can find guidance online and in libraries.
Exercise isn’t only for controlling your weight. It’s also about learning to celebrate your body instead of being ashamed of it. It’s a time to gently challenge your limits and relieve daily stress.
Engaging in other stress-relieving activities, such as deep breathing and getting adequate sleep, also improves your overall health.
4. Your Trauma History
Therapist and author Gabor Mate explains that trauma is less what happens to you but what happens inside you. It isn’t only the car accident, assault or narcissistic abuse that creates unwanted symptoms and shakes your confidence, but how you process the event, and the support you receive afterward — or never get.
Unfortunately, just as facing your upbringing is your responsibility as an adult, so is dealing with your trauma. Failing to do so can mean passing it on to others, especially your kids. It’s hard, and it’s unfair if you’re left alone to deal with trauma’s wake, but you can heal yourself using this method and applying the same TLC (tender loving care) to yourself as a professional therapist would:
- Validate your experience: It happened. It sucked. However, you got through it. Acknowledge how hard it was to overcome what you did — don’t downplay or minimize the struggle. Applaud yourself for doing the best you could with the knowledge you had at the time.
- Educate yourself: Read stories about others who have overcome similar traumatic events. Go online and research various therapeutic modalities like CBT and DBT. There’s no law stopping you from using these techniques on yourself independent of a therapist, and you’re often the best judge of which practices work best for you, anyway.
- Learn bottom-up and top-down interventions: Bottom-up interventions include things like practicing yoga or working in the garden to diffuse intense emotions until you can process them more intellectually. They involve using your body to calm your physical reactions to emotional stress so you can think. Top-down strategies include journaling, CBT and DBT, which use your mind to work through problematic situations.
- Treat yourself like you were a patient: How would you want your therapist to treat you? Show yourself at least that much loving-kindness to gradually rebuild your self-confidence and appreciation.
Recovering from trauma isn’t easy, but it is perhaps the best thing you can do to rebuild shattered self-confidence after an event that shakes it. Also, remember, there’s no trauma Olympics — if the circumstances were sufficient to change how you feel about yourself, they’re deserving of TLC. Forget the notion that you’re undeserving of self-care simply because others have it worse.
5. Your Ability to Connect With Others
Are you a trusting person, or do you jump to automatically suspecting the worst about other people’s motives and behaviors? Ideally, you’re somewhere in the middle — but your ability to connect with others can affect your self-confidence.
Those who find it hard to trust others often become hyper-independent, which can backfire in two ways. One, it nurtures a “my way or the highway” mentality that drives people away, and your confidence drops when folks avoid you. Two, you can make easy tasks unnecessarily difficult, leading you to throw up your hands in despair. Such behavior shatters your confidence in your abilities when asking for help may have revealed a simple solution.
Fortunately, you can improve your attachment style, even if your childhood left you less trusting. Self-reflection and journaling are powerful techniques, as is attending therapy, especially with a counselor well-versed in attachment theory.
Build Your Confidence
On the surface, it appears that the factors that impact confidence the most lie outside of your control. However, there’s always something you can do to build your self-confidence, and it all begins with validating your experiences and exercising self-compassion instead of beating yourself up.
Understanding the factors that impact your self-confidence provides a pathway to a brighter tomorrow. Recognize your unique challenges and address them to feel more secure in how you face the world each day.
This is a collaborative post supporting our Peace In Peace Out initiative.
