It’s easy to say to someone ‘just believe in yourself’. It takes a lot of mental work and motivation to start believing in yourself, especially when your self worth and confidence is really low. 

You get all of these negative thoughts telling you that you won’t accomplish your dreams or you’re not good enough to do the things you want to. But I can’t tell you how wrong this is. 

I fully believe that you need to create enough opportunities for yourself and can attract the positives to you. Thinking negatively is only blocking what the universe wants you to have. 

And so, the first step to success is believing you can get there!

 

Setting Goals

One thing you can do to help you start believing in yourself is goal setting. 

If you don’t know where you want to be, how do you know if you can get there?

I firmly believe that setting goals really helps us to take steps forward in every aspect of our lives. 

So first you must believe that when you set goals, you can accomplish them. And you will. 

Every day that you work towards your goals, you’re getting that little bit closer to ticking it off. You’re working your way along the road to get there so that’s one reason to believe in yourself. 

You’re already on your way. You’ve started your journey. You’re going to get there. 

Write down the things you want to accomplish and come up with the steps you must take to get you there. Breaking your goals down into the little things that you can do along the way is going to help you to physically see that you’re ticking everything off and that you’re steadily working your way up the ladder. 

A lot of the time we let ourselves down because we’re setting goals that feel out of reach with no plan on how to get there. We all have big dreams of some sort, and sadly for a lot of people, they never become realities. That’s because they don’t take action. They don’t have the motivation, will power or strategy to start building up to this dream. 

Every dream has to start somewhere. Sometimes, you have to start small. 

I set myself some daily tasks and like to tick off the small things. Each day I write down what I want to accomplish and I mark them complete before bed. These little things can give us a sense of accomplishment and we can gradually build these up, not realising that you’re actually building more and more faith in yourself. It makes us feel good and full of worth. You can actually say to yourself, ‘well I’ve accomplished x, so now I can move onto y’ and that mindset will take you further and further to your bigger goals. 

 

Surround Yourself With Positivity

This is a very simple one. You are what you attract, in this case. 

Being around people who constantly put you down and don’t believe in you isn’t going to help you think any differently about yourself. Not only do you need to remove the people who speak badly about you, but also the people who speak badly around you. 

Someone who has nothing good to say isn’t going to praise you on your journey of improving yourself. Most likely, they’ll put you down for it, make you feel stupid or insecure about your goals.

We all need encouragement from other people, especially when we feel low and want to give up. Other people’s advice and reassurance can be the driving force when we don’t believe in ourselves so it’s really important that the people around you want you to do well.

It’s an amazing thing that you’re here and want to grow. It’s admirable actually, because a lot of people are too close minded to know that they need to change or tweak certain parts of their lives to live better or be a better person. 

So first of all, recognising that you need to change and start believing in yourself is a huge positive thing. So surround yourself with more positivity. Surround yourself with good energy and people who want the best for you. 

Attract goodness in your life. Use daily affirmations to repeat to yourself and let your brain and the universe do their work. You can read some of my favourite daily affirmations here or visit my Instagram page where I post a new affirmation every Tuesday. 

 

Take Time to Praise Yourself

No matter how big or small, you have got to give yourself a little cheer every time you accomplish something that matters to you. Nothing is too small to praise yourself for. 

It’s all about telling yourself that you’re on your way and you’re getting there. That’s a huge self esteem booster and a physical thing to do to tell your brain that you’re amazing. You’re getting things done. 

You’re showing yourself that you’ve been able to do x, y, z so there’s no reason to not believe in yourself!

Take the time to give yourself some praise and acknowledge the accomplishments in life before moving on to tackle the next goal. 

Cut down on criticising yourself when you haven’t managed to achieve something yet. Know that you’re wasting time telling yourself off for it and get moving – you’ve got more things coming your way. And you’ve got so much time on your hands. 

Praising yourself can help you to believe in yourself as you are actually telling your brain that you’ve done something great. This can psychologically affect your mind as it triggers it to think ‘oh, wow, okay, that’s amazing’ and your confidence is lifted. 

So applaud yourself for what you did. Everything else can wait until later. 

You can’t put yourself down for not being able to run 5k continuously. There could be many reasons why you couldn’t run that far. Either because you haven’t trained or worked your way up to that distance yet, or your body is too tired to run that far today. Whatever the reason is, you must recognise that it’s a huge achievement even stepping out of the door in your running gear. 

I briefly talk about this in my ‘relationship with exercise’ blog post that you can read here. 

Praising yourself for the small things is great for the daily reminder that you’re a beautiful person. However, sometimes we need more encouragement than telling ourselves we’re good at doing the little things. 

When I start to doubt myself and my ability to do something, I make time to reflect on myself. I try to do this on a regular basis, usually every three months and you can read this guide here on how to refresh your mindset. 

Reminding yourself of all the big things you’re good at can be a huge self esteem booster too. Sometimes we need to remind ourselves of what we’ve been through and achieved because we often tick things off a list and automatically think ‘what next?’ without celebrating. 

For example, when I officially launched my blog, my mind was filled with the overwhelming thoughts of all the things I need to continuously complete each week to keep it going and get readers to engage with my contact. And I never took the time to stop and think how incredible it was to get to where I was. 

I started with nothing and now everything is up and running successfully. So writing down and reflecting on that and all the other things I’ve accomplished in different parts of my life helped me to relax, know that I can do more in the future and believe in myself that I can get there.

Or when somebody finishes studying, they may immediately start focusing on job searching and worrying about being employed in their desired industry, instead of taking time to celebrate their graduation or the results they received. 

Whatever your achievements are, look back, reflect and praise yourself. It’ll create a positive mindset for you to begin truly believing in yourself.