How counselling can help with confidence

What is confidence?

Confidence is defined as the belief or feeling that you can rely on something or someone, in this case yourself.  If you have a high level of confidence you may feel secure enough to try new challenges and experience everything life has to offer.  I think a key reason for this is because a person with a higher level of confidence knows that if they have tried their best, even if things don't work out, setbacks will not define them because they believe in themselves and is grounded in self-worth.

When you feel as though you have low confidence it is easy to start to compare yourself to others and to think that everyone else has been luckier than you and were given more confidence than you, where the truth is often people may feel low in confidence but they are doing things to expand their comfort zone and increase their self-efficacy despite how they feel which in turn does end up increasing their confidence.  This is good news because it means you can work on increasing your levels of confidence.

Myths around confidence:

A belief that it is predetermined and set at a permanent level:

Confidence is related to how you see yourself in terms of your ability, mastery and worth as a person.  Your self-perception is often based on past experiences or cultural expectations so you might think “I would be confident if I looked better”, this type of thinking interprets confidence as something that is pre set which we have little control over but the reality is there will be someone out there who also is conscious of the very same thing that holds you back but they go on to thrive because they recognise that confidence can be built irrespective of what your starting point is.

Fear of mistakes or perfectionism:

When people have perfectionist tendencies, they might think that they are trying to achieve a high standard for its own sake but often it is an attempt to avoid embarrassment, criticism or potential disconnection.  For some people, to be seen as not knowing what they are doing is a source of fear, maybe in the past you experienced a disconnection from people around you when something didn’t go right, this can be remembered as a form of shame in the body.  To avoid criticism or disconnection you subconsciously choose to play small in your life and to stick to areas you already know you are good at or can competently do without fear of mistakes or embarrassment.  However, this is an issue because over time, the areas in your life that you are confident in will shrink. As the world seems to expand around you there will be more and more that you don’t allow yourself to try for fear of getting it wrong, embarrassing yourself, or being seen as not knowing what you’re doing. 

Self-confidence and self-esteem is the same thing:

People often confuse confidence with self-esteem and treat them like interchangeable concepts however I think that there is a distinction because self-esteem creates the right environment for confidence to thrive. Confidence is linked to self-esteem because having a secure base of self-esteem means that people have unconditional self-worth and high levels of self-compassion.  This enables people to flourish and to feel able to push themselves out of their comfort zone and try new things because their value as a person isn’t on the line and can’t be taken away.

The role of counselling:

Counselling can be useful to help identify the root causes of low confidence, by exploring your past you can begin to see things from a new perspective and begin to plan on how you want to address your low confidence and move forward.

Traditional talking therapies help by providing a space for you to voice your issues and to explore how you want to move forward.  This might sound simple but if you go through life feeling like you have no choice or options then coming to realise you have agency and can behave in new ways is confidence giving.  It can raise your sense of assertiveness and belief that you can express yourself clearly. 

Creative therapies allow you to explore how you feel now and envisage where you want to go, using colours, images and symbols allows the unconscious to step forward and guide you.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy can be helpful in looking at low confidence.  CBT explains that your thoughts, feelings and behaviours are interlinked and affect each other, so a break in the cycle in one area could have a positive impact on others.  Often CBT challenges thoughts that contribute to maintaining low confidence.  For example, thinking that you should be good at something makes you feel like a failure before you’ve began.  You might also label yourself as having low confidence which makes you see it as a character trait you can’t change.  Another common thought distortion is the spotlight affect – thinking everyone is looking at you and mindreading – assuming you know what people are thinking about you these combined might make you feel nervous of being seen trying new things because you assume everyone is paying attention to you and that they are judging you.

You can see how these thoughts would affect your behaviour and stop you trying new things.  CBT works to challenge the thought distortions to help you experiment with changing your behaviour.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) works with low confidence by opening up and making room for insecurities or low confidence levels instead of trying to push them away, instead if you simply acknowledge them and act in the way you want to act despite how you are feeling you open up the possibility of extending your levels of confidence by changing your behaviour, over time this will raise your confidence levels and you will have gained practice as behaving in the way you want to behave irrespective of how you might feel.

Whichever therapeutic modality appeals to you, counselling should feel like a non-judgmental space where you can discuss openly how you feel.  Successfully working on confidence levels probably would involve some behaviour change which pushes you outside of your comfort zone and counselling sessions provide an ideal opportunity to use goal setting to plan new behaviour you want to try and then to review how it went.  This can be especially important if you need space to process things that didn’t work as you had envisaged.  Counselling can help to ensure that the goals are set are realistic and manageable. Some people find that having external accountability helps them to make progress rather than put off taking action and procrastination.

Confidence isn’t a one time thing:

If your confidence isn’t continually growing then it will become stagnant and start to shrink, be on the lookout for opportunities to push yourself out your comfort zone.