We all have a person in our lives who is extremely confident in everything they say and do. From our point of view, it seems as if they have everything figured out. Their confidence makes them instantly attractive and trustworthy. Everyone wishes to be that person.

Being confident is especially difficult for people suffering from self-doubt. Confidence is a skill and like all skills, confidence can also be learned. This short guide will change your perspective and makes you 10 times more confident.

What does it mean to be Confident?

When you say that you are confident about something, what does that give you? How would you describe that state of mind?

Well, being confident before a running race is like trusting your abilities so much that you believe you would win the race. Confidence is being at ease in compelling social situations; it’s like having authority while you speak to the public. Confidence means having a positive opinion about yourself and a healthy feeling of self-worth.

Why is it Important to be Confident?

Confidence is like a superpower. It has the potential to take you places. You might be over-qualified for your current job, but if you are not confident enough to ask your manager for a raise, you wouldn’t get that promotion that you deserve. On the other hand, your confident colleague might become your team leader despite being half as skilled as you.

If you’ve never been easily accepted in a social group, then you wouldn’t be confident when meeting new people, and you would only act like an anxious person. So, to everyone else, you may seem weird and again it would be difficult for you to be accepted by new people, further reducing the little confidence you already had.

Likewise, if you’ve never had a successful relationship, you would not be confident while you’re in a new one, or worse, you will not be confident enough to try to be in a new relationship, fearing that you might experience rejection.

This is the problem with confidence — confident people will continue improving their lives, which makes them even more confident and unconfident people will continue failing in several aspects of their life, eventually making them even less confident.

If confidence is something that has the potential to improve your life, then you don’t need another reason to master that skill.

The Real Way to be Confident

People assume that confidence is directly related to success, and they’re not wrong to believe so, as all confident people we know are successful in different ways. But confidence is not a measure of success. In fact, it is your ability to deal with failure…

“The only way you can be really confident is to be comfortable with failure.”

Yes, you heard that right. Confident people didn’t become confident because of everything they’ve achieved, they are confident because they’re at ease with everything they didn’t achieve.

Let’s break down their process:

1. They did something that they thought would improve their life.
2. They failed or didn’t get the result they were hoping for.
3. They are comfortable with their failure.
4. This builds their confidence.
5. This confidence drives them to success.

Successful businessmen and businesswomen are confident because of their ability to be comfortable with their failed projects. They realize that their failure is due to external factors like market fluctuations or their poor marketing strategy, and not because of who they are as a person. This confidence helps them to try a different approach and succeed, if they don’t, they’ll know what to do.

People who are confident in their relationships are comfortable with getting hurt. They didn’t become confident because they found a perfect partner. They are confident because they trust their ability to pull themselves together if their partner leaves them.

In the end, it comes down to this — If you want to be confident, you must learn to deal with failure and the emotions that follow.

Five Practical Ways to Deal with Failure

1. Don’t take it personally

Failures are a part of life. You tried to do something, but it didn’t work out. The reasons may be plenty; it might have been your mistake too, but even that shouldn’t persuade you to make it personal, because it happens to everybody.

Your hair will get grey as you become older. There is no reason to take it personally. You throw a ball in the air, and you hope to catch it, but you couldn’t; does that make you a person who can’t catch a ball?

You will fail many times, but you shouldn’t consider it your identity. Separating your identity from failure is the best thing that you can do to gain confidence.

2. Take note, learn and adapt

So, you tried to do something, and you failed, what should you be doing? You should try to understand why it happened and look at failure from a logical point of view with an eye of curiosity instead of anger, sadness, or frustration.

What could you have done better? Was this completely out of your control? Once you find the answers, ask yourself, what did you learn from this? Think about how you will use this newfound knowledge in your next attempt.

3. It’s in the past

As long as you don’t have time-traveling capabilities, thinking about your failure will not change its outcome. But obsessing over failure can cripple your mind, preventing you from taking any further steps and of course, reducing your confidence.

If you are thinking about your failure, it should only be to learn from it. The sooner you start taking positive steps, the faster you will escape from the crushing thoughts of failure.

4. Stop chasing people’s approval

For most people, the fear of failure comes from the fear of being judged by others. We give too much power to others’ opinions about us. But not everyone is the same. What one person thinks about you will be different from that of another person; if that’s the case, why does their opinion even matter in the first place?

Think about someone and one of their failures; do you often associate them with this failure that they had? No. Similarly, people don’t have time to think about your failures. Remember, they have their life to live and so do you!

5. Change your perspective

From our childhood itself, we’ve been taught to think of failure as something bad. Little did we know that failing at something three times teaches us more about that thing than succeeding at it on the first try. After all these years, our confidence in anything is now directly related to our success in it.

The best thing you can do now is to shift your perspective about failure being this negative aspect of life to a more positive steppingstone to your eventual success. Speak to yourself, “If I fail, it doesn’t mean that I am foolish, ignorant, or incapable; in fact, the knowledge that I’ve got from the experience of failure made me smarter and more capable than before.”

The only way you can be truly confident is to simply be comfortable with failure. However, dealing with failure demands a psychological shift. This snippet from If — by Rudyard Kipling, is the best conclusion that I can think of…

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

…

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And — which is more — you’ll be a Man

A confident human.