To have more confidence surround yourself with positive, supportive people. If you don’t have a supportive community, go create one. No excuses. A positive peer set will help you feel more confident. We all need people around us who are supportive, positive and buoyant, and who appreciate our sense of aliveness, joy and happiness in life. And, if we don’t have that, you can’t sit there and be a victim saying, Ooh I just have a bad set of parents. I have a bad set of friends. I guess I’m destined to be around a bunch of losers.” No!
- Go find a new peer group.
- Go to a seminar.
- Go find a new triathlon club.
- Go to a volunteer meeting.
- Go get around people who are positive and who are amazing.
A lot of people will tell you, “Hey you know what, just get rid of all those negative people.” But sometimes your negative people in your life are your family, your spouse, your partner, or one of your kids who is going through the “terrible teens”. You can’t just open the door and say, “Get out of here you little shit.” It doesn’t work like that.
It’s not about cutting loose all the negative people, or chopping off people and getting rid of them, though maybe there are some people where you need to say, “I don’t need to associate with this person as much in my life anymore or if I do, I don’t need to get so hooked up and trapped into their pools of pessimism.” What you have to do is say instead, “If I don’t have the supportive peer group, let me go create that. Let me go find those people and get around them.” Because, as people are cheering you on you gain more confidence.
Life is a team sport! As people are saying, “Hey you’re doing a good job.” You say, “Yeah I am doing a good job.” You allow yourself to feel that sense of success and sense of integrity, when other people recognise it in you. Sometimes our greatest confidence is coming from having a community of supporters. So you don’t have to wait for those supporters to show up, go find them. Go mix. Go mingle. Get outside of the house, live life again. As you do that, as you live life again, suddenly that thing you were hoping to find, confidence, well one day you wake up and you found you created it.
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