Protecting Your Confidence--Who's in Your Inner Circle?
Posted on August 17, 2016 by Jana Corinne, One of Thousands of Entrepreneurship Coaches on Noomii.
Confidence can be both attractive and threatening to others. Who's in your circle? Do you surround yourself with supporters or negative critics?
Have you ever heard men say that the sexiest thing about a woman is her smile? Have you noticed that women’s heads turn when a well dressed man walks by?
So ladies, why don’t you smile more?
Men, why not take pride in your style?
Confidence is so attractive in so many ways. To have confidence does not mean to live without fear; it means believing in yourself and having the courage to overcome obstacles in the presence of fear. It means to be boldly be yourself, regardless of the judgement of others. This is true confidence.
Being able to recognize true confidence is a skill. People can fake confidence—you’ll often see it in the form of arrogance. Most often arrogant people are the least confident because they are hiding behind a facade that they have created to protect themselves from others finding out their truth.
True confidence is so attractive. It draws others to you. People like to be around confident people. It makes them feel safe, comfortable, excited, alive, hopeful, happy, etc.
And yet others don’t like to be around confident people because it makes them feel uncomfortable, jealous, envious, because they compare themselves to the confident person. They themselves wish they could be confident, so it pains them to be around those that are so unaffected by their judgements.
Some people will admire and support your confidence, others who are threatened by it will try to break it down.
Find people who admire and support your confidence—those are the people that you want to surround yourself with and can have happy and healthy relationships with.
Take two minutes now to write down the 5 people that you are in most contact with on a daily/weekly/monthly basis:
Next, after each person’s name, write down if they are supportive or non supportive of your personal confidence in a positive way.
For some, you can happily find that you are surrounded by positive and supporting people!
For others, you might look at your inner circle and realize you might need to make some changes in the frequency of interaction you have with each person. If you have one person who is unsupportive yet you are not able to avoid being in their presence, find a way to build up your own personal strength when you’re around them. Not allowing them to pierce through your confidence or bring you down. This is actually great practice for you! As you continue to master this skill, you will be able to use it whenever you come across judgmental people.
