Written by: Angela Echevarria
Published: December 13, 2024
Building confidence and courage as a teenager can feel impossible sometimes. There's so many forms of media telling you who you should be, how you should look, and what you need to change about yourself; it's no wonder why so many of us struggle with our self-esteem during those especially difficult years. But building confidence and having courage is something we can all start moving towards bit by bit.
Here are some things that might help you in your journey to self-confidence:
1.Stop comparing yourself. As Theodore Roosevelt once said: Comparison is the thief of joy. Comparing your looks or abilities to someone else’s will make you feel inferior when in reality you are most likely doing perfectly fine. We are our own worst critics and the cruel things we believe about ourselves would almost never cross other people’s minds, just like we don’t think as harshly about other people as we do ourselves.
2 Challenge your negative thoughts with facts. Most of our negative self-talk is a cognitive distortion of reality. Do you really have evidence that someone thinks badly about you or could you have read their social cues wrong? Do you have evidence that you will fail every test you take or was it just one bad test day? Our thoughts have power over our emotions but we have power over our thoughts.
3. Use positive affirmations and positive self-talk. Speaking positively about ourselves might feel really strange at first but studies show that self deprecating humor often makes our self-esteem worse over time. Positive affirmations have the opposite effect! Something I’ve started implementing is jokingly saying that I was a genius, or brave, or super talented when doing simple things that I would usually say a self-deprecating joke about and I noticed it helped me feel better about myself over the course of a few weeks. If affirmations that are all positive don’t work for you, there are also affirmations that acknowledge the difficulty of your situation such as “This is going to be hard but I can get through it.”
4. Practice things you enjoy. Being able to improve a hobby or skill will raise your perception of your own competence. Going through the ups and downs of the hobby, messing up but learning how to fix it, those are the things that will make you trust yourself more. You can do hard things!
5. Surround yourself with people who value you. Being confident around people who don’t think positively about you can be very difficult. Try finding people who lift you up and encourage you to be confident. There’s no use denying it; we are social creatures so other people’s opinions matter to us.
6. Maintain boundaries. Being able to protect yourself from people who effect your life positively is important. If someone crosses a boundary, communicate that. If they are mean, remind them that you won’t accept that behavior from a friend. Remember a boundary is a statement expressing what you will do in response to a behavior, not simply telling people not to do things. You need to follow through as well. For example, “If you keep saying mean things about me I won’t hang out with you anymore.” And if they continue then don’t hang out with them anymore. If you don’t follow through then they are simply empty threats and people will continue to do as they please.
7. Make small brave choices. Being courageous is more than a personality trait, it’s a skill that needs to be practiced. If you don’t regularly challenge yourself, it gets harder to pull out that bravery when you need it. Raise your hand in class even if you aren’t fully confident you are correct. Compliment the girl with really nice handwriting. Over time you will find yourself less afraid to participate in the world.
These may not be comfortable to try at first but if you keep at it, and it will eventually become second nature. We are a complex mix of our evolutionary processes and our modern society, with anxiety being wired to our brains as a protective mechanism from the past. Recognizing that it doesn’t serve us any more than, say, having an appendix does, can help us release those emotions. Remember that no matter how big or small the problems life throws at you are, you are a human being with an inherent value. No one can take that from you.
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