Doubt is the greatest challenge a lot of us face, and the biggest drain on our Confidence. How do we overcome this self-doubt, these negative thoughts about ourselves and our capabilities, and rise above them to reach our potential? We’ve put together a list of 10 activities that build confidence and self esteem to help you cope with the doubt, negative thoughts patterns, and insecurities that you have.

Did you know that 70%-80% of your thoughts are negative, or have some negative content attached to them? Even for those of us who are unrelentingly confident in ourselves, a huge portion of our daily mental processing is taken up with negativity. That’s why these self esteem boosting exercises and activities don’t just apply to those of us who’re dealing with confidence issues or insecurity. Almost everybody can benefit from a few tips to help our self confidence, and to cope with negative thoughts and feelings, because almost everybody’s thoughts are dominated by negativity (even the most positive and optimistic people have a high percentage of negative thoughts).

Confidence is a by-product of security and self esteem. Therefore building confidence is about building security – and the number one thing that causes insecurity is negative thought patterns that start off reasonable and realistic, but spiral into unrealistic, untrue negative thoughts about yourself and your capabilities.

For example, you might start off by thinking “This task is hard”. This morphs into “This task is impossible”, which turns into “I will never be able to complete this task”, which turns into “I will never be able to achieve what I want because I can’t achieve this task”.

Does this sort of negative spiralling seem familiar to you? It’s actually pretty common, and is a frequent cause of issues like procrastination, anxiety, and depression. Even if you’re a generally confident person, if you think back to the times that you’ve procrastinated on something or felt anxiety, it can probably be traced back to this kind of negative spiralling. When this happens consistently, it can lead to insecurity and a lack of self confidence.

Also, unfortunately, in most cases a lack of confidence is something that’s easy to spot – and it makes other people less likely to work with you, to help you, and to support you (except those who’re closest to you). That’s how self confidence affects success – it’s a self fulfilling prophecy of sorts.

Because of this, regardless of what field you’re in, confidence is the key to success – because to achieve anything out of the ordinary or special, you need the help of other people.

Confidence draws people in, whereas a lack of confidence can often scare people away. This is especially true if you’re a leader (or if you aspire toe be one). A lack of confidence as a leader will undermine your decisions and make people question you. Ultimately, people want to believe in someone who believes in themself.

So – we’ve established that negative thought patterns and spiralling can damage confidence, and we’ve agreed that confidence is key to success. How do we attack the problem at it’s roots? How do we handle and cope with negative thought patterns? What are some self esteem and confidence building exercises and activities that we can put into practice immediately?

10 Self Esteem Exercises, Activities, and Techniques to Help You Build Confidence

1. Question your What Ifs, and Turn them Positive

One frequent form that negative thoughts take is ‘What If’. What if I don’t make this sale? What if I don’t have enough to cover rent? What if I embarass myself?

What Ifs are fine – they are a natural part of risk assessment and strong decision making. But for those of us who’re lacking confidence, our What Ifs are often blown out of proportion – either we’ve overestimated the probability of the What If, or we’ve overestimated the negative consequences of the What If – in many cases, you’ll have done both.

So everytime you find yourself thinking a negative What If, take a breath and argue with yourself. Ask yourself these three questions:

• Realistically, how likely will this bad thing actually happen?
• Realistically, if this happens, what how bad will the consequences really be?
• What if this thing actually goes well?

The truth is, our negative What Ifs are just an evolutionary instinct that protected us from Lions and Wolves trying to eat us. In our modern day life, outside of very extreme circumstances, our What Ifs are overwhelmingly negative compared to the reality of the situation. Think on this – how many times have you thought ‘What If I get hit by a bus?’ – it’s probably pretty likely that you’ve at least had this thought cross your mind a few times in your life. Now, ask yourself – how many times have you actually been hit by a bus?

Whenever you start thinking What if something bad happens?, stop, and calmly and ask yourself the three questions listed above. This is a technique borrowed from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and it’s all about realigning your thoughts with reality and preventing them from being constantly skewed towards the negative and catastrophic. This is our first, one one of the most important confidence and self esteem exercises. Train yourself to do this, and you’ll find yourself going down a negative rabbit hole far less.

2. Keep A Daily Success Log

At the end of each day, take a moment to list your ‘wins’ or your ’successes’ of the day at the end of a journal or diary. It is important for us to recognize both our successes and our failures – but for many people, a successful day where they achieved everything they wanted is just a “normal” day to them. The research shows that recording and acknowledging small successes makkes you happier, which in turns makes you more effective and productive.

99 out of 100 days, when we do all the things we aim to, they’re “normal”, but then on the 1 day where we fail badly, we’re “failures”. No wonder we feel so negative about ourselves! This problem is exacerbated in the work world – most bosses will notice when you make mistakes, but when you do your job successfully, to them it’s just you “doing your job as usual”.

Keeping a record of your wins is an important confidence building activity will help you fight the societal idea that successful days are just “normal days”. No matter how small the success, write it down and recognize the success that you’ve had. After all, large successes are built on a steady stream of small successes. If you solved a problem at work, write it down. If you did the weekly grocery shopping, mark that down. If you made your spouse or partner, or another loved one feel good about themselves, note that down.

In a world where small wins aren’t recognized by society because they’re incorrectly seen as “normal”, you need to actively recognize your own successes to combat the negativity. Whether you use a gratitude journal, a regular diary, or some other method of recording your wins, make sure you do it now – so the next time you have a bad day, you can look back and see just how infrequent your failures are compared to your successes.

3. Clean Your Room (and your Workspace, and Be A Little Neater in General)

Studies have found that cleanliness and neatness correspond to higher happiness and more focus, whereas disorganization and ‘Clutter’ is linked to an increase in depression and stress. Neat houses are even linked to better physical health (not just mental health). 

So if you want to focus better, be happier, and feel healthier – make sure that your living space and your work space is neat and organized. Organizing and cleaning is an activity that builds self esteem, even if it might not seem like it at first.

Spend an hour every three or four days making sure that the spaces that you occupy are clean and reasonably well organized – it might just surprise you how much of a difference this makes to your thought patterns and overall confidence level.

Not to mention you get the satisfaction of a relatively achievable success – cleaning and organizing costs virtually nothing, doesn’t take that long, but will definitely make you feel like you’ve accomplished something, which in turn makes you feel good about yourself. It’s a great self-confidence building activity that will often mark the first step to better productivity and well-being.

4. Go Outside!

Be it a walk in the park, along the beach, or just sitting in the garden – surrounding yourself with natural beauty is a great way of giving yourself a boost. A number of studies show that spending time in nature, or even just being near nature, can lower your stress levels. Engaging with nature can also boost your immune system. Nature also helps boost happiness, improves creativity, and most importantly, reduces negative thoughts bout the self – exactly the behavior that contributes so much towards undermining our self confidence.

Most of us have experienced the joy and awe of looking out over the ocean or seeing a magnificent tree. The feelings that are inspired by natural surroundings are pretty much uniformly positive, so we could all stand to spend a little bit more time outside. It’ll help you gain perspective on your problems, lower the frequency that you have negative thoughts, and make you happier and healthier in general.

5. Body Language Matters

Are you’re a habitual sloucher? Do you sit with your head down and hands on top of each other? Studies suggest that even if you’re not a generally confident person, performing confident body language can actually increase your confidence and risk taking ability.

This is one of those ‘fake it till you make it’ thinks. Even if you don’t feel confident, even if it feels silly to you – opening up your body language, adopting better posture, and striking power poses will have an effect on how powerful you feel, which in turn will help you confidence.

One way you can implement this easily is as follows. The next time you’re feeling insecure, nervous, or anxious about something – maybe you have to give a big presentation or you have a meeting with your boss – just before you begin, go to the bathroom, get in one of the stalls, and stand in a power pose. This is a self esteem exercise that will immediately have an effect on both how you feel and how confident you look to others – and it only takes about 30 seconds.

6. Get Off of Social Media

You’ve probably heard this one a million times, but it’s really true. Social media generally makes us unhappier. Unhappiness leads to negative thoughts. Negative thoughts lead to insecurity and a lack of confidence. On the surface, social media seems like a great way to stay in touch with people you care about – so it should be great, right? Unfortunately, social media has the effect of warping our understanding of reality.

Most people on Facebook or Instagram are only posting positive things. We see their successes, but not their failures. We compare ourselves to them, and it makes us feel worse about ourselves, particularly because we primarily focus on our own failures rather than successes. It’s all the worst aspects of actually socializing – the bragging, the showing off, the one-upping – without any of the good stuff. The connections that we build, the care that we have, and the sharing of both the good and bad.

So this one is not so much a self esteem activity as it is a self esteem inactivity – start spending less time on social media. Using social media a lot is pretty much a guaranteed way to reduce your own happiness. So why do it? We’d recommend you cut it out completely, but if you need to use social media either for professional or personal reasons, make sure you’re setting strict limits for yourself on how much you use it.

7. Meditation is (almost) Magical

Meditation comes as close to a miracle cure as we are likely to see in the near future. The data is in, and it is overwhelming. Meditation makes you happier and more compassionate. It improves focus. It can reduce stress and anxiety. It helps with self awareness (which, by the way, helps a lot with combating negative thought patterns).

It can also have positive physical effects – from helping to reduce chronic pain, lower blood pressure, and even (sort of) reverse aging!

This is probably the most important confidence/self esteem activity you can do – it literally has no downsides and costs absolutely nothing. Take 30 minutes a day to meditate. It’ll be difficult at first – we recommend you follow some guided meditations initially. But once you get into the habit of meditating, you’ll be shocked at how much of a difference it makes. There are very few self confidence exercises that can match up to meditation.

8. Get a Good Night’s Sleep. Every Night

For decades now we’ve known that sleep is important for cognitive function – a lack of sleep can lead to lack of focus, slower reaction times, less creative thinking, and more irritability and unhappiness. What you may not have known however, is that sleep is directly tied to confidence as well.

The science shows that sleep is linked to self esteem and optimism, even excluding the already known effects about how a lack of sleep can lead to depression. Sleep is exceedingly important for us to function at our best – it may not be what you might typically expect of a self confidence exercise – so think of this one as more of a self confidence tip. Get to bed on time and don’t skip out on sleep. Try getting at least 8 hours a night for a week, and see how big of a difference to your mood and confidence it makes.

9. Working Out Will Work Out Well

If you’re someone who has trouble following the advice above about getting enough sleep, then you’ll definitely want to do this one. But even aside from that, study after study show that physical activity has both a direct and indirect link to self esteem and confidence. Regular physical activity causes you to think of yourself in better terms.

But exercise also has many indirect effects that help boost self esteem – from your own perceptions about your body and how you look, to how well you sleep, to how smart and alert you are – all of these are improved with regular exercise.

Along with meditation, exercise is like a medical miracle – it basically helps across the board with both physical and mental health. So in this case, the self esteem building activity that we’re recommending is greater activity – specifically physical activity.

If you were told that just one hour of your time a day could drastically improve your health and happiness in almost every way, what would you say? Well, it’s absolutely true. Spend 30 minutes meditating and another 30 exercising and you’ll start feeling different (and much more confident) almost immediately.

10. Give a Helping Hand, Receive A Healthy Mind

This one may seem surprising until you stop to think about it for a second, then it begins to make sense. Helping others can lead to more happiness and self esteem within ourselves. There is research that shows that those who help others have better self esteem (and also that those with better self esteem are more likely to help others). Granted, this research studies teenagers, but there are plenty of other studies that show that generosity and altruism leads to greater happiness and satisfaction with ourselves. There’s also plenty of evidence to suggest that altruism improves overall wellbeing, that it reduces stress, and that it helps us live longer.

Not to mention the fact that it makes sense intuitively if we think about it. By helping others successfully, we’re demonstrating to ourselves that we have value to other people and to society as a whole. We’re also succeeding at a task. Most importantly, when we focus on something outside of the self, we avoid the negative thought patterns that occur when we’re ruminating. That’s not even counting all the other incredibly positive effects that being generous and altruistic has on our lives.

That’s why we recommennd being generous as the last confidence building exercise. How to do this? Go volunteer at a local soup kitchen or charity. Or help your parents or grandparents around the house. Give a shoulder to a friend to cry on. There are countless ways to be generous and altruistic – we’re sure you can find someone to help, whether it’s a stranger or a friend.

If you want to help yourself with confidence building and happiness? One of the first things you should do is help someone else out.

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