How to Carry Yourself with Confidence: 21 Essential Tips
In this article, you are going to familiarize yourself with 21 essential tips that will help you learn how to carry yourself with confidence in a variety of environments and social gatherings.
As you work on building confidence, you’ll soon be ready for your next job interview or your next first date, or even that holiday work party that you dread every year.
Confidence is an important aspect of personal growth and development. It helps us maximize our true potential and accomplish our goals. Therefore, we must seek to continually be developing and refining our self-confidence in all settings.
As you go on your journey of personal growth to build and refine your confidence, you will soon realize you’ve become a more confident woman who faces new challenges without fear or anxiety.
If you’re someone who struggles with confidence, it’s important to know that you’re not alone. We all have moments of self-doubt. The key is to focus on building your self-confidence so that those moments become less and less frequent.
Below, you will explore 21 of the best ways to develop confidence on a regular basis. Go ahead and take this first step toward becoming a new you. Don’t let a lack of confidence prevent you from following your dreams and fulfilling your goals!
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Tips on How to Carry Yourself with Confidence
A confident person is a good communicator and can step outside their comfort zone without difficulty. Confident people can manage new things without fear or worry.
Carrying yourself with confidence will make others see you as a very confident person even if you are not feeling confident in the moment.
Sometimes you just have to fake confidence! It’s not unusual for people to feel anxiety in certain situations. Even the most confident people in the world have times when their level of confidence is low.
In these situations, if you have been working on building your confidence levels, you should be able to utilize strategies to convince everyone around you that you are fully confident.
You know what they say — fake it until you make it! You can do this! So let’s get on with learning how to carry yourself with confidence!
1. Monitor your body language. If you’re not as confident as you’d like to be, body language is an area that can have a huge impact on your confidence even with slight modifications.
Practice these body language tricks to look and feel more confident. Keep your chin and head up; stand up straight; plant yourself in one position without swaying or fidgeting; and don’t cross your arms over your body.
2. Maintain eye contact. This is an essential part of confidence. Always practice making direct eye contact with the person who is speaking. This will let that person know you are interested in what they have to say and confident in your ability to have a conversation with them.
3. Be aware of your tone of voice. Different settings allow for different tones of voice, so always be aware of your environment and the tone of voice that you should be using. You may appear overly-anxious or under-confident if your tone of voice is not appropriate for the setting.
4. Become a good conversationalist. Good conversationalists appear to have more confidence than poor conversationalists. Therefore, work on developing your conversation skills.
Be able to ask questions and discuss a variety of topics. Listen to the speaker(s) with interest. Express a desire to learn more about a topic, or share your input. Don’t take over the conversation. Make sure it is smooth and comfortable.
5. Make a good first impression. Greet people with a smile and handshake, do introductions, and offer them a seat or glass of water. Speak clearly, make eye contact, and smile warmly.
6. Always use good posture. Good posture means you maintain balance so that your weight is evenly distributed throughout your body when you are standing or sitting. You sit and stand with your back and neck straight.
Bad posture presents as a serious lack of confidence. Sitting up straight in your chair gives you more confidence in your own thoughts as you are speaking with someone. Standing up straight with your shoulders back and your head held up high gives you a mindset of clarity and assuredness.
7. Practice your power pose. A power pose is when you stand or sit in a way that is intended to make you look powerful, confident, and successful. Adopting power postures can actually help make you “feel” more powerful and confident.
Practice with the positions of your arms and hands, legs and feet, and even your back. See what positions make you feel confident and powerful — practice those poses for the next time you want to appear particularly confident.
8. Buy yourself a new outfit. This might seem like a little thing, but it’s far more valuable than you might realize. Choose something that makes you feel empowered. Buy coordinating accessories such as jewelry, a handbag, and shoes.
As you walk through life in this outfit, you are going to look and feel your best! You might as well shout that you are Super Woman!
9. Present the best version of yourself to others. We don’t always wake up feeling or looking ready to face the world. But while you are working on your confidence, be sure to always present yourself in a way that let’s the world know you are ready to take on anything.
Be neat and clean… speak with clarity and kindness. Hold your head high and walk with confidence. In other words, don’t shuffle around in your pajamas with your head down.
10. Develop good habits and routines. Maintain a well-balanced life that has room for self, work, family, friends, and fun. Be sure to get plenty of sleep, exercise regularly, eat regular meals, wake up on time. Enjoy time with family and friends.
Keeping a good schedule and routine will help you develop more confidence because you can be mindful and present in all that you do.
11. Smile. Did you know a simple smile can change someone’s perception of you? Smiling and laughing are two behaviors that confident, well-rounded, and happy people do regularly. These behaviors demonstrate a sense of self-respect and self-worth. They also increase your happy brain chemicals so you feel more positive.
12. Be your own best friend. Don’t rely solely on others to give you positive feedback or build your confidence. Practice self talk — tell yourself all the positive things you are doing. Practice self-care — make yourself a priority because you are important and worthy.
Treat yourself as you would treat your best friend — with kindness and love. Eliminate self-criticism and affirm your real worth.
13. Maintain a healthy diet and drink lots of water. Physical and mental health go hand in hand. Taking care of yourself physically will support your goals of being emotionally more confident in all settings.
Fueling your body with the nutrients it needs is a great act of self-love and helps to raise your self-esteem. Eating well has a physical effect on the chemicals in your brain and will help you feel better about yourself, too.
14. Hang out with confident people. The people you hang around have a great influence on the way you feel, think, and behave. Spend time with people who are confident and notice how they carry themselves. Observe how they speak to each other.
You’ll notice that they always seem happy and comfortable in their own skin. They give off positive vibes without appearing arrogant or self-centered. You’ll start to absorb this kind of energy and feel more confident in your skin, too.
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15. Use daily positive affirmations for confidence. Positive affirmations are proven to help retrain the way your brain thinks and feels. Reciting daily positive affirmations for confidence and self-love will help you become more confident.
16. Take deep breaths to calm your anxiety. When you’re feeling a lack of self-confidence, it usually stems from anxiety. Practice taking deep breaths through your nose and breath out through your mouth. This will get oxygen flowing through your body and relieve the tension that builds up from anxiety. It will help you relax and therefore feel more confident.
17. Practice active listening. Active listening is a key component of good communication skills. Active listening involves giving your complete time and attention to the speaker and being genuinely engaged in the conversation.
Remember the important things that are being said and be prepared to provide positive feedback to the speaker. This will result in more engagement and better conversation.
18. Become a conversation starter. On a daily basis, be sure you practice initiating a conversation with people you do and don’t know.. Once you have started the conversation, be sure to continue practicing your conversational skills by asking questions and active listening. Prepare yourself for conversations by knowing what’s happening in your community and the world. Express a genuine interest in the other person.
19. Journal for self-confidence. Journaling for self-confidence is a great strategy for building confidence. Use this sentence starter at least once per week, “Self-confidence means …..”
Each week, reflect on situations where you have felt confident and where you have not felt confident. Think and write about those situations — making note of interesting points that seemed to influence your level of confidence. Were you wearing nice clothes that day? Did you get enough sleep the night before? Were there a lot of people involved? Was it a social situation or a work situation? Etc.
20. Become aware of your strengths and weaknesses. Self-reflection is a strength in itself that helps build confidence. This can be done through self-reflection daily journal activities.
Once you identify your own personal strengths and weaknesses, you are able to use your strengths as a mechanism to feel more confidence. And you can steer away from tasks that emphasize your weaknesses.
21. Trust your intuition. Getting out of your own head can lead to more intuitive thinking and less time wasted on overthinking. The benefits are that you find your authentic self, you make the right choices for you, you become more willing to chances, and you take action where others will not. These skills lead to greater confidence. So trust your intuition to help you become more confident.
Final Thoughts: How to Carry Yourself with Confidence
Remember, it is not always an easy task to carry yourself with confidence. Sometimes you just want to slouch around, pout, and avoid people all together. And that’s okay in certain situations.
But confidence is an important component of personal growth, so you want to demonstrate confident behaviors as often as possible — especially in a group of people.
Your brain actually believes what you tell it — so if you speak positive, good things to yourself and others — your brain will start to believe those things. Focus on your strengths instead of your weaknesses.
Pay attention to your posture, body language, eye contact, tone of voice. Speak and communicate in a positive manner. SMILE.
If you implement these 21 best practices to build and maintain confidence, you’ll be feeling confident in no time! Good luck!
Love to ALL! ~ Susan
Remember That Everyone Struggles with Confidence Sometimes
When do you struggle with confidence? Which of the 21 tips do you think you’ll try? Please feel free to share your thoughts about confidence in the comment section below:)
