How to build your confidence

Sometimes we might feel like we want to be more confident and sometimes we might feel like everyone around us is more confident than we are.

While that may be true, we don't really know how other people feel on the inside.

Even the people who seem the most confident get nervous sometimes.

Maybe if you don’t feel confident enough to do something, you won’t try it at all.

But here's the interesting thing, the more you do something the more confident you become at doing it.It can be challenging to do something new or to do something in front of others or something that feels uncomfortable at first.

One way you can become more confident is actually by learning that it's okay to make mistakes.

See if you can bring to mind the last time you made a mistake. Maybe it was something you said that you felt didn't come out the right way or a mistake in a piece of work that you had to do. Anything at all.

How do you think about yourself when you make a mistake?

Maybe making mistakes makes you hard on yourself or critical or even embarrassed.

So now I want you to imagine what you would say to a friend who’d made a mistake. Maybe you would tell them not to worry or that it’s okay or that it’s a good way to learn.

Notice how kind you would be to your friend and think about how you might feel better if you thought about your own mistakes in the same way.

We can put so much pressure on ourselves to do things perfectly and yet we can really build our confidence by being brave enough to try things, even if we make mistakes.

If we don't get things right first time, we can keep practising.

The other really important thing we can practise is being kind to ourselves and responding to ourselves just the way we would to a friend.