Confidence is something everyone wants, though many of us struggle to attain it. Growing up, I knew I was lacking confidence. I constantly compared myself to others and felt chronically inferior. I fantasized about being a confident person admired by all. In my fantasy, this version of myself was outgoing, gorgeous, and untouchable. She had attitude and made everybody laugh. She was a performer. 

Then, in my early twenties, I learned that the word “confidence” comes from the Latin word “confidere”, which means trust. Just like trust, there are many ways to experience confidence: confidence that your doctor will take care of you, confidence that your best friend will always have your back. But what we’re really talking about here is self confidence, so, in other words, self trust. Self confidence isn’t actually about being easy, breezy, and beautiful, it’s about trusting yourself. 

The following are three surefire ways to work towards self trust, starting now:

1.  Be of Service to Others
   Helping people is good for your brain in so many ways. When you’re being of service, you aren’t worrying about the ways you think you’re not good enough. Instead, you’re seeing first hand that you are capable of bringing good into people’s lives, and once you see that, it’s hard to continue being down on yourself. You begin to develop confidence in your own goodness. 
    
2. Do One Thing Every Day That Scares You
   These are famous words of wisdom by Eleanor Roosevelt, and they’ve worked wonders for me. A big component of fear is not trusting that you’ll be able to protect yourself from what you fear. Exposing yourself to what scares you sends a sign to your brain that you can, in fact, handle it, and in doing so creates a new kind of trust in yourself. For example, my whole life I’ve been afraid of flying. In recent years, every time I have to travel, I embrace the flight as my “scary thing of the day”. I’ve never gotten over my fear of flying, but doing it over and over has lead me to trust in my abilities to get myself through a flight, and in doing so has made me feel confident as a traveler. 
    
3. Have Realistic Expectations and Go Easy on Yourself 
   We often feel bad about ourselves (i.e, insecure, not confident) when we compare ourselves to chronic overachievers or expect ourselves to be superhuman. When I read that Barack Obama wakes up at 4:00AM to work exercise into his already jam-packed schedule, I turned it into an opportunity to be hard on myself. This is RIDICULOUS. I am not Barack Obama, but believe it or not, that doesn’t mean I’m inferior to Barack Obama. I operate on a schedule that makes sense for me and my lifestyle (somewhat less intense than the lifestyle of an American President), and true self-confidence will never come from packing achievements into my day. Instead, it will come from taking good care of myself and listening to my body in a mission to learn what is best for me. If having self-confidence is paired with trusting oneself, and trusting oneself is a direct result of radical self-care, then it follows that radical self-care is a direct stepping stone to confidence. Next time you hear someone say “You have just as many hours in your day as Beyoncé,” and it makes you feel incompetent, remember that she has a robust staff of full-time helpers for every area of her life, and that we will never know the truth about her self-confidence or happiness. In summary: though productive daily hours may correlate with self-confidence, they don’t cause it, so rearrange your value system and priorities so that self-care is on the top and impressing people is on the bottom.

By this point, you should have a new understanding of self-confidence. The truth is exciting for us all: self-confidence is not a rare personality trait awarded to lucky individuals, but a personal experience that can be expanded upon by taking simple action.