Confidence 101
About Lesson

What It Means To Have Confidence In Your Ability To Be Completely Self Supportive

Feeling confidence in your ability to be completely self-supportive means you are comfortable handling your own problems and taking care of yourself. You feel like you can tackle any problem that comes your way and make decisions based on your best interests. 

Sometimes, this type of confidence can be a little confusing to understand. If someone has enough confidence to be completely self-supportive, does it mean they never reach out for help or keep a support system or trusted people in their lives? The answer is no! 

When someone is confident in their ability to be completely self-supportive, they are comfortable doing whatever is necessary to get themselves the support and care that they need. Sometimes this means the confident person can tackle the issue by themselves. 

It also means that the confident person can make the decision to reach out to a helpful person for assistance without fear, shame, or hesitation. 

Confident people who trust their ability to be self-supportive know when and how to make the right calls to take good care of themselves. Sometimes those decisions involve acting alone; other times, those decisions require asking for help. 

People who are confident in their ability to be self-supportive understand that taking good care of themselves is key.

6 Key Benefits Of Having Confidence In Your Ability To Be Completely Self Supportive

Having confidence in your ability to be completely self-supportive comes with a variety of benefits. 

1| You don’t need to rely on someone else to make it through a tough situation. 

Asking for help isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but when you’re self-supportive, you also believe in yourself to do the right thing to get yourself through a tough situation. You know you have the resources you need to take care of yourself and make good choices.

2| You experience a heightened sense of trust in yourself. 

When you know you have confidence in your ability to be completely self-supportive, you have an immense amount of trust in yourself. No matter what life throws your way, you really, truly believe you are able to handle it and support yourself through whatever happens. 

3| You gain a deep understanding of who you are.

People who have confidence in their ability to be completely self-supportive have deep understandings of who they really are. They know all the deep inner workings of themselves, including their strengths, weaknesses, fears, and dreams. Because these people know themselves so deeply, they are always confident that they can be self-supportive. 

4| You lose a lot of anxiety and fear about what the future might hold. 

Life can be unpredictable, but people with confidence in their ability to be completely self-supportive don’t concern themselves too much with those surprises. They know that no matter what happens in the future, they’ll be able to handle it. Because they’re confident in their ability to be completely self-supportive, they trust themselves to analyze and act on a situation accordingly. 

5| You are thoroughly prepared and have a plan for everything. 

People who are confident in their ability to be self-supportive know the value of planning ahead. One reason why they tend to feel so confident in their ability to be self-supportive is because they know they’re already prepared for emergencies.

For example, a person who is confident in their ability to be completely self-supportive likely has emergency plans in place for a variety of potential situations, including anything from unexpected car trouble to a medical emergency. 

By having a plan in place, confidence is instilled – no matter the emergency, this person knows they’ll be able to move forward and act in a way that will be helpful rather than hurtful. 

6| People see you as a highly dependable person. 

A person who has a lot of confidence in their ability to be completely self-supportive often gives off an aura of dependability. Because of a heightened sense of preparedness, they also exude a calming presence, especially during a challenging situation. 

People tend to turn to people with this type of confidence as an authoritative figure in the midst of a crisis because they tend to have a plan in place to work through it. 

15 Tips For Developing A Stronger Sense Of Confidence In Your Ability To Be Completely Self Supportive

To develop a stronger sense of confidence in your ability to be completely self-supportive, consider the following strategies:

1| Keep a list of all the times you’ve done something positive or beneficial for yourself in the past.

It’s easy to lose your sense of confidence when you don’t have any good examples to remember when you’re feeling less-than-sure about yourself. When you feel your confidence in yourself beginning to drop, jot down a list of times in the past where you’ve made good decisions regarding your health and wellbeing. 

Keeping a list of reminders is an excellent way to give yourself a quick confidence boost in your ability to be completely self-supportive. 

When you’re going through an especially difficult time, it can be challenging to feel that confidence in yourself – having some examples handy will help you remember that you’ve done well at taking care of yourself in the past, and you are capable of doing it again. 

2| Don’t let yourself get memories confused with the actual facts.

Memories can be deceitful. Sometimes your emotions can cloud the facts of what really happened in a past situation, which affects how you remember them. 

When you have a difficult time remembering your past instances of being self-supportive and taking care of yourself, focus on the hard facts of the situation. 

For example, if you pushed yourself through a hard time and found success after the fact, it can be easy to let yourself remember the emotions and difficulties you faced during the hard time. It can become easy enough to forget that, while the situation was challenging, you did make it through to the end. When your confidence is wavering in your ability to be completely self-supportive, remind yourself of those important facts.

3| Be prepared and always have a plan. 

Prepared people are also confident people. Because they’ve already imagined different outcomes and events that could happen to them in the future, they’ve pre-planned multiple ways to handle a challenge should it ever arise.

Preparing yourself and having backup plans is an excellent way to build more confidence in your ability to be completely self-supportive. You know you’ll be able to take good care of yourself, no matter what, as long as you have some emergency plans in place. 

With good preparation and a backup plan, you can rest assured that you’ll have a smart route to follow should you find yourself in trouble. 

4| Learn how to sit with your emotions and feel uncomfortable. 

Dealing with emotions can be brutal. Often, people tend to believe the easiest way to deal with their challenging emotions is to ignore them entirely or bury them, believing that if they’re out of sight, they’re gone for good. This is never the case with hiding, or repressing, challenging emotions. 

Learning how to feel your emotions, sit with them, and experience that discomfort is a big step toward building your confidence in being completely self-supportive. A person who can get through the discomfort of big, difficult emotions has the power to take good care of themselves. 

Often, the hard emotions are what makes any situation feel impossible or challenging. If you can develop a stronger sense of feeling your emotions and actually processing them, you’re a big step closer to getting through the problem at hand and taking care of yourself in the process. 

5| Acknowledge your strengths as well as your weaknesses.

Everyone has a unique set of strengths and weaknesses. Understanding what yours are and how they work is a big part of feeling confident in your ability to be completely self-supportive. 

By understanding your strengths, you can use them to your advantage to take good care of yourself and make good decisions. In a sense, you can purposely “play toward your strengths,” or make decisions where your strengths will be able to help you through the situation.

Similarly, understanding your weaknesses is also important. When you know where your weaknesses lie, you can work harder toward improving them and avoid situations where your weaknesses may cause you serious detriment. 

6| Conquer your negativity bias. 

Most people fall subject to their negativity biases, or the tendencies to think and center around negative thoughts, from time to time. Having a negativity bias is a natural survival tactic the human brain learned and instilled within us all long ago. 

When you have a negativity bias, it means you tend to lean toward the potential harmful or negative outcomes of a situation, which causes you to be more careful. While this is useful for self-preservation, it can also wreck your confidence in your own ability to be self-supportive. 

Learn to counter your negative thinking with positive or more truthful thoughts. Often, negative thoughts spring out of fear or anxiety, which is rarely rooted in truth and reality. When you feel yourself spiraling into negative thinking, counter those thoughts with a truthful statement to protect your confidence. 

7| Allow yourself plenty of space to be curious. 

Reframing your thought process to be curious is an excellent method for boosting your confidence in your ability to be self-supportive. People who stay curious are constantly seeking new knowledge and experiences – they also learn how to approach situations with a curious mindset rather than a fearful one. 

Let yourself be curious. Those feelings will drive you to continue moving forward, learning new things, and taking healthy risks for your own good. 

8| Kick self-doubt to the curb. 

Doubting yourself and your ability to care for yourself is a major confidence killer. It’s tough to have confidence in yourself to be completely self-supportive when you don’t think you’re strong or capable enough to actually do it. 

For example, someone in a bad relationship struggles with being hurt or betrayed but they stay in the relationship because the other person begs them not to leave, they say they can’t live with without them, or for other reasons. So, instead of choosing to be self-supportive the person stays and continues to suffer. 

This decision not only causes suffering in the immediate moment, but it also greatly destroys that confidence of being self-supportive and confidence in the ability to take good care of themselves in the partner who stays. This destruction of confidence spills over to affect all areas of this person’s life and can cause them to make more poor choices in the future, and to debilitate their ability to thrive and live their best life. 

On the flip side, another person decides to choose themselves, to be self-supportive and leave the relationship. This person has now greatly instilled their confidence to be self-supportive. This person now knows they can face anything in life because that confidence keeps them balanced and strong in the idea that they have themselves to look out for themselves and so no matter what life brings, they have themselves. 

Develop a self-supportive attitude by reminding yourself of how being self-supportive has served you in the past. These reminders that you are capable of supporting yourself and therefore capable of tackling any challenges that come your way to excel and thrive in life. Continue to be self-supportive, even in the little ways in every day life. 

9| Work on conquering your fears.

Fears can be major roadblocks to being self-supportive. It’s hard to feel confident in your ability to support yourself when you have major fears affecting your daily life. 

Whatever your fears may be, learning to move past them and conquer them for good is the first step toward regaining that sense of confidence. When your fears are no longer a problem holding you back, it’s easier to push through challenges.

10| Fake it until you make it. 

One of the best methods to boost your confidence in your ability to be completely self-supportive is to “fake it ‘til you make it.” This method simply refers to acting with confidence….even if you don’t really, truly feel that confident. 

When you act the part of a confident person, you’ll soon notice the “act” will start to feel a lot more real. This is a psychology trick: By acting the part of a confident person, you’ll notice your mind starting to adopt that role more seriously. Eventually, you’ll be a full-fledged confident person.

11| Adopt a growth mindset.

A person with a growth mindset always wants to continue learning, evolving, and growing as a person. Because of this, they have a lot of confidence in their ability to be completely self-supportive. They understand that learning more is a key component of being able to handle anything that comes their way and care for themselves adequately. 

A growth mindset can take many forms. For some people, it involves improving themselves through therapy or self-care rituals. For others, it involves taking classes and learning new hands-on skills. Regardless of how a person approaches a growth mindset, harboring one is an excellent confidence booster.

12| Stop getting in your own way. 

One of the biggest roadblocks to feeling confident in your ability to be completely self-supportive is often yourself! When you place limiting beliefs on yourself and your ability to do certain things, you create a “self-fulfilling prophecy” situation – this is similar to “predicting the future.” When you constantly tell yourself “I can’t do this,” you begin to adopt that mindset as the truth.

By placing self-limiting beliefs on yourself, you may begin to truly believe that you can’t be self-supportive. Begin to identify and acknowledge those self-imposed limitations so you can begin challenging and removing them from your life. 

13| Set yourself up for success. 

If you ever look at your dirty laundry and think “that can wait until next weekend” or see your list of chores and think “I can get started on those tomorrow,” think again. A great way to boost your confidence in your ability to be self-supportive is to do more in the present to set yourself up for success in the future. 

For example, consider the dirty laundry. If you go ahead and get started on it now, you’ll save yourself the worry of having to do it next weekend. By acting on the task in the present, you are supporting your future self by taking the task off your to-do list then. 

14| Make yourself a top priority in your own life.

People lead busy lives. Between your kids, your career, your spouse, your social calendar, your other family members, your errands, and anything else vying for your time, you may find it challenging to squeeze in any time to take care of yourself. 

While your other obligations are important, taking care of yourself should be a top priority. When you’re caring for yourself properly, you boost your confidence in your ability to be self-supportive. 

After all, if you can’t trust yourself to get enough sleep and get yourself to your doctor’s appointments, you can begin to lose trust in yourself to be appropriately self-supportive! 

15| Reach out to a mental health professional such as a counselor or therapist.

Getting professional mental health help is a great way to boost your confidence in your ability to be completely self-supportive. A therapist can be especially helpful when esteem is very low which naturally effects your ability to be self-supportive. 

Self-support comes from a feeling of self-love and self-respect, when those elements of a person are damaged, a professional can help to effectively address those issues and heal the root causes which result in those perceptions.

Speaking to a person who can be objective about your fears, anxiety and obstacles to supporting yourself can help you overcome the changes that stand in the way of you being self-supportive, and once you become so, you feel confident in that ability so you can truly excel in life. 

Case Study: Understanding What Confidence In Your Ability To Be Completely Self Supportive Looks Like

Examining an example of a person who has confidence in their ability to be completely self-supportive can help you better understand what that type of confidence looks like. To gain a better understanding of this type of confidence, consider Hannah. 

Hannah had a tough childhood. She grew up with a single mother and two sisters, so money tended to be slim in their household. Because her mother worked so hard at two jobs during the week, Hannah was usually responsible for getting herself and her two younger sisters to school on time. Hannah was also usually the person responsible for making sure homework got finished, dinner was cooked, and everyone was in bed at a reasonable hour.

Because Hannah had a lot of responsibility placed on her at a young age, she learned how to be resilient. It was hard to watch her friends’ parents buy them the newest and latest tech gadgets and fashionable clothes, but she understood that as long as she could eat meals, stay in a warm house, and get her homework finished, she had everything she needed to be successful. 

Fast forward ten years: Hannah is now a college graduate with a well-paying job. She is the first person in her family to attend college and is now living with a comfortable income; she no longer needs to worry about scrimping and saving every last dollar to help make ends meet. 

Instead, she is able to save some money in her savings account (and even have a little fun money each month for shopping and nights out with friends). 

Although Hannah’s life is much easier, she feels confident in her abilities to take care of herself. She knows that if her life ever became difficult again, she’d be able to take good care of herself. 

After spending so much time taking care of her younger sisters and the household while her mother was busy working, Hannah feels like she’s had plenty of experiences and life lessons that taught her a lot about being self-sufficient. 

Despite having a much easier living situation as an adult, Hannah makes sure she has backup plans for many types of situations she feels she might encounter. She has an emergency kit in case of a power outage or bad storm. 

She keeps a savings account for unexpected costs like car repairs or house damage. Hannah realizes that a big part of being self-supportive is being prepared for the worst (while hoping for the best). 

She hopes she doesn’t need to enact any of her emergency preparedness plans, but she feels more at ease knowing she has those plans in place if she ever needed to use them. 

The Bottom Line

Having confidence in your ability to be completely self-supportive is key to excel in life.

Feeling confident that you can do whatever is a necessary type of confidence to have for independence and self-sufficiency. 

Learning how to better develop this type of confidence offers multiple benefits, including a stronger sense of preparedness, independence to help yourself in the way that makes the most sense for your needs, and the ability to offer a sense of calmness in the midst of crisis. 

Exercise Files
L6-CHECKLIST.pdf
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Workbook Less 6 – Conf In Self-Support.docx
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Workbook Less 6 – Conf In Self-Support.pdf
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