Having a good reason to be confident, brave, and courageous can be a huge help. We’ve already looked at how reflection, gratitude, and even doing the things you’re scared of helps you do them anyway, and how it starts to build this habit of being courageous and confident.
Today I have another helpful concept to share with you. We make time for and work on the things that are important to us. We can use that concept to our advantage when it comes to courage and self-confidence.
In other words, I want you to start creating these new habits by focusing on what’s important to you. It’s much easier to work on courage and increase self-confidence with tasks you enjoy and that have meaning to you. Don’t worry about feeling like you “should” do something. That can come later. For now, let’s start with what you’re passionate about.
Let’s say you would like to become a better cook, grow more of your own food, lose some weight, and get back into running. That’s a long list of positive changes, and it will take some time and effort to build up your courage and confidence to make them all happen.
What if you focus on the one thing you’re passionate about? Choose something that’s fun and important to you. For this example, let’s say you’re most passionate about gardening. Just start there.
Build those new habits and focus your time and effort there first. Seeing your garden flourish and having that delicious, fresh produce to work with will give you a huge boost in confidence.
Knowing you have delicious produce to use may inspire you to cook more from scratch to use up the food you’ve grown. From there, you can branch out and make smarter food choices that will help you lose weight.
Do you see how focusing on what’s important to you can help motivate you to get started? While gardening isn’t particularly difficult, it did take some effort to plant, nourish and harvest it. You had to take action, and that’s all I’m really asking you to do.
Perhaps you want to improve your marriage, become a better parent, go back to school, or save up enough money to get out of debt. It doesn’t matter what your most important goal or task is. You can use it to get started on this journey of building courage and increasing your self-confidence.
My challenge to you for today is to think about what’s really important to you. Make sure you realize there’s a big difference between something being urgent and something being important. We often focus on the things with the tightest deadline, the stuff that needs to get done “right now.” While it may be important, it’s often not the thing that’s most important to us overall.
Make the choice of what’s truly important to you, and then focus your efforts of being courageous and building those new good habits there.