Posted by DianeCorriette on October 23, 2011
Article from Inspirational Guidance
When you first start thinking about how to build self confidence there are a number of ways you can approach it and there were a few that worked for me and using affirmations to build self confidence was one of them. When you are creating your own affirmations (which is much more powerful than just copying some out of a book) it will help if you write them not only in the first person but in the second person too.
When you speak in the first-person you use words to describe yourself like “I” – “I am…” and in the second-person you use personal pronouns such as “you” and it really does help you believe that you are what you are saying even if you are the one saying it! For some reason if I said “I am a confident women” I wouldn’t always believe it but when I said “You are a confident woman” it helped me feel self confident. As I was the person saying both words I couldn’t understand how that made sense but decided to go with it.
When I first started I used affirmations to help me work towards loving myself more – most times I didn’t – and I certainly didn’t feel love for myself even as I said them at the beginning – but there was power in the
First person affirmation
“I love and approve of myself as I am right now and I know I can be self confident”
Second person affirmation
“You love and approve of yourself as you are right now and you know you can be self confident”
Sometimes when I was on the train or walking the kids of school I would repeat affirmations in my head over and over again…
“I enjoy self confidence” and/or ”You enjoy self confidence”
Mainly I used the second person affirmations until I began to feel more self confident and then I would use the first person more. They both worked and you can work them into a phrase or just repeat them over and over again. Repetition really helped me to begin believing what I was telling myself.
My biggest fear that I had to overcome was the fear of speaking in conversations and talking to people – not just people I didn’t know but people I knew as well. For example if my then boyfriend had a family get together although I knew them all and had done for years I never could speak to many of them. To help me overcome that I used these types of first and second person affirmations:
“Every day in every way I build self confidence which makes it easy for me to enjoy speaking to people”
“Every day in every way you build self confidence which makes it easy for you to enjoy speaking to people”
Decide on which you prefer to say to yourself and say it in front of the mirror too (I hated doing that at first but a smile and a second person affirmation really helped me!) – the thing you need to really do is learn how to write affirmations yourself because they have far more power than if you repeat anything that I have used here. You are welcome to use them but the real power comes in writing something because they are your words being used on you to help you build self confidence.
