9 Signs a Lack of Confidence is Holding You Back
“Your success will be determined by your own confidence and fortitude.”
-Michelle Obama
Have you ever found yourself in a meeting with your leadership team, and they are reviewing an issue that has been causing the company problems? You have thought extensively about the situation and identified a few possible fixes. However, when it’s your turn to speak, you choke. You aren’t sure if your ideas will be well received or if they will be perceived as ridiculous. Do you risk the potential shame you know you’ll feel if the latter is true, or do you put your head down and play it safe?
Confidence speaks to trust and belief in our talents, strengths, judgments, and ideas. Confidence impacts so many areas of our lives, including how we interact with other people, our daily decisions, and how we show up in every aspect of our lives. A lack of confidence can thereby limit us in substantial ways regarding our careers. So, I’m sure you are starting to see how important it is to be aware that we are battling low confidence. Through awareness, we can deal with it and embrace more healthy patterns and behaviors as a means of improving confidence and helping us accomplish our career goals. Here are nine signs that you may have a confidence problem:
You Avoid Conflict: One sign that you may be dealing with a lack of confidence is a tendency to avoid conflict. When you constantly question yourself, it can make it hard to believe that you have something valuable to contribute, especially in scenarios that seem tense. You might feel that your opinions or insights will contribute to more conflict rather than solve the problem. Thus you remain silent or distant in response.
You Doubt Your Decisions: Another signal that could alert you to a lack of confidence is doubting your decisions. When you don’t believe in yourself and your abilities, you will naturally doubt whether you’ve made the right choices. This is often fueled by a fear that your choices will lead to mistakes, failure, or problems. At its worst, doubting your decisions can also signify that you fear being ridiculed.
You Take Critiques Personal: People who struggle with confidence tend to take criticism personally. Generally, criticism offered by others is designed to help us improve in some manner or area of our lives. Many people can take constructive criticism and apply the feedback in a way that helps them get better and improve. However, when confidence is low, you will take the critique and internalize it. This makes it hard for you to learn from it because you see it more as an attack than a learning tool. You may be taking it personally if you find yourself ruminating over feedback and allowing it to conjure up negative self-talk.
You Don’t Advocate For Yourself: Failing to stand up for yourself might also highlight a lack of confidence. When you are unable or unwilling to advocate for what you want or need, especially in situations where you are being mistreated, it might mean that you don’t think highly enough of yourself to do so. If you doubt your value and worth, you won’t see it worthwhile or meaningful to pursue what you want/need because you won’t see yourself as worthy.
You Defend Your Decisions: Another sign that you could be dealing with low confidence is if you constantly feel the need to defend your choices. If you question yourself and your abilities, you will often doubt whether you made the right choices. These doubts can make you feel as if you need to explain yourself to others, though this is often not required or even desired by other people.
Inability To Handle Compliments: It can easily be disguised as humility, but sometimes an inability to accept compliments can hint at low confidence levels. When you doubt yourself and your value or worth, compliments can feel so uncomfortable that you don’t even want to receive them. This is because compliments can feel like a lie compared to the truth you’ve created in your mind about the minimal value/worth you have. The more you doubt the validity of the good things said about you, the more the desire to hear and receive them diminishes.
Indecisiveness: As mentioned above, low confidence can make you doubt your decisions because of a fear that you might make the wrong choice. This can cause you to become paralyzed and fail to make any decisions so that you don’t face a negative outcome.
You Fear Failure: People who lack confidence see failure as a reflection of who they are and not a necessary part of life. Failure, when embraced, can help lead us to greater insight and learning. However, when we fear failure or allow it to shut us down. It can prevent us from taking the necessary action required to succeed.
Negative Self-talk: A final way you might be able to tell if you are dealing with a lack of confidence is if you are constantly battling negative self-talk. What you tell yourself is very important to how much you can accomplish. If you continuously tell yourself negative things, you will eventually start to believe them and act accordingly.
The inner doubts we have about ourselves impact our outside choices and behavior. A combination of the signs listed above could mean you need to pause and assess your feelings about yourself and your abilities. When you address low self-confidence, you can improve your inner beliefs, which ultimately means an improvement in behavior and outcomes.
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