Can you lack confidence because your unsure of who you are?

Question

i'm 17 and although i have quite alot going for me i'm not the most confident.

i'm just wondering if it's because maybe i haven't discovered 'who i am'?

or if it's because i liked a guy for a few years and he always picked on the negative things and said i was a faliure?

time to prove him wrong i think.. :)

Answer 1

Absolutely! – Any relationship, whether friends, family or a partner has a huge impact on your confidence.

The cycle is usually along these lines:

If someone prominent in your life is constantly critical and telling you that you’re a failure then you start to believe it. Once you start to believe it, you then subconsciously look for signals to reinforce that belief (ever spent nights tossing and turning over something that made you feel small?). Those signals strengthen the feeling of being in a failure which in turn dents your confidence further.

Everyone is different but if you were to take a step back and review your emotions from a neutral perspective, you may be able to identify your own cycle. It’s not a simple thing to do but identifying it is part of the solution.

  

Once identified, be aware of any little comment or other people’s behaviour that you would normally use to reinforce the negative thoughts. Then try to break that cycle by weighing up something positive to balance how your view yourself.

Finally, don’t try too hard to show that you’re now super-confident. Allow yourself some time and space to sort this out. Setting impossible goals will be completely counter-productive.

Good luck.

Answer 2

yeah i think so.........as you get older you become more aware of everything around yourself and start to question things. Im sort of like that, i think about the point of my existence and what i can do to make it as important as possible.