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Self-confidence is an attitude about your skills and abilities. When you accept and trust yourself, you have a sense of control in your life. You know your strengths and weakness well, and you approve of yourself. You set realistic expectations and goals, knowing you are capable of quite a lot, if not everything you really put your mind to. You know how to communicate assertively, telling people what you want, what you believe, and how you feel without attacking them.
Because you don’t live for the approval of others, you can handle criticism. You may or may not integrate the advice you receive in that criticism, but you don’t just fall apart because someone criticized you. You may look back to your much younger days when you did live for the approval of others. Now you know that you cannot please everyone all the time. Now you know that you are doing the best you can every. single. day. There was never a day you woke up and thought, “This is going to be the day I do everything wrong and piss off everyone.” That never happened. And it never will.
In your younger days you may have had low self-confidence. You may have been full of self-doubt, questioning every choice you might make so doing nothing or doing what you were told to do. You may have trusted no one, mainly because you didn’t trust yourself. On a bad day, you may have felt inferior, unloved, or hyper-sensitive to criticism. You may have pretended to be brave, but really lacked the confidence necessary to build a healthy relationship.