Self Confident Women

Self-confident Women

Women's self-confidence problems can get very complicated. Much of it is due to the social confusion surrounding gender roles. Men who are caring and loving and successful are still allowed to be masculine, whereas many women feel the need to avoid femininity in order to be taken seriously.

At the same time they are still seen as the caretakers in our communities, and usually in our lives. Mothers stay home when the children are sick. It's not uncommon for women to work a full-time job alongside their partners and come home to face the brunt of the cooking and housework.

Because of these reasons, many women are perfectionists and overachievers, unable to face failure but hemmed in by the failure of not being involved. This leaves little room for the positive acceptance of what one does well, and the realistic expectations of what needs improving.

This also leads to a bigger problem among women where they first degrade themselves internally, then cut down their peers in an attempt to level the playing field. Female friendship dynamics can be truly terrifying. In Japan, for instance, one woman become obsessed with the success of her friend's daughter to the point of killing the child to prove the other parents weren't doing enough to protect her. That's an extreme case, but women kill each other in all kinds of subtler ways.

How Criticism Hurts Self-Confidence

This seems like a no-brainer. When someone degrades your ability to do things, including how well you present yourself, you don't feel positive about your abilities. You don't grow self-confident in those environments, though you may feel the push to succeed to prove someone else wrong. Outward confidence means very little in terms of how you feel about yourself.

What surprises most people is the effect their criticism of others affects their own self-confidence. The high of feeling better than one person is quickly followed by the doubt of how you compare against someone else. There will always be someone more beautiful, talented, or "giving". To be truly self-confident, and able to enjoy your life, you must be willing to accept your abilities on their own, without stacking them up to someone else's.

How to stop whining and start winning

Success quickly follows self-confidence into your life. It can be hard to change a lifetime of habits, and it will not happen over night. As always, the beginning step is recognizing things you do well. Not "as good as" or "better than" someone else, but what things deliver results that benefit you and your family? Now, which actions deliver results you would like to improve?

Read over these lists at night, or add to them as you go along, and you will teach yourself out of an overly competitive mindset.

This frees up your head and your heart to work on things important to your life. It also takes responsibility off of the other people to determine your self-worth.

Resisting the Urge to Overachieve

The urge to do everything and be everything for everyone, all the time, is so strong in some women that they will ignore things they care about to do things with little real affect on their lives. You see this especially in moms who volunteer at school, and at church, and run youth groups, and have a home business, and and and...

They don't take realistic steps to meet their goals. One mom told me all she wanted was to do support her children. She would frequently arrive to our youth club dragging her daughter by the arm, and criticizing her out in front of everyone. Why? She wanted to get her sons to their scout troop on time.

Women need to look hard at their goals and see if their actions support the big picture. Taking realistic steps to make improvements in your life will build your self-confidence.