Faking Confidence!

Hey Guys x

First of all, I've changed my blog design, which you've probably noticed! Let me know what you think about it!

I'm really happy with it, and if you want me to write a post either about how I did it or why I chose certain things, leave me a comment and I'll write that!

I also want to thank Peace Firestone so much for her help. She spent a lot of time with me this morning helping me and making sure that my blog looked perfect and everything was readable. Her advice was amazing and I'm really really grateful for it, so thank you so much Peace!

Now I want to talk about confidence, and this ties in with my blog design.

When I was changing everything, I had to have confidence that I knew what I was doing. I made a lot of mistakes, which some of you might know if you were on my blog at midnight this morning to see the weird in-between stages where the mistakes were visible for the world to see!

And I wasn't confident, in fact, I was freaking out! I thought I was going to have a header that was too big and a black box around my posts and all the words would be the wrong colours and clash with the background and it was really scary, especially because my blog means so much to me and a bad design means that I wouldn't be able to attract new viewers.

And this is kind of like confidence in real life situations.

For example, when you have to meet a lot of new people at one time, for school, college, university, work etc, you want to come across as confident.

But a lot of the time, we're not. In fact, we'd rather be anywhere else than in that room with those people facing us and looking around nervously. Well, I would anyway!

However, I only have one piece of advice for situations like this, and it really helps me. 'Fake it 'til you make it'. Fake your confidence!

I recently had a university taster day, where you go in and meet people doing your course and some lecturers who give you a taster for the kind of things you'll be doing.

It was terrifying. I remember walking into the room to see a lot of people sitting at tables and talking to other people around the room. I was drenched from the rain, hot from walking quickly to try and find the right room in the first place, and my heart was pounding out of my chest at the thought of actually going up to people and starting a conversation.

So at first, I stood off to the side and pretended to flick through the pack that they'd given us. But then I looked around, and saw a girl also standing alone, flicking through a pack.

I was not feeling confident in the slightest, but I decided to just go for it and introduce myself to her. What was the worst that could happen?

So I did, and we had a conversation and it was nice. But the same thing happened again when she decided to go and look for a toilet.

But this time, the faked confidence had kind of merged with my fear and made me feel ready to talk to more people, and the next person that I went up to ended up being someone that I spent the whole day with, swapped numbers with, and still talk to and make plans with now, and it's been about 3 weeks. And that's not all, I actually talked to a lot of people and found out a lot of interesting things about the people that will be spending the next 3 or so years with me.

So that was my personal experience. Faking confidence is great because no one aside from you knows that you weren't feeling that confidence in the first place anyway!

And, hopefully, eventually you won't have to fake that confidence anymore, because you'll already feel the confidence that you were pretending to feel!

I hope this helps anyone who's unconfident about starting a new school, college, university or workplace this month/year!

Thank you for reading

Comment below your confidence tips to help me (and other readers) out!

Keep Smiling - Lou xx