By Christina Greve
waking up in the morning, feeling confident and energized, with a mind full of creative ideas. You have those “happy butterflies” in your stomach because you just can´t wait to get started. You have no fear of failing, only confidence that whatever you do today, it will be a wonderful experience—perhaps youʼll create an outstanding image for your portfolio or youʼll learn from experimenting.
Imagine if you let go of harsh self critique, the bad habit of comparing yourself with others and the fear of failing:
your world will change dramatically because of it.
I personally guarantee that if you lack self confidence you can change this and turn yourself into a rock solid, powerful, confident you—not arrogant or ignorant —just someone who loves herrself and is proud to be herself: 100% true to your hearts desires.
Self-confidence is a state of mind
Self confidence is our own attitude towards ourselves, our belief in what we are capable of. It is our perceived certainty that we have what it takes. We express it in our body-language, in what we say, in how we say it and how we handle any given situation.
Confidence is also connected to our self-esteem, which is our self-image and determines how much we value ourselves. Improving self-confidence usually improves our self-image as well, and to succeed as an artist and photographer we need to develop both.
Every moment of every day,you decide who you are and what to believe! You get a second chance every second!
It´s important to believe in yourself enough to:
•
$ enjoy the sometimes lonesome journey of artistic creation
• handle times when inspiration is lacking
• navigate any technical difficulties
• ignore your insecurities about the quality of your own work
• sufficiently and fairly price your work and your time
• stop comparing yourself to others
• share your images on a website, Flickr, Facebook or other social medium
• show your work to potential clients, buyers, friends and art galleries
• receive and grow from any comment or criticism you may receive
• sell yourself to make a living out of your craft + passion
Believing in yourself is simply the fastest way to succeed as an artist.
The 7 Rules of Confidence
1. You are not your past.
2. Know what drains your self confidence.
3. Stop comparing yourself to others.
4. Challenge Yourself.
5. Don´t give a sh*t what others think.
6. Screw perfection, be playful.
7. Get off your (cute) butt and take action.
“Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.”
- Maria Robinson
“Don´t build your self image on past negative experiences. Build it on your dreams for the future!”
- Christina Greve
Regardless of how you view yourself, regardless of your past experiences, regardless of your
personal story—
you can start to grow your self confidence today!
If you lack confidence, chances are that you spend too much time looking back at your past and looking for both proof and evidence that you are a person who lacks confidence. Your mind turns into a movie player that plays your bad memories over and over again—and the messages is clear; we all have those stories from our past where we failed, looked stupid, did something that made us look foolish, got rejected, picked on, forgotten—and maybe someone even laughed at something we were proud of!
The more you keep returning to those memories, the more confidence you will lack. Therefore, it´s absolutely crucial that you make a decision right here, right now: not to live in the past anymore. The past is gone and the past does not in any way determine how your future looks.YOU decide right at this moment how you want be. Know that you are not your past, and every second, every day, you can make a new decision about who you want to be and how you want to live. It´s as simple as that. Your past is a part of you: you learned some valuable lessons, but your past does not define who you are.
Know what drains your self confidence
Let´s compare your self confidence with a battery. Sometimes our self confidence battery is fully charged and provides lots of energy and great ideas. When it
ʼs fully charged, things are great. You can smile at challenges. You can laugh at yourself and be easily present in the moment. You can care for others and still have enough energy left for yourself. You feel more brave, make goals and take big steps towards your dreams. But then, sometimes the battery only runs on a half-charge or gets burned out completely. I bet you remember times when you felt your creativity was low or gone? During these times you probably felt completely unsuccessful as an artist and a photographer.
It´s important to understand that even the most confident woman can, if sheʼs not careful, find herself in a state of feeling unworthy and lacking confidence. Confidence is not a constant state, but a state of mind that you consciously need to work on, on a daily basis. Many things can drain your self-confidence battery: stress, lack of sleep, negative thinking, impossible schedules, life challenges, difficult decisions, procrastination, too many chores, too much unhealthy food and lack of exercise...to name a few. To feel confident you need to take care of yourself and be mindful of what drains your confidence.
Rule no.2
Know what drains your self confidence
Let´s compare your self confidence with a battery. Sometimes our self confidence battery is fully charged and provides lots of energy and great ideas. When it
ʼs fully charged, things are great. You can smile at challenges. You can laugh at yourself and be easily present in the moment. You can care for others and still have enough energy left for yourself. You feel more brave, make goals and take big steps towards your dreams.
But then, sometimes the battery only runs on a half-charge or gets burned out completely. I bet you remember times when you felt your creativity was low or gone? During these times you probably felt completely unsuccessful as an artist and a photographer.
It´s important to understand that even the most confident woman can, if sheʼs not careful, find herself in a state of feeling unworthy and lacking confidence. Confidence is not a constant state, but a state of mind that you consciously need to work on, on a daily basis.
Many things can drain your self-confidence battery: stress, lack of sleep, negative thinking, impossible schedules, life challenges, difficult decisions, procrastination, too many chores, too much unhealthy food and lack of exercise...to name a few. To feel confident you need to take care of yourself and be mindful of what drains your confidence.
Of course, some of what I mention above is okay once in a while and in small doses. But the longer you are in danger of draining your inner battery - you´ll eat up your confidence in the end. So be aware of the foundation.
Stop comparing yourself to others
If you took the strength of others, and compared them to your weaknesses, how do you think you'
d size up? And do you think this would make you feel good? The funny thing is, this is what most of us do at one time or another—and some of us do pretty often. Itʼs a sure-fire recipe for a drop in self-confidence and for unhappiness. Itʼs also not useful for the development of your creativity.
When you compare yourself with another photographer or artist it can kill your creativity, your energy and bring down your self esteem—not always of course but sometimes. Perhaps you know the feeling? I certainly do.
If you are like me and most creative people in the world, you more than likely admire a few people, and maybe even see them as better or more qualified than you, or as competition (if theyʼre at the same level as you).
Comparing yourself to them does not encourage you (or me) to stretch our imagination and find alternate sources of inspiration. Of course it´s great if they inspire you and make you glow with passion and ideas, but if you feel terrible and "not good enough" then donʼt look at their work! Goout and play and have fun instead, testing your own ideas to feel alive and creative.
“Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
- Steve Jobs
If you compare strength to strength, there will always be those who are better, and those who are worse. Even if you do well in comparison with others, you may be artificially inflated from this comparison. It
ʼs a short-lived ego boost if you win the comparison. Youʼll be easily knocked down.
When our "inner critic” voice wants to sabotage our passion and creativity by comparing itself to another, it distracts us from our flow, our value and unique contribution. Thoughts like: “I suck… they are so much better. I am a total failure.” “Look at where they are…I should be ʻthere, ʻdoing thisʼ or ʻdoing thatʼ and I am not good enough…I am a loser..” etc.. are like water on your inner passion and fire, it simply kills creativity!
Photographers, especially women, struggle with comparison. So let's cut to the chase and put it as simply as possible. Comparison kills the little positive seeds of inspiration growing inside of you! Don´t use comparison to bring yourself down–you are too unique! In fact, there is no one on earth like you, so comparison is not worth spending time on anyway!
What really matters is that you dare to aim for the stars (go for all your crazy ideas and dreams) and aim from your heart (be sure to create and photograph what you truly LOVE)—nothing else matters! Focus on being you and bringing YOU into your pictures. If you look to much at others work, you will bring to much of their vision into your own work.
Challenge Yourself—Feel the fear and do it anyway
To be really proud of yourself and develop self-confidence you need to challenge yourself from time to time. That means to get out of the comfort-zone.
The comfort-zone is a good thing because we feel safe there and it´s healthy for us to feel safe, but it´s not in the comfort zone we grow the most and it´s not in the comfort zone we develop confidence. To do that you need to step outside and put your pretty feet on uncertain ground, so to speak.
It can be scary to follow your dreams because to do so, you often need to leave the safe zone and do things that make you doubt yourself, that make your heart pump faster, that make your hands sweaty.
But staying inside the comfort zone is the big enemy of any accomplishment—and tends to have a negative impact on our confidence. To fully LIVE and become confident the key is to feel the fear and then DO it anyway. Successful people are often successful because of this. Despite their fear they keep taking steps to reach their goals.
They consciously move forward every day, little bylittle.
Doing something that you know is good for you, even though you feel fear, will grow your confidence fast. And the good thing is that
the more you do what scares you, the more it starts feeling easy and comforting. Challenging yourself to higher standards. Don't live by standards of other people, you are the only one that knows what is good enough for you. Above anything else, you need to be true to yourself.
Take the risks involved to get to the next level by trusting that if you give all you can that only good will result. Again, if you are really proud of yourself then you know you are on the right track.
Don´t give a sh*t what others think
The thought of what other people think about you can hold you back in life and eraseyour confidence. This might be the fastest way to lose faith in yourself If you care too much about
their opinions.
Sometimes we don´t take action because of fear of being judged by someone or people in general. Strangely enough we fear being judged by people we don´t know very well oreven want to know. How odd is that? When we have a connection with people and like them, we fear their judgement much less. Another funny thing is, those other people whose opinions you care so much about?
They don´t have time to focus on you, because they are so busy caring about what others might think of them—perhaps even what YOU think of them! The number one fear in humans is to be rejected, not being accepted—and that is the reason why this takes up space in our minds. We are afraid to be left out and left alone.
This fear drives us to please others even when we hurt ourselves.
As photographers and artists we fear that no one will like our art, that someone will think we lack talent or skills. We fear rejection and therefore tend to sit around waiting for someone to discover us, waiting for someone to see our talent and come dragging us out of our hiding place. But the fact is 99% of time it just t doesn
ʼt happen that way!
That´s why you need to say “f**k it” and proudly show off your skills and craft as the creative human being you are.
Rejection and judgement will come your way, but for every one time you are rejected, you will be accepted ten times or more. Focus on those who cheer you on and support you. Forget the rest!
Life is too short to live in the shadow of others
ʼ judgement—and remember they feel the need to judge only because they themselves lack confidence.
Confident people rarely feel a need to judge others, they are too busy living their life.
Screw perfection, be playful
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
- Mark Twain
Never wait for your perfect creative mood to strike—just get to it and create it. Body movement has a strong impact on the mind, therefore if you feel uninspired, don´t sit and wait for magic to happen.
Do something active. Some of my best ideas come when I
ʼm in the gym or while running. The more you move the more your creative juices will flow, the stronger and more confident you ʼll feel. The trick is not to aim for perfection, but to aim for creating. In other words; the final result should not be your main focus - in stead focus on having fun while making your art. Be playful, experiment, test new techniques and more. .
“Keep away from those who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you believe that you too can become great.”
- Mark Twain
The more you focus on the creative process and the joy of playing with ideas, the better your end result will be. If you start out aiming for perfection, chances are that you´ll be too hard on yourself, too negative and way too judgmental over your own skills and ideas—and then your confidence disappears in a heartbeat.
Allow yourself to be a little crazy, to do silly stuff, you don´t have to explain yourself
to anyone. After all it´s your art, your style and your camera. As you manage to let go of putting pressure on yourself to create perfect images, creating wonderful images actually starts to get much easier. It´s kind of funny really. :-)
“The ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the
ones who do.” - Steve Jobs
“When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is - everything around you that you call life, was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. The minute that you understand that you can poke life - everything change!”
- Steve Jobs
Get off your (cute) butt and take action
“Eighty percent of success is showing up.
” - Woody Allen
Confidence training is a lot like doing exercise: if you don´t exercise, you do´t get fit; the
more you work out the better shape you´ll find yourself in. It´s exactly the same with your
confidence. You are the one who decides if you´ll be confident and you are the one who
decides how confident you´ll feel.
The best way to train your confidence is by doing the right thing—for yourself. This means
looking out for yourself by being your own best friend, allowing yourself to reach for your
dreams with integrity and setting healthy goals to improve your life.
A sense of accomplishment will obviously make you feel more confident. So quit
putting off those new creative ventures, whatever they may be.
The best way to move towards your dreams and grow your confidence is to focus at one
goal at a time. Then do something every day to move yourself closer to this goal. Just do
one thing everyday—that´s all it takes.
For every action step you take, your confidence will rise. And when you finally reach
your goal, your self confidence and self esteem will blossom like never before.
It´s fantastic, right?- Not only will you reach your goals, but you´ll feel confident, too!
Seems simple enough, right? So get out there and show them all what you are made
of and evolve into a newly confident you!
You have nothing to lose and nowhere to go but up.
You can write absolutely anything on a blank page—anything at all. Every time you
wake up, you face a blank page. No matter how much time you think you
ʼve wasted or lost in life, it is never too late to make the very most of the moment you have
now. Let go of the past. Life is yours to be lived now. You'll gain nothing by hiding from it.
Surround yourself with only the best people. Let go of the rest. Change doesn't
happen in the future—
it happens right now by taking action in the present.
Your time is now!
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