6 Things that Cause Lack of Confidence
Everyone can be confident about something because everyone knows something they are good at. You become confident at something when you train more.
With training, you can become confident and professional. While everyone can be confident at something, there’s the self-confidence, the strength inside you that tells you ‘you can overcome difficult situations in life.’
The major reason that causes a lack of confidence is a traumatic experience from childhood, past relationships, or bad friendships. But there are other reasons that people don’t consider, and it continues to drop their confidence.
Here are what causes the lack of confidence:
1. Traumatic experience
Unhappy childhood
Childhood plays a major role in a person’s behavior and personality. Unhappy childhood can lead to low self-esteem, low self-confidence, and negative self-talk.
When we are young, we let our parents decide who we are and how we should behave.
A kid who was never motivated to do better, cherished when he performs well, and trained mentally to become stronger develops low self-confidence.
A kid develops low self-esteem and low self-confidence due to traumatic childhood.
Every time he fails he’s cursed and called a failure, and blamed for how bad he’s due to physical insecurities.
When such a traumatic event repeats itself several times, it will lead to a negative and false self-belief that will be attached to that kid’s personality and grow with him.
The kid grows with the belief that he will not become better or succeed in something and that his life is bad and will never become good. This belief causes a lack of confidence.
Bad relationships and friendships
Other traumatic experiences like bad relationships and friendships can cause a lack of confidence. The people we surround ourselves with affect our mental and emotional health.
If we are surrounded by supportive and positive people, we will develop skills similar to our surroundings. Bad relationships and friendships affect a person in many negative ways.
A person always thinks of himself as less or doesn’t deserve more. Especially in manipulative relationships where people don’t believe in themselves but believe what their partner tells them.
Brain trying to find meaning
We are the product of our past. Our subconscious mind tries to find meaning in every situation we experience.
When it finds a particular meaning in an experience, it attaches it to what we are experiencing.
These meanings manifest themselves in form of negative thoughts when we want to start something new.
Such thoughts cause a lack of confidence. You can gain back your confidence in this situation by asking yourself:
- Which experience is your mind attached to
- What is the meaning behind the attachment
- Are these meanings healthy and logical?
The more you ask for the reasons behind the lack of confidence, the frequency of these thoughts becomes.
2. Caring about others’ opinions
Caring more about the opinions of other people prevents a person from taking his/her decisions, which can cause a lack of confidence.
In many situations, the person doesn’t choose what he/she wants, but what pleases everybody.
This act prevents a person from standing up for what they believe in. The more a person pleases others, the less confidence a person will have.
People who care about others’ opinions have a constant fear of what people might say, which stops them from trying new things which leads to low self-confidence.
Trying new things is important in building confidence and increasing mental and emotional strength.
3. Believing in confidence myths
A major reason that stops a person from growing mentally strong and causes low confidence.
There are a lot of confidence myths that people believe, and that includes:
1. Confident people are born confident
This belief is one of the reasons people are unable to improve their lives and settle for the life they have. Confident people become confident by practicing and training.
2. You have to be successful to be confident.
One of the myths of our time. A person believing this myth lives a life of limitation.
A person doesn’t succeed because he/she is confident only. Success requires self-belief, learning from mistakes and failures, hard and smart work, and consistency.
Successful people build their confidence on this journey. The more you fail and learn why you failed, the more confidence you can have after you succeed.
3. To be confident you have to be an extrovert
A confidence myth that causes a lack of confidence. Being extroverted doesn’t mean being confident.
Extroverts talk loudly and are always the center of the crowd, but that doesn’t mean, this trait makes them confident.
I’m a social introvert who’s more confident than most people I know. Just like the more, you train the muscle, the stronger it becomes.
It’s similar to confidence. It has nothing to do with how a person looks.
People think confidence is always loud, but confidence is silence with power behind it. You don’t need to prove your confidence to people if you are aware you are confident.
Also, read: How to Build Confidence in Oneself
4. Staying in the comfort zone
The comfort zone is the most dangerous place you can stay in. Nothing grows inside the comfort zone.
The more a person stays in their comfort zone, the weaker their ability and mentality become, which causes a lack of confidence.
Growing and becoming confident means becoming comfortable with discomfort.
Everything that a person finds uncomfortable teaches a person how to grow and why a person should grow.
These situations include the lack of confidence a person shows to do something new and the lack of self-confidence a person shows when presented with an opportunity above a person’s level.
5. Depending on others
Since confidence comes from putting in the work, a person who depends on others to get things done doesn’t build confidence but builds fake confidence.
No wonder a person can’t build confidence in himself if he can’t do a simple task like going to a restaurant alone.
Everyone is dependent on their parents as a kid to get everything they want.
A person who continues to live under the shadows of their parents builds no confidence in leading his/her life alone.
A person has to be able to cross that boundary and live on his own for a while to prove to himself that he’s able to take care of himself.
6. Pleasing people
Pleasing people makes a person mentally weak and causes a lack of confidence. People pleasers may be liked by people who can’t see the lies behind the face a person puts on.
The more a person lives by pleasing others, the less confidence a person can have. This trait continues until a person gives up the fake personality they have built.
A person will have strong confidence in himself when he builds it in his true personality and can stand up for himself if he’s different or is unaccepted by others.
