I guess you already know that high self-confidence and feeling good about yourself goes hand in hand. If you managed to be confident then you would naturally feel good about yourself. One the other hand, when you have low self-esteem, you will always be critical of yourself, therefore, you will hardly feel good about yourself.
I’m not going to tell you to build your self-confidence simply because telling you to do so without telling you how won’t help you. Of course, building self-confidence is a huge subject that can’t be written in one or two articles but the following tips will help you feel good about yourself and confident as well.
Try to impress yourself and not others
Most people, including narcissistic ones, try to feel good about themselves by impressing people around them. When they succeed at impressing those people, they feel good about themselves but for a short period of time. On the other hand, when they fail to impress them or even worse when they get rejected, they feel really worthless and incompetent.
This is a destructive way of building self-confidence and to feel good about yourself, simply because you will only feel good as long as you are not facing rejections or mistreatment, which is impossible. (See: what causes codependency)
Contrary to common beliefs, narcissists are not that in love with themselves as they seem. They only feel special and important as long as they are getting narcissistic supply by impressing people around them, but they feel worthless when they fail to do so.
The best way to feel good about yourself is to impress yourself by doing something you always failed to do. For example, if you always feel bad because you lack communication skills then learning communication skills will make you feel really good about yourself. A student who feels bad about himself because he gets bad grades will never feel good by performing well in sports no matter how everybody is impressed by his performance in sports. Getting the good grades that he had always failed to get is the only way he can solve the problem.
On the other hand a brilliant student with good grades may be feeling inferior because he’s bad at sports, therefore getting better grades will add nothing to his self-esteem unless he works on improving his performance in sports. This is the reason why you need to do things you always failed to do in order to feel good about yourself. This must be something that you badly wanted to achieve and failed and not just something you think is considered important.
Examine and fix your perception
Perception plays a huge role in self-confidence. Some people believe that they are boring, unattractive or incompetent as a result of false perception about themselves. The big problem is that, once someone believes that he is not attractive for example, every clue he receives will be interpreted in a different way. If the new co-worker didn’t say “hi” they will think that it’s because she didn’t find them attractive while in reality the new co-worker may be shy to start a conversation. See: is introversion a disorder?
I know you might be thinking that you have hundreds of proofs that you are unattractive, incompetent or unworthy but do you ever ask yourself whether these clues are correct or whether they were just the result of a distorted perception? See: why you should not care about what people think about you.