This is part four of a 4 part mini-course on how to build your self confidence.  To make sure you recieve any future posts as they are published  use the subscribe box on the left to have them sent directly to your inbox.

So, you feel good, you’re acting the part of the confident individual and you look good, too. Now it’s time to make sure that these feelings of positivity don’t disintegrate the minute something goes wrong.

In order to really reap the benefits of increased confidence and self-worth, you have to accept that everything doesn’t go according to plan all of the time. This has no bearing on you as an individual; it’s just a simple fact of life. We all make mistakes: it’s how we deal with them that counts. You need to try and turn a negative situation into a positive outcome and use the experience wisely in order to learn more about yourself and other people.

It can sometimes take a lot of courage to own up and admit to making a mistake, especially if it’s one that has had financial or personal implications for other people, or the company you work for. By admitting to the mistake as soon as possible, you’re demonstrating real confidence as an individual. The courage and humility required to do this will only serve to enhance your reputation in the eyes of others and it will also help you to gain closure on the event and move forward. Dwelling on the mistakes you make is a fruitless exercise and is simply time wasted that could have been put to better use.

Once you realise that you’ve made a mistake, the important thing is to try and rectify the situation as quickly as possible. Then, instead of thinking about how it could have been avoided if you’d done ‘this’ or ‘that’, think about how you can learn from the mistake and ensure that it doesn’t happen again. If the mistake occurred because you were tired, or because you were becoming too blasé about a certain aspect of your job, then you need to look at these issues and decide on a plan of action to take away the reason for the mistake occurring.

The key is to evaluate certain aspects of your life in order to ensure that you don’t keep on making the same mistakes. It’s the person who fails to learn from their mistakes that will keep making them and, if you keep making the same mistakes, then your confidence will naturally decrease until you get to the stage whereby your peers and colleagues might begin to lose faith in your abilities. It can turn into a perpetual cycle and can have a detrimental effect on all areas of your life.

If, on the other hand you learn form the mistakes you make, you will discover areas of your life that you can improve. You have then succeeded in turning the negative situation surrounding the mistake into a positive outcome. This can only be a good thing when it comes to boosting your confidence and taking charge of your life and the path you’re going to take.