Are relationships a confidence crusher for you? In this Soul Fit message, I’ll share 5 tips with you about ways to skyrocket your confidence. You can watch or read. Take your pick!
Improving your confidence is the first step I talk about in Love Junkies because having a healthy self-esteem or identity is vital to having a healthy soul. Not only is it vital for your own soul, confidence is one of the greatest ways to ensure a healthy relationship.
But I gotta be honest. When I started researching this topic, I couldn’t find anything in the Bible about self confidence. And to make matters worse, there is so much talk in church circles about having our identity in Christ, but I couldn’t find the word identity anywhere in the Bible.
After some digging, here’s what I found: What we so frequently refer to as our image or identity, the Bible calls our hope, confidence and trust. But you won’t find God talking about self-hope, self-confidence or self-trust… That’s right. You are catching on. God wants us to put our hope, our confidence and trust in Him.
So how do we do that? I’m a firm believer in taking the word of God and applying it to our lives. We can’t just memorize the truth. We have to activate it. It’s not the memorization of scripture that sets us free, it’s the application of truth that brings liberty.
On my website under the soul assessment tab, there are 7 quizzes—one for each of the 7 steps for breaking the toxic relationship cycle that I talk about in Love Junkies.
The 7 steps are based on a acronym, IF-I-PRAY and they are:
These short quizzes are designed to help you evaluate your strengths and weaknesses in relation to each of the seven steps. It’s only when we identify our areas of vulnerability that we can take active measures to strengthen them.
Then, each step has an entire chapter in Love Junkies completely devoted to action steps, hands-on easy-to-apply-to-your-own-life ways that can help you take scripture truths to a higher level by actually implementing them into your own daily life.
So let me share some of these action points for the first step, the identity step. Here are five ways that you can improve your confidence or your identity in Christ.
- Evaluate your thoughts. What you think about you, you will eventually say about yourself, and what you say about yourself will cause you to act that way. The bible puts it this way. As a woman thinks in her heart, so shall she be. So what do you say about yourself? Good things, or bad things? Your thoughts create who you are, but they are often hard to detect because they are silent—and some are silent killers. Your thoughts may have no external volume, but they scream above the loudest voice. It really doesn’t matter what others say about you. What matters most is what you say about yourself. Rerouting your own thoughts takes discipline, but the rewards are tremendous.
- Declare truth over yourself. I want to challenge you to make a list of positive affirmations about yourself. Then say them out loud. It may seem awkward talking to yourself, but you probably do it more than you realize. Find a time when you are alone. Maybe in the car on your way to work, or when you are in the shower. The best place is in front of the mirror. Your own ears have to hear the truth. Faith comes by hearing. You’ve got to believe truth before anyone else will.
- Avoid negative people and places. Negative people speak doubt and discouragement. You’ll walk away from them feeling deflated. If you have negative people in your life, find some new friends. Proverbs says that a woman is known by the company she keeps. You will become like those you hang out with.
- Challenge yourself to do something you’ve never done. You may have to take baby steps at first, but don’t despise small beginnings. It’s been said that every expert was once a beginner. Refuse to let fear and doubt hinder you. Then congratulate yourself for taking steps toward your goal. Praise yourself and watch your confidence improve.
- Give yourself a break. Whenever you goof up, exercise grace over your own mistakes. You give grace to others, so why not yourself? Don’t allow your self-talk to belittle and berate yourself. As you think in your heart, so shall you be. If you wouldn’t say it about someone else, why would you say it about yourself?
I hope you’ve enjoyed these tips for improving your confidence. And I hope you’ll stay tuned on this video journey as we explore ways to improve our soul health and avoid the toxic love rut. Next, I’m going to talk about mind affairs. Are mind affairs innocent or dangerous? Read it or watch it here.
HELP ! Toxic relationship s. with grown kids . Addiction
I can’t take it anymore
I’m 58 years old with a 37 year old son that can’t stay sober
I tried to reach him over holidays but he did not answer !
I have a NEW life re- married in April after being single 20 years
I have had it with addiction & the attitudes. that his life is now my FAULT
Diane, have you tried Alanon? It is a support group for those involved with alcoholics. 25 years ago, the program radically changed my life. God used the principles in Alanon to help me recover from my codependency with the addict I lived with. It was truly the springboard that helped me understand the gospel and discover peace in the midst of chaos.