Does Meditation Make You More Confident?

Many are in the quest for confidence, as it helps them achieve their goals. I don’t know a single person that would deny they could do it with more confidence. But does it have any correlation with meditation, and can meditation help you build it? 

So many things go inside our mind when it runs on autopilot without us taking a step back, one of those being talking down to ourselves because of what we think we can’t do when we put ourselves next to someone else. Meditation allows you to change that, at the cost of some levels of discomfort by working on yourself but making it worth it at the end of the day.

There’s no shortage of self-improvement books mentioning meditation, to the point where some see it as a cliché. 

Is it really that good? Well, meditation expands your mind and consciousness and lets you experience life in a way you’re not used to, but said way is the way that brings you closer to the changes you want to see. 

Deep down, we all want to develop good habits and make it our default, but not everyone is willing to put in the work for that. Meditation can be seen as a transaction in that sense: you devote time to the practice, and you wound up becoming calmer, more confident and increasing your quality of life. 

Positive Self-Comparisons

You might have been told that to live a happy life, you must not compare yourself to others. And while that thinking has merit, meditation lets you challenge this kind of thinking. Meditation gives you an expanded perception of reality and based on your situation, shows you what’s possible. 

It wires the mind to think more positively towards what you can achieve. Without meditation, you might have seen someone else’s achievements and seen it as this impossible threshold to reach for yourself, whereas with meditation, you see what’s possible instead. 

It’s a paradigm shift that makes all the difference on whether you bring yourself down or bump yourself up. I don’t believe it’s possible to stop comparing ourselves to others, but I believe it can be done in a way that doesn’t bring you down. With meditation, you see that what’s in your way is more often than not yourself.

Self-Awareness

Being aware of what you’re capable of can be crushing at times, but it doesn’t have to be. Instead, becoming comfortable with that fact, you’re accepting such reality, which in this case is the cost to change. 

Meditation makes you humble, it allows you to see things from a third-person view, where you let go of judgment and just allow your thoughts to exist, at least, that’s how it works with mindfulness. 

Some of these thoughts are often mixed with internal dialogue telling you can’t seemingly do a certain thing. 

That is, unless you put this to the test, challenge that part of yourself that was holding you back and break that thinking. With meditation, you gain self-awareness, you can use this in your favor or let it be used against you by your mind. 

You can become your own best friend as much as you can become your worst enemy. The first step is allowing yourself to be humble enough and admit something isn’t how you want it to be in your own life. 

The biggest obstacle to this is the ego, it holds this perfect image and subconsciously, you’ll want to live up to that image. 

However, you’re not allowing yourself to grow. Meditation allows you to pause that ego, see what the problem is and change things from there, ultimately putting you in a situation where you genuinely achieve the image said ego wanted you to achieve, but of course, with a lot of confrontation of unpleasant thoughts. 

Few people want to admit to themselves if they have a problem without doing anything about it. 

The self-awareness meditation gives you, as well as the option to act in a way where you fix such problems is what brings genuine confidence. 

As soon as you understand the root cause of the problem you’re having, often done through shadow work meditation, it’s then when you can tackle the source of said problem. Meditation wire your mind to see solutions where others would see problems. 

Rewiring

Changing the subconscious mind is also one of those things that are written in almost any self-help book, but there’s a good reason for that – your subconscious perspective on a situation can dictate your response to said thing. 

If you engage in a meditation that explicitly has the purpose of making you more confident, you could end up moving your subconscious in that direction. 

Assuming the audio or guided meditation you listen to is followed by actions that match said confidence. Matching your actions with your thoughts deepens such a belief system and matches the two at the same frequency. 

This can also be done through positive affirmations, which align with what your goals are. If it’s on your subconscious, and you take action on the said objective, you get better at said thing. 

Often, this is done through mindful practice or what’s also known as deliberate practice, where it’s the only known way to get good at anything. 

The better you get at said things, the more evidence you have for your subconscious mind to overcome some of the pre-established blockages it had that held on to false beliefs on what you could and couldn’t achieve. 

The only thing you can’t do is what you convince yourself that you can’t do, but with meditation, you’re always breaking that ceiling and going beyond yourself. 

It takes consistent practice, but there’s nothing better than breaking an old paradigm on what you thought you couldn’t do, proving yourself otherwise, and rewiring your beliefs entirely.

 Don’t get me wrong, this can be a multi-month or multi-year process, but it’s available for those who stick through. Rewiring the subconscious is changing entire systems in you that have been there for years, so it’s only natural to expect some resistance while trying to change this. 

Anticipation

Meditation teaches you to live in the present moment. When we’re not meditating, it’s common for the mind to wander into the future or the past. 

The past usually is used as a reference for track records of past failures or successes, and basing our beliefs on how possible something is. 

However, this backfires when we’re talking about confidence, because many tend to talk themselves down because of their past failures and project the future is gonna be the exact same. It’s a survival mechanism to prepare us for the worst. 

This is another paradigm break we do with meditation because with meditation, we are the present moment and we’re no longer basing our decisions on past or future failures, but the present. 

This is liberating in the sense that if you fail at a certain thing, the past is no longer there to haunt you with it, allowing you to make the progress you were trying so hard to make. 

No matter if the past is pleasant, all we have is the now, and the more we focus on one task or goal in question, the more likely we are to perform better at said things. 

That’s why meditation perfectly goes hand in hand with exercising or reading. 

That will allow you to give birth to a new cycle of successes which in turn, bring confidence, overwriting the mind of any negative beliefs you had about yourself. 

We tend to anticipate that what’s about to come is the worst that’s gonna happen, getting rid of that anticipation is liberating. And the negative anticipation you had to begin with, rarely ends up happening. 

Is Confidence Important?

Confidence is important, but not as much as focus and discipline. With focus and discipline, you do say things you want to do, no matter what, and you’re bound to get better at said things, without relying on things to be a certain way or feeling a certain emotion. Confidence will come as a byproduct of the result of your output through discipline. 

Discipline doesn’t sound attractive, but it’s the most underrated gift you receive when meditating, it makes you unstoppable. Confidence is a bit like motivation, in the sense that if you don’t feel confident about doing something, you may not end up doing it. 

So, while confidence can give a great sense of achievement, it’s not exactly the best way to measure how well you’re gonna perform at something. 

Of course, there are exceptions to this, but you’ll often find yourself being a more confident person and disciplined the more and longer you meditate.