Self-esteem can take a real battering when you see yourself in a negative way and the events of life just add to that self-image. Low confidence is directly related to that and it can affect all areas of a Muslims life, both in public and private.

So how do you build self-esteem? The way to build indestructible self-esteem is simple and it’s foundation is to stop relying on yourself and absolutely rely on the Creator of the heavens and the earth. This has been explained to us through the Verse of the Quran where Allah those who have patience and rely upon their lord. Having patience means to be persistent in this case, not to just lay down and accept all negative things.

In this article we will look at all the ways you can build self-esteem and confidence and also dig deeper into what causes this.

Low self-esteem often means we become withdrawn and allow the opportunities of life to pass by us because you don’t feel worthy, or confident enough to try something new. It has an all-round negative impact on a persons life. But so many just learn to accept it and live with it. In this article, I’ll show you by the permission of Allah that you don’t have to and that you can absolutely change that.

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When describing the believers who will enjoy the greatest rewards of personal achievement, Allah says about them that they are:

الَّذِينَ صَبَرُوا وَعَلَىٰ رَبِّهِمْ يَتَوَكَّلُونَ

“Those who exercise patience and put their trust in their Lord”

Surat Al-Ankaboot, verse 59.

You see in this verse Allah is describing to us how to create confidence. Confidence is something that you have to build upon your reliance on Allah. You see, we can’t rely on ourselves because right now we don’t feel like we have that confidence or that self-belief. So the easiest way and the way that Allah directs us towards building that self-esteem is to build a reliance on The Everliving, on the Creator of all that exists.

If you rely upon Allah, then there is no failing because Allah does not fail. However, if you rely upon yourself because you don’t feel like you have the confidence or the ability to do something, then you won’t do it. And because you won’t do it, by default you end up failing.

What is Self-Esteem or Self-Confidence?

I want to define for us exactly what self-confidence is, because sometimes we say self-confidence and other times we say self-esteem or self-belief. All these terms are synonymous, they essentially point to the same thing, your self-image. That’s right, how you see yourself, worthy or not worthy. Able or not able.

Your self-image, or what you believe about yourself determines your confidence level. If you see yourself as someone who can do things, you’ll be confident and have a high self-image and self-esteem. Whereas, if you see yourself as someone who always fails, or can’t do things right, clumsy or at least you doubt yourself and your abilities, then you will automatically have lower self-image and self-esteem. As a result, your confidence will be low and you will pass by on great opportunities in life and live in regret.

So how do you Build your Self Esteem and Confidence level?

First, it’s important to recognize what’s really happening here. The thing that stops us from what we want is this fear of failure or the self-doubts that we have. Sometimes we just fear to look bad in front of people. So, high confidence means having the ability to do something and feel as though you can do it or that it’s ok if you don’t get it 100 percent right because that alleviates the fear of failure.

So, going back to the Ayah of the Quran, I want you to see that you can create this sense of fearlessness, a sense of being able to do things simply by leaving the results with Allah.

The easiest way that you can achieve this high self-confidence is to rely on the creator who is able to do all things. I want you to suspend your belief or disbelief in yourself for a moment and completely put your trust in Allah who can do all things. When you do that, you no longer need to rely on yourself. All you have to do is take the steps, take the actions towards the thing that you want and leave the results in the hands of Allah.

It’s as simple as that. And that’s why Allah explains in this verse when describing the believers, He subhanahu wa ta’ala says that the believers of those who have patience.

They have patience in that they persistently take the steps or actions towards their goals.

And then Allah the Most Loving, The Most Compassionate who understands you and how you feel when you are going through this, He finishes the verse by saying, and they put their trust in their Lord. And this part of the verse explains to us that after the believers have persistently taken action (patiently), they now put their reliance in Allah by leaving the results to Allah. It’s not your responsibility to create the results. Instead, it’s your responsibility to patiently take the actions towards your goals.

Look, this is pretty simple. You take the action and then rely on Allah for the results.

Create the skill of Confidence

Notice that I said ‘create the skill’, and I did not say ‘create confidence’. The reason for that is that confidence is a skill it’s not your characteristic. Many people feel as though confidence is a personality trait or a characteristic that a person has.

People think that he or she was born as a confident person. But that’s not true, and I suggest that confidence is a skill that is built up and created.

If you think about someone that you know that is very confident in what they do, the likelihood is that they are competent in what they do. And why do I use the word competent? because they have modeled the behaviour of other competent people.

And that’s the key here if you want to become confident look at those people who have the skill or the ability to do what you want to do. Everyone is confident in something and not confident in other things. They are confident in the things that they have spent time building their skills in. And they are not confident in the things that they’ve never tried before.

The great thing about confidence is that when you’ve learned new skills over and over again, you realise that you can learn any skill and so you are not afraid anymore to learn something new, or look bad at doing something new, or even trying something and getting it wrong.

The fact is, when we begin to do something new, we will always get it wrong. We will always make mistakes and we will probably look bad and that’s okay. Because everyone has to go through that journey of trial and error. But the great thing is, once you’ve succeeded or even just improved, your confidence will increase and it will keep increasing as you get better and better.

I hope you can see now, that confidence itself can be created, simply by going through the trial and error until you improve and get better. So confidence is a skill that you should be working on. How? That’s what we’ll address in my next point.

But I want you to understand that if you think about any skill that you want, then seek out and find someone who has it. Then try your best to find out the journey they took to get there. Once you know what they had to DO to get there. Just start by modeling/ copying their behaviour one small, tiny step at a time. Keep taking those steps and soon your confidence, self-esteem, and self-image will begin to grow insha’Allah.

Confident People with High Self-Esteem always Prepare to win

Practice, practice, practice.

Practice is the mother of our behaviour. Practice helps you to make mistakes in a safe environment. Practice nurtures your actions until they become a habit. Practice helps you to build self-belief and ultimately your confidence.  In order to win mentally, you have to practice something over and over again, you have to go through the mistakes, fall flat on your face and get up and do it again. And the more you do it, the better you will become. The better you become, the more confident you will become. You see, confidence is the fruits of action. Action comes first, and confidence comes later.

Let’s not complicate this if you want to win mentally. Whatever area of your life you want that confidence in, you must practice over and over again. Visualise the end result as though you already have it and then just take action towards creating that end result.

Once you’ve visualised your end result, or how you want to be at the end of this process, then all you need to do now is take action. And that action must be taken over and over again until you become who it is that you have envisaged in your mental win.

I can’t stress how important this is because this will create your confidence for you.

How to overcome the Obstacle that will destroy your Self-Esteem

Stop the negative cycle of thoughts.

You see, all of us are talking to ourselves and most of us don’t realise. When you set out to do something, ask yourself, are you always telling yourself or thinking to yourself that ‘I can’t do this’, or ‘this is not me’, or ‘I’ve never done this before’.

These thoughts that we think on a regular basis that are negative and disempowering. They are putting a lid on your potential. You are stopping yourself before you’ve even begun to take any action or any step towards the person that you want to be. So, the easiest way to create an empowering version of yourself is to start talking to yourself using positive good words.

I suggest that you spend 24 hours or 48 hours and monitor your thoughts and write them down. It’s very important that you write it down because you will forget it because it’s those habitual thoughts. After 48 hours you will see what you are saying to yourself or thinking to yourself.

If you’re telling yourself constantly, ‘it’s not possible’ or ‘I can’t do it’, or ‘this is for someone else’, OR ANY train of thought that is disempowering, and stopping you from taking action or opportunities then this is your Obstacle.

The way to get over this obstacle is to replace those negative, disempowering thoughts with positive thoughts and statements that you can repeat to yourself. Write these positive, empowering, ‘can-do’ type statements down.

And then repeat these words to yourself for the next week, over and over again every single day. You have to talk yourself into doing the things that you want to do, instead of talking yourself out of doing these things.

Build Confidence by Remove the Negative influences in your life

Let’s get straight to the point, there may be people in your life that are constantly telling you that you can’t do it, that it’s not possible for you, or people who just don’t encourage you in any positive way. Get rid of them, if they are friends.

Okay, so maybe you can’t get rid of them. Maybe they are people from your family, so what do you do?

Negative family is a difficult thing to deal with. I would suggest that you do not pay attention to what they say about you if it is negative. Tell yourself that what they say is not you, you are who you want to be. And then reconnect to Allah at all times. Remind yourself that you are the servant of Allah, He loves you and you can do anything because Allah is on your side.

Don’t get emotional and allow those negative thoughts to dominate your mind. When we become emotional and allow negative thoughts to replay over and over, we become victims of our own negative thoughts.

Just remember Allah says about you, that you are Patiently persistent, and you place your reliance upon Allah for all your results. Let that give you the strength to just do what you need to do.

You see, if you completely connect yourself to Allah, and rely on Allah to give you the results that you want in your life, then you can do anything. Nothing can stop Allah from giving you’re your results. But you need to do your part, take action and be patient and wait.

If your negative influences are bad friends, then just get rid of them, or see them less. Don’t worry and just do whatever you have to do to create the life that you want.

Create an Action plan to build an amazing future

You have to have goals that motivate you. That means your goals have to be something that you really want, even if you feel as though it’s out of your reach. That’s something that will motivate you to take steps, to take actions towards getting it.

You might ask yourself, ‘Is that really something I can do’. And that’s okay, forget about relying on yourself for the results. Just put your complete trust in getting the results from Allah, and all you need to do is take the action, the steps towards getting it. You’re not going to make the results come to you now. You will just take the steps towards those goals, and Allah will give you the results insha’Allah when the time is right.

Confidence in the Quran

Confidence will help you in the face of the thing that you fear. The example I want to show you is from the verse of Surah Yusuf, verse 33, where Yusuf (AS) says:

“O my Lord prison is more beloved to me than what they are calling me to”

You see the natural reaction to things that we fear, is to run away from them. But in this verse, Allah narrates to us the story of the Prophet Yusuf (AS), where he calls out to Allah, asking to be saved from the trial that he is facing, and his confidence in Allah gives him the confidence to make the prayer that he is making here. He makes dua asking Allah for prison over the trial that he is facing. Who would ask for prison? You would normally run away from it and towards your desires. That was the option that Yusuf(AS) had. Either prison or to be seduced by this women.  So, look at what his reliance gave him the strength to do.

Confidence will help you to face your fears.

Allah informs us of this type of confidence by showing us the story of one of the greatest Prophets in the history of mankind. But if we look at the Prophet Yusus(AS) we can see that he was a man by himself with no family, in a land where he had no connections, no relatives, no support. He had nothing.

However, despite all of that, his reliance in Allah gave him the confidence to face the things that he feared. Don’t forget this is not a prison like the prisons that we know of today, where you get recreation time, and where you get food and other comforts such as TV and entertainment.

This is the type of prison that is like a dungeon in the darkness, in the cold and wet horrible environment that no one would want to find themselves in. Yet he faced his fear because of his confidence in Allah. Because he knew that relying on Allah meant that Allah would save him in the end. And that gave him confidence.

Building Confidence is about enjoying the process

You see, once you’ve decided on who you want to become, what skills you want to build, what goals you want to reach, then what you need to focus on the daily process of taking actions towards that goal.

There is nothing more empowering, that will help you more to build your confidence than to take action on a day to day basis. Don’t do it weekly and don’t do it monthly, do it daily. Because if you do this daily, it will build your confidence and give you the practice that you need, and before long you will realise very quickly that Allah is the one that will give you what you want.

Dua for Self-esteem and confidence in speaking

One of the great problems that many of us face and it’s something that I have faced personally, is having confidence when speaking in a public setting. So Allah teaches us in the Quran the prayer of the Prophet Musa (AS), who had an impediment in his speech. He had a stutter in speech and he asked Allah in this prayer for a solution.

Allah says:

“O my Lord, open up my chest and untie my tongue and make easy for me my affairs and make my speech understood”.

قَالَ رَبِّ اشْرَحْ لِي صَدْرِي ﴿٢٥﴾ وَيَسِّرْ لِي أَمْرِي ﴿٢٦﴾ وَاحْلُلْ عُقْدَةً مِّن لِّسَانِي ﴿٢٧﴾ يَفْقَهُوا قَوْلِي

Surah Taha, 25

This is one of those prayers that has been saved for us in this eternal revelation, the Quran. This is the prayer that the Prophet Musa (AS) made when he had to face Pharaoh, and he was not confident in his speech. If you make this prayer, then Allah will aid you. Once again we take the steps towards what we want, whether it is speaking or taking action, whatever we want, we can do it, but the ultimate reliance for results is upon Allah. If you rely upon Allah for your results and just take the steps and you will become the confident person that you want to be.

If you know someone who suffers low self-esteem and a lack of confident as so many of us do, I’d urge you to share this information with them as I’m sharing with you right now.

I pray Allah, the Most loving and generous helps you to connect to the Quran and find your solutions for life.

Jazakum’Allahu khair