How to build your confidence

Low confidence can impact your mental health, create a general sense of lack of control, and can cause you to miss out on opportunities that you may otherwise have stuck your hand up for. So what can you do to turn this around and build your self-esteem?

1. Acknowledge your strengths and achievements

Take the time to sit down and write out what you are good at, and your successes. Get a friend or family member that you trust to review this list, and make sure you haven't left anything off. With an outside perspective, they may surprise you with points that you may not have considered or seen. By monitoring progress and the areas you are strong in, you'll begin to build your confidence.

2. Stand with your shoulders back

A confident posture creates a feeling of power in individuals, as a study published in the January 2011 issue of Psychological Science shows. In turn, it can make people behave like more like they are in charge. Standing with confidence can positively impact how people view themselves even more than a title or position, and it can change how others interact with you as well. So even if you feels strange to do so, stand with your shoulders a little back to improve your posture, and see how it changes your confidence.

Building better sleep habits

Getting good sleep impacts your health in a myriad of ways. Depression is influenced by it, as is your body's ability to heal itself. It also helps your brain create new pathways, increasing your ability to retain information. Luckily, even if you don't sleep well currently, you can learn to create good habits.

1. Keep regular sleep patterns

This may be a tip you've heard many times before, but there are a lot of reasons why keeping regular hours for sleep is important. Waking up at a different time in the morning can upset your circadian rhythm, creating an effect similar to jet lag. Even if you suffer from a bad night's sleep, it is better to get up at the same time than to sleep in. Getting up later can make falling asleep the following night more difficult, compounding the problem.

2. Bedtime buffer zone

Allocate a period of time before bed and dedicate it to relaxing. Avoid dwelling on problems or thinking about what you need to do the next day. If possible, stay away from electronic screens during the buffer zone as well. The blue light emitted by them can inhibit the levels of melatonin released, which is a sleep-promoting hormone.

3. Don't fall into clock watching

If you are struggling to sleep, it is always tempting to check the time. Doing so only heightens your anxiety about not being able to sleep, and makes you less likely to be able to slip into slumber. Try thinking about things that are relaxing, or that you are grateful for, to slow your thoughts and let you drift off. If sleep is definitely not coming, it is better to get up and do something relaxing for a while longer before attempting to go to bed again.

Making your habits work for you

Habits are something that your mind does automatically once a trigger has been activated. Requiring little thought, they can be hard to break, and aren't always easy to form.

But investing the time and patience to create a set of healthy habits can pay off in the long run. Being able to fall back on them when you are tired or stressed can be a relief, and help you stay on track. For example, if you create the habit of reading a good book after a stressful day, rather than turning to unhealthy snacks and a mindless movie, you are able to change a time-wasting, unhealthy habit into something productive.

Creating habits isn't easy, so focus your energy on building up ones that benefit you the most. Look at the processes you fall-back on when times get hard that leave you feeling worse off. See if you can change these into something positive instead.

Information overload

With an EA's role being so varied, it is easy to feel overloaded with ideas, projects, and information. Instead of tearing your hair out, learn ways to help you keep afloat when this happens.

Figure out what information is important, and what isn't. The sheer volume of information available can be too much to take on, but when you filter out what's actually useful, you'll be left with a much more manageable level. Don't feel like you need to deal with everything at once, either. Set it aside, and dedicate time to working through it when you're not trying to multitask. If you can hand information on to someone more suitable to dealing with it, do so. It's not just your Executive that needs to know when, and how, to delegate.

Critical thinking

Decisions are a large part of an EA's life. Critical thinking is a process of making connections between ideas, and evaluating information presented to you. By improving your ability in this, you can make better decisions more reliably, and explain the logic behind your choices.

When presented with a decision, formulate questions around the situation and try to keep them straightforward. When you've gathered the information you need, check the basic assumptions involved and don't be afraid to question them if you need to. Consider where the information came from, and if it's from a trusted source.

Think about the implications of each decision you can make. Don't just focus on the immediate rewards, but look at the long-term effects. Explore what other people think to understand what appeals to them. If it's a viewpoint that you disagree with this process can be especially beneficial, as it forces you to consider why your own decisions.

Taking these steps will help you make more informed decisions, and the more you practice critical thinking, the more you will apply it out of habit.

Understanding mistakes

No matter how skilled you are, how attentive, and how careful, it is impossible to completely avoid making mistakes. They may make you feel awful, but they can also be a really good learning point so it is worthwhile examining them. Some mistakes are just plain silly. These include things like spilling coffee, tripping over something, or hitting a wrong key.

Other mistakes can be easily understood, and simple to correct in future. Examples of this are not including the right people in an email chain, or running out of stationery due to not knowing how easy it is for pens to vanish. Then there's the mistakes that require more effort to correct. For example, producing a report that lacks the detail it needs due to not understanding how to use the software, or regularly running late for work. With practice and dedicated time these can be reviewed and broken down into components to work on, so that they don't occur again.

The last category of mistake is where there are so many complicated aspects to it that there's no real way to avoid making the same error again. This can be in part because the same situation is unlikely to ever reoccur.

Figuring out what type of mistake you have made allows you to analyse it, and understand what information you can take away from the situation to use in future. Though you can never eliminate mistakes, you can still reduce the frequency and severity of them.