How being confident and resilient reduces stress, improves self-esteem and physical literacy.

Confidence and resilience impact a person beyond making them become a better athlete and helping them curate a better body image which we’ve mentioned in our previous blogs. Feel free to check out “How to train resilience?” and “How to be more confident?” if you want to find out more about strategies and tools that boost confidence and resilience. These incredible skills have an unbelievably positive impact on self-esteem, physical literacy, and stress reduction. 

Self-esteem

We’ve already briefly discussed an aspect of self-esteem - body image in our blog. As a quick recap, confidence boosts self-esteem which allows you to focus more on your positivities and discourages you from comparing yourself to social standards; so overall, it would help you build a healthy body image.

• What does self-esteem mean?

  • Self-esteem is the overall opinion of yourself (Mayo Clinic, 2020), your abilities, strengths, and weaknesses. 

• Self-esteem vs. Self-confidence

  In the first blog of our blog series [link of blog#1], we talked about the definition of confidence. Now, although these terms are used interchangeably, there is a huge difference between them. Self-confidence is the ability to believe in your abilities and strengths, while self-esteem is how we regard ourselves. There are several factors that impact one’s self-esteem including, but not limited to: age, role in society, media messages, thoughts and perception of yourself, others behaviour towards you, disability

• Relation between confidence and self-esteem

  • Having a strong sense of confidence doesn't necessarily enhance self-esteem and vice-versa

  • It is super important to understand that the underlying factors that impact self-esteem are thoughts and mindset. 

  • With a strong mindset, you don’t tend to waste time thinking low of yourself, instead, you embrace changes, accept failures, and learn from them.

  • Thinking positive and believing that you are capable of doing the impossible would make you feel better about yourself and would ultimately boost your self-esteem.

• Failure does not define you as a person

  • Everyone fails sometimes. Failure helps us learn.

  • Sometimes, it’s hard to remember that a failure does not define you. Losing a sports match, or getting fired, or getting a bad mark can all be life-altering changes, but they do not change a person’s character. 

• Strive to improve

  • It’s important to continue striving for improvement and betterment in all aspects of life: learning, improving a skill, working to become a better person.

  • Confidence helps with motivation and belief that you can achieve the improvement you are striving for

  • Resilience helps continue working towards your goals through thick and thin.

Physical literacy

• Physical literacy is “the motivation, confidence, physical competence, knowledge, and understanding to value and take responsibility for engagement in physical activities for life." - The International Physical Literacy Association, 2017

• An active lifestyle is something that works better than any pill to make a person healthier. 

• Exercise regularly

  • Resilience to exercise even when cannot see results

  • Understand that exercising will make you more confident in your abilities and your appearance, therefore exercising

• Do physical activities for yourself

  • “Be about that goal” - Coach Neal

  • Want to be physically healthy for your own self, and take the steps to make it happen for yourself

• Stop feeling guilty for not exercising

  • Forgive yourself for not taking part in physical activity, whether due to laziness, business, etc. do not let those decisions define you, instead start making decisions that will make you achieve your physical health goals

Stress

• As we mentioned stress has a huge influence on our brain and changes our body chemistry. 

• Important to know how to deal with stress and remain calm in stressful situations.

• What causes stress?

  • Stress is usually caused by being under too much pressure, facing challenges, social pressure, etc.

• Damaging effects of stress

  • A little stress is beneficial because it increases your effectiveness, however, stressing too much could only cause health problems.

  • Everyone faces challenges and experiences stress, too much stress could contribute to serious health problems such as heart attack, stroke, high blood pressure, diabetes, or even mental disorders.

• It’s not a solution

  • Be realistic and know that everyone experiences adversity and challenges, so just like everyone else, you can overcome them!