5 Ways To Help Your Daughter Build Confidence
One of the topics that parents ask me about most often is confidence. They can see their daughter’s potential: “if she just had more confidence…” they say, “then she could excel.”
Confidence can be surprisingly tricky. Take participating in sports, for example. Even when an athlete increases her skills and rises in competition level, she can still struggle with confidence. She is not alone.
All young girls are affected at times by self-doubt, mistakes, and fear that they don’t have the ability to meet the demands placed upon them.
The concept of confidence itself can be as elusive as the experience. Is it an emotion? (“I FEEL confident today”) Or is it a characteristic? (“I HAVE confidence” or “I AM confident”) And where does confidence go when girls exclaim that they have LOST it?
Here’s the thing: Confidence is all of those things.
Confidence is a product of feelings and thought patterns, which together form a BELIEF in one’s ability to be successful, both generally and in particular situations.
Related: 3 Strategies To Step Forward Bravely When You’re Nervous
Confidence can come and go depending on the situation (state confidence), or it can be a stable positive belief about one’s abilities that applies across all situations (trait confidence). But more important than the murkiness in describing the concept, is how clear we are on the benefits of cultivating confidence.
Research consistently supports what many parents see at home:
Confidence contributes to more successful performances, higher levels of motivation, less anxiety, and increased resilience.
Unfortunately, some research indicates that girls, in general, report lower levels of confidence than boys. That makes it is even more important for parents to intentionally find ways to boost and maintain their daughter’s confidence.
The good news is that sports are a great avenue for doing just that. Those who participate in sport have been shown to have higher levels of confidence, compared to those who don’t. That means girls who are involved in sports are already well on their way to increasing their confidence.
If sports aren’t her thing, girls that participate in ZGiRLS have an even better advantage, given that the ZGiRLS Curriculum™ includes an entire unit designed to help girls constructively build their own self-confidence.
When a girl is confident, she can take on the world.
Though it is essential for your daughter to learn how to cultivate her own feelings of confidence, building your daughter’s confidence can also be an interactive process with other people in her life. Not surprisingly, parents play an important role in increasing both state and trait confidence in their kids.
Here are a few tips to help bolster your daughter’s confidence:
Acknowledge her effort (rather than just outcomes). Find something specific that she worked hard on and help reminder her of the effort she put into it. It’s essential to celebrate the process.
Show her video of her accomplishments, improvement, and skills. Encourage her to make a “highlight reel” linking clips together.
Reminisce with her about her past accomplishments, and get her talking about how she felt in those moment and how she put in effort to achieve those accomplishments.
Remind her of everything she does to prepare for a competition or performance. Encourage her to write a list, and be sure she includes things that are outside of practice as well (good sleep, healthy nutrition, etc.)
Encourage positive self-talk and affirmations. In a perfect world, we would all talk to ourselves with the same care and praise that we use talking to our loved ones. Remind your daughter of the power of her own thoughts: “I am growing,” “I am improving,” “I am resilient,” “I am brave.”
Confidence-building is a complicated and broad topic. The ZGiRLS Curriculum™ includes a variety of additional helpful tips for parents to support their athletes in the development and stabilization of confidence. Because you shouldn’t have to have a Ph.D. to raise your teenage daughter.
Learn how ZGiRLS can provide your daughter the confidence and inner strength to channel her greatness while navigating life’s challenges.