Former First Lady, Michelle Obama is a strong advocate for education. She once said, “Through my education, I didn’t just develop skills…I developed confidence.” Many people would love to learn how to develop confidence too.
Hobbies can be trivial pastimes or interests that fill the time between work or other responsibilities and sleep. Alternatively, they can make a profound difference in our lives. Read on to learn about 10 healthy hobbies that can help build confidence and self-esteem.
Health and Wellbeing
What’s a healthy hobby? On the face of it, a healthy hobby could be one that involves physical exercise. An example could be jogging or swimming.
This idea of health is a limited and unhelpful one. Health and wellbeing are much broader concepts. It includes both physical and psychological health.
Thinking about health and wellbeing as both physical and psychological or emotional recognizes that they are interlinked. Poor psychological health can have a detrimental effect on physical health and vice versa. Aspects of our psychology such as confidence can be linked to physical factors such as nutrition, obesity, blood pressure and more.
Healthy hobbies can, therefore, be defined as any hobbies that have a positive impact on your physical or psychological well-being. A key aspect of your psychological wellbeing is confidence and self-esteem.
There are many ways of taking up meditation. It may be included as part of a yoga or tai chi class. It’s often a feature of mindfulness training.
There are many different traditions of meditation with a variety of approaches and techniques.
Some traditions emphasize visualization, repeating mantras or chanting. These approaches may work by occupying or filling the mind in order to exclude negative or unhelpful thoughts.
Other approaches emphasize the emptying of the mind. The focus with this approach is on your own breathing, self-examination, and awareness.
These techniques can be helpful by inducing relaxation, reduced anxiety and feelings of wellbeing. Low self-esteem and lack of confidence can arise from difficulty with being anxious or relaxed. Mindfulness practice such as meditation has been proven to have beneficial effects on self-esteem.
2. Creative Arts
Art therapy has long been used to assist people with a range of health issues. It can provide a distraction from worries and anxiety but it may do much more.
Expressing thoughts and feelings through creative art can be a release for your emotions. Communicating through visual arts, writing or even dance might be easier for you than discussing your feelings or engaging with people in other ways.
There is a boost to self-esteem and confidence that comes from learning a new skill and successfully expressing yourself. It’s only a short step to realizing that success in one area of your life could be followed by success in another.
Yoga can start simply with a beginner’s class. As your flexibility and knowledge grow you can quickly perform more difficult positions. At the same time as your physical capability develops you also develop your breathing control and some mental techniques.
Breath control is very closely linked to anxiety and confidence. Anxiety and stress are associated with shallow and ineffective breathing. Better breath control has the effect of calming the body and mind and helps confidence for example with speaking in public and dealing with conflict.
Not everybody has had a positive experience of education. Deep-seated negative feelings can arise out of poor academic performance and bullying in school. These experiences may have turned you off academic study in later life.
Learning as an adult is not the same as learning in school. Learning can be a hobby that rebuilds lost confidence by helping you see yourself as someone who can acquire new skills and achieve good academic results.
Taking yourself out of your normal life can be an opportunity to try out new versions of yourself with no risk to existing relationships. Traveling, especially solo traveling, lets you do this.
Try a short solo trip. You have to i