Everyone has heard the phrase fake it till you make it, but sometimes it’s easier said than done. However, if you start focusing on your perspective on life and how you are talking to/about yourself these small steps will make a difference in how people see you.
Mindset
Mindset plays a huge role in the energy you put off which in turn impacts the energy that you are putting off and how people see you. Someone who is always looking on the bad side and only putting out negative energy is not going to be someone that people want to be around. We want to be around people who are radiating positive energy, fun to be around and have a more optimistic view of the world. This does not mean you ALWAYS have to be positive, and faking happiness all the time by feeling like you must put on a smile 24/7. A positive mindset means acknowledging all of your feelings, even the bad ones because we are all human and it’s okay to feel all of the emotions. The difference between a negative mindset and a positive one is that a positive mindset allows you to take a second to acknowledge and feel whatever feeling it is and then spin it in a way that adds to your life instead of seeing it as the end of the world. A positive mindset looks like having an open mind and welcoming all the different things that come into your life. For example, if you are feeling very overwhelmed or left out which are common feelings as college students, someone with a positive mindset would take these feelings as a sign to check in on yourself and do some much-needed self-care.
Self-Talk/Image
We tend to overlook just how much the way we see ourselves impacts how others see us. The same goes for how you are talking to yourself and about yourself. If you always have negative things to say about yourself then you are always going to see the bad things when you look in the mirror and that is going to be the image of yourself that you start to believe is true. Self-talk/image requires you to step away from comparison, because it’s easier to paint a negative picture of ourselves when we are constantly comparing our own individual selves to all the people we see on the internet. This is an extremely hard thing to navigate especially being a girl in a society that sexualizes women and fosters comparison. When we start saying positive affirmations to and about ourselves then we start to internalize those affirmations until we believe them. Start simple and write down a list of affirmations and say them to yourself whenever you need some encouragement.