How the Right Role Model Can Enhance Your Confidence

How the Right Role Model Can Enhance Your Confidence

Choosing the right role model can improve your life in a vast number of ways. In fact, this is an incredibly potent tool for improving the way you come across to others.

The problem? Many of us have either no role models at all, or we have the wrong role models.
In either case, we’re comparing ourselves to the wrong people. Social comparison theory from psychology tells us that we’re always comparing ourselves to someone. In fact, this is how many of us assess our own happiness and our own success.

That is to say that we don’t judge what we have on its own merits, but rather we judge it by comparing it to what others have. You feel good because you have a widescreen TV. But then you feel bad because you realize the neighbor has an even bigger one!

If we weren’t comparing ourselves to others all the time, we’d be more content!
Problem is, most of us are comparing ourselves to the heavily doctored and carefully selected images that are put out on social media and to the celebrities that are practically entirely fabrications. No wonder we’re low in esteem!

So the scenario might well be that your sense of self-worth is coming from a comparison you are making between yourself and a celebrity who is heavily airbrushed and a billionaire.

The Right Role Model

Carefully choosing a role model can change this. It can give us realistic aims while still providing us with some motivation and the right goals to set about improving ourselves.

The right role model will be someone who is perhaps more successful than us in terms of their career or the way they present themselves. But at the same time, they are also similar to us and what they represent is just within our reach. By being this way, we are pursuing someone who provides us with that little bit of incentive and motivation but at the same time, confidence and inspiration in terms of what we can become.

In short, you’re looking for someone who is like you but just a little ahead.
And don’t follow false idols. Remember that even the people who you respect a whole lot are only human and they have their faults too. Remember that behind the Instagram account is a real-life person who has their bad days too!