How to Gain Confidence when faced with anxiety

Being anxious about the future can cripple your ability to do well. If you're anxious, change how you look at your future to turn your behavior from nervous and tepid to confident.
As advice site Wall Street Oasis explains, anxiety and confidence are mental cousins that can come from the same rough track. You think about your future and act based on what you see. Except that anxiety arises when you look forward and see failure. Confidence, on the other hand, arises when you look ahead and see yourself succeeding.

Of course, we're pretty bad at predicting the future, and maybe you won't fail as much as you think you will. However, your attitude about your potential success or failure can affect how you perform. If you think you're going to screw up, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Reminding yourself that you could succeed can actually change not just your confidence level, but the outcome as well

Anxiety is a very complex emotion that brings tension, unhappiness, diseases and restlessness into our lives. Latest studies show that anxiety is affecting 40 million adults in the United States age 18 and older.

It often surfaces when we go through uncertainties (living in the unknown), reject or repress our emotions, or don't get our needs met in our lives. It is also caused by many factors such as genetics, mal-nourishment (physical), personality, brain and past experiences. When we are anxious, we become impatient, aggressive, and insecure, we lose faith, trust, we play the guilt game, we feel ashamed about who we are and how we feel, we lose our confidence, we lose ourselves and we allow fear to take over our life. There are methods you can use that can help you turn your anxiety into confidence.

Count your blessings
Oprah Winfrey called Maya Angelou one morning, confused and concerned about things that were happening in her life. Angelou's advice to Oprah: "Count your blessings." Winfrey reported being surprised by the statement; after all, she was looking for advice and sympathy, not a scolding. But when she concentrated on her blessings, she realized her problems were not so big, compared with what she had. And by counting her blessings, she was also reminding herself of her accomplishments; her courage over fear in the face of danger, and her ability to overcome.

Lead by example
"What a leader does for followers is to turn anxiety into confidence." --Marcus Buckingham(best-selling author and motivational speaker)
Those in command have generally learned that workers will follow by example. When you are able to put on a brave face and make decisions despite your apprehensions, you learn to trust your gut and have more confidence in your innate abilities. You pass that confidence onto those who depend on your decisions.
According to Buckingham, demonstrating courage (as a leader) "fosters trust and sets a crucial example for others to follow at a time when they'd rather hunker down and wait for the storm to pass."

Help others
Nothing gives more satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment than helping others. If you can show someone a way to solve a problem through mentoring or volunteering, you feel more confident in your own abilities. At work, you can help guide and assist rather than demean and tease. The same is true for your friends and family. Volunteering in places where there are people needing a hand can help you appreciate the frailness of life, again reminding you to count your blessings.

Turn anxiety into positive energy
According to an expert, "Multitasking is out." It's time to realize that you only increase your anxiety when you think you're completing several tasks at once. Completing one task at a time gives you a feeling of confidence and knocks out the stress one project at a time. Having advice and backing from those who have been there can help you reach inside and pull out a healthy dose of your own internal confidence.