Recently, someone close to me said to me “I would be confident if I was skinny.” I let this go, but I shouldn’t have. What I should have told this person is that confidence comes from within, and nothing external is going to change that.

In the purest sense, confidence is believing in yourself. It is knowing what you are good at, and it’s being completely at peace with who you are in every moment. It’s never feeling the need to apologize for who you are. One of our biggest problems when struggling with our confidence levels also happens to be one of our greatest assets—our brain. We think too much. When we are constantly thinking about how pretty we look or how awkward we feel, we are losing confidence at the same time. Stop living in your own mind and live in the moment. Have you ever looked at someone who seems to radiate confidence and wish you could be like them? I think we’ve all been there. The trick is to stay completely engaged with your surroundings at all times. Stop thinking about what other people think. Who cares if they don’t like your outfit? Who cares if they think your opinion is silly? Who cares if they think you’re too loud or too quiet? Who cares if they think you could spare the dessert? The only thing that matters is what you care about. If you’re rockin’ a badass dress to the grocery store, great. If you want a brownie after you just ate a whole pizza, GREAT! Own it! With that being said, don’t try to be someone that you’re not. If you’re not a fashionista, you shouldn’t be wearing that dress to the grocery store because it’s not going to make you feel good. All it’s going to do is make you think about what everyone else is thinking about you.

Our society associates confidence with outward appearance. Does that really make sense? Think about it. Have you ever had so many compliments on the way you look in one day, but you still don’t see what everyone else is seeing? That’s because confidence is NOT about the way we look. It’s about the way we feel about ourselves. We are all guilty of seeing celebrities with perfect bodies, perfect makeup, and perfect hair, wishing we could look like that. The thing to remember is, those celebrities have a whole crew of people to make them look like that, and they also have a lot of money to fix the things about themselves that they don’t like. But I guarantee all of that glitz and glamour is not enough to make them feel confident. I guarantee those same celebrities that we constantly glorify feel all the same pressures to fit in as we do.

Surround yourself with people who make you feel good about who you are, set goals, take risks, stop complaining, and most importantly, stop comparing yourself to others. Don’t waste your days wishing to be like somebody else, because nobody in the entire world can do a better job at being you than you. Believe in yourself and have faith in your abilities.

There is nothing more attractive than confidence. Once you see your own beauty, so will everyone else.