As you might already know, we at MarieMur strive to empower women and make them feel more confident.

And we talk quite a lot about this topic trying to figure out better ways to achieve this goal.

Our team is rather girly — there are just a couple of guys among us. So we know the struggle women deal with not just in theory. We are not exceptions, and we sometimes have issues with confidence, too.

The other day we had an interesting conversation in our group chat. The question popped up — “Are confidence and self-esteem the same thing?” It provoked a heated argument. Some of us thought that these are just two terms for one feeling. Others argued that these are two different things. 

So we deep-dived into research. And we found out some interesting ideas we want to share with you.

The main fact we’ve uncovered is quite upsetting. It’s that despite the progress in the realm of equal rights, we, women, still feel way less confident than men. 

There are quite a lot of reasons for this from the impact of the society we live in to prepossessions about females to hormonal surges. But we can’t just write off the lack of confidence on these factors and act as if it’s fine to feel less worthy. 

Our confidence depends not just on the body image but also on our career, relationships, and other aspects of our lives. However, the trick is that the way we feel ourselves and all those factors that impact us are interconnected. It means that different aspects of life from our looks to success do improve our self-esteem. Yet, the level of confidence impacts those factors as well. 

As we’ve figured this out, confidence became even more important to us. We want ourselves to be successful and happy. And by all means, we want you, our Marie Mur kittens, to be successful and happy, too. So we came up with a whole cycle of articles about confidence, the factors that impact it, and the ways to improve it. 

In this article, we want to bring light to confidence itself. What is it exactly?

How does confidence work?

We often confuse confidence and self-esteem thinking it’s the same thing. But it’s more logical to consider the latter to be just one of the parts of what we call confidence. The other two parts are optimism and self-compassion. Of course, that’s the simpler take on this matter. Yet, it should be sufficient for us now. Let’s take a look at all three ingredients in detail.

Self-esteem is about believing that we deserve to be loved and cherished, and thinking generally good things about ourselves. And self-compassion is about being kind and caring about ourselves. These two aspects stand beside each other because they’re united by a single feeling — self-love. When we truly love ourselves, we naturally want to care about our needs, mental and physical condition, and we believe that we’re worth being loved by someone else, too. 

Optimism is a different thing. It’s our ability to believe that everything will work out eventually, and we will prosper. Truly optimistic people are quite rare because the rollercoaster of life has no mercy. Nevertheless, we all should try to learn to tap into an optimistic state of mind if we want to be confident.

These three aspects combined constitute confidence — this uplifting emotion that makes us feel like we’re capable of everything. And let’s pause here and focus on this thought: confidence makes us feel powerful. Therefore, when we feel confident, we can achieve more merely because we believe that we can do what we’re up to. 

That’s precisely the reason why we decided to write about this issue. In the upcoming articles, we will talk more about the factors that impact our confidence and ways to improve it. Meanwhile, don’t forget about how gorgeous you are! And don’t allow anyone to bring down your self-esteem.

Let us know how you feel about confidence in the comments! Your thoughts will help us greatly with our future articles. 

Take care!