Quigs here!

If you haven't kept up with my confidence series, feel free to check out my previous two blog posts, linked here and here. I dove into the importance of confidence for your overall wellbeing and five ways of building confidence in yourself.

We are always growing, adapting, and changing. Developing self-confidence can traverse ALL aspects of your life: self-love, romantic relationships, career, and so much more. I've specifically seen a huge change in my career when it came to being in front of the camera as I grew my inner self-confidence. I didn’t always have the confidence to strike a pose, and today, I want to tell you a story about when I first started posing.

Above were some of the first photos I took for Instagram when I started “blogging” my outfits. The first two were taken in 2012, and the second two were taken in 2014. As you can see, I just stood on street corners... for more than two years. Was I a pro? No! Did I feel uncomfortable? Yes! And it clearly showed.

However, I kept posing for photos anyway. I read that to “master a skill,” it takes 10,000 hours of practice (Malcolm Gladwell). I knew the magic ingredients would be time, repetition, and confidence. I first looked to build my confidence internally. I didn’t care if I wasn’t great at posing because I believed in myself. I experimented, let go of my fears, and opened up. I realized my own worst critic was myself, and that if I didn’t push past my own judgements, I would never be able to put in the hours to master this skill.

The moral of the story is we all start somewhere. We are always learning and developing new skills. We cannot become an expert of anything overnight, but we can take action toward believing in ourselves and our talent. Eventually, we will look back and see how far we’ve come.

What’s one skill you want to master? Let’s talk about it in the comments below!