Making Friends When You Lack Confidence

It can be extremely challenging to make friends when you lack confidence in yourself. For one thing, you may be inclined to avoid social situations, so that you don't give yourself an opportunity to meet people. This can make your problem worse, because if you avoid social interaction it only becomes more difficult to force yourself to talk to people. If you don't practise your social skills, when you finally do try to interact you may find yourself behaving in an awkward manner and your confidence plummets further. Even when you do manage to chat to people, you may not have the confidence to develop the friendship further.

Consequently, it can be a very lonely life when you lack confidence. Not always, though, as you may be one of those people who is able to hide the fact you don't have very much confidence. To everyone else, you may seem to be outgoing and charismatic when the reality is that you question yourself constantly and often wonder why anyone would want to be your friend. At least you are able to put yourself in a position to meet people. If you lack confidence and also suffer from severe shyness, you may really struggle to socialise with others. You may be lucky enough to have a small group of friends who you feel comfortable being around, or you may not.

It is when you have no friends at all that you can find yourself growing depressed. Unless you happen to be a loner who enjoys your own company more than anyone else's, the chances are you want to fit in and be accepted. You want to be able to go out with friends and have a good time, but without the confidence to meet people and open up, this is obviously difficult. It doesn't help when everyone else you know seems to have lots of friends. You come to see yourself as the black sheep of the family – the person no one else understands or can relate to – and so you withdraw deeper into your shell.

People are generally drawn to other people with confidence, because they don't want to have to constantly provide reassurance to their friends. Of course, offering reassurance is part of being a friend, but you don't want to have to tell your friend that she is attractive, slim and flawless every day when she is complaining about being fat, ugly and stupid and is evidently none of those things. It therefore helps to be confident when you're on the look out for friendship, but at the same time, you have to put yourself out there and risk rejection so you can actually gain the necessary confidence to make more friends.

Besides, everyone has certain aspects of themselves they are not particularly confident about, so you just have to try to get past your lack of confidence and instead focus on what makes you great!