 What's up, wonderful website creators? All right. So recently I was asked a question and somebody asked me, what do we do when we lose confidence as a web designer, you know, lose confidence and skills and abilities or just feel like, am I good enough? And this question, it was a great question. It's something that stuck with me for, for a few days. And I guess it's because I just resonated and just related to this so much, you know, something about me is a majority of my life. I suffered from very poor confidence, extremely low self-esteem. And I never really had self-worth. It was pretty bad my entire life, even as a child. And it wasn't until about nine years ago, I started to rebuild myself. I started my journey where I basically started over and I learned to build confidence. I learned to build self-worth and self-esteem. So that's why when this question was brought up to me, it really, it hit me. And I've been working really hard on a personal level to develop confidence, self-esteem and to realize all those feelings and thoughts I thought about myself my entire life was just a lie. It was the lie. That's what I call it. I call it the lie. And it's that voice in my head that always tells me, not good enough, your failure and blah, blah, blah. You know, the voice that likes to just show up and hold me down and make me feel bad about myself. That's where I could be my worst enemy. So I've done a lot of work and I've done quite well with it. I'm in a really good position. Nine years and I've been working really hard constantly. I still am in the process to continuously work. But here's the thing. I'm still susceptible to having self-doubts, to losing confidence. And I have to be very vigilant on it. And as a web designer and as a creative and I could speak for myself and I know many other creatives and many of us that I know, we share these similar traits and some of the similar traits that we share are like perfectionism, you know, having that. It's never good enough syndrome, you know, another one is being very passionate, sometimes overly passionate and just having that drive to just want to just continuously do the best we can. You know, another one is a bit of being an introvert. Now, I know not every creative is like that, but these are common traits. Here's the thing. I could build an awesome website, put together a really dope design that does really well. Clients are super happy with it, but then also there could be case studies where we could see that this improved sales, engagement from their customers, improve and increase conversions. And when I get something like that, I have actual data and case studies and back it up. I'm on top of the world. My confidence is way high. I know without a doubt, hey, I can offer value to clients and I could really help them with their business. I'm not just talking like I could really do it. And even after having a really kick ass case study, I could fall right back and be working on a design and it just doesn't come out right. I go for inspiration on dribble, words.com. And I'm seeing some of these top designers. I'm like, why aren't my designs this good? And then I could start having self-doubt. I could start having all those feelings come back in. Like, should I even be doing this? And I have to snap out of it and I want to share with you just in case if you also can relate. And if you've gone through the same thing and if you felt the same thing, this is what I do when these feelings and this loss of confidence starts to creep in. I play the tape back. That's my secret. I play the tape back. I go back to the beginning of my journey, which is now a little over five years ago. A little over five years ago, I was computer illiterate. I didn't even know how to use a computer. I started from the very beginning self-taught. The first year wasn't that good. You know, I was just hungry, learning and excited. Second year started getting better. Third year did really well, had clients globally, started building a team, turned it into a company. Four year, learning the business side and it was just a valuable learning lesson. Fifth year, you see where I'm going. If I play the tape back from the very beginning, I start to recognize the progress and I start to look at the journey of it. And when I see it through that view and stop comparing myself to other designers, there's always going to be better designers out there. But when I focus on my journey, I look at my progress, that start to feel like, wow, I've come a long ways. Like I don't, I should not be feeling like I shouldn't be doing this. I should, these are the lies, the thoughts that go through my head because the truth is, I just continuously went up and I'm more than sure anybody feeling this, if you've worked hard, if you're passionate and learning, you're constantly pushing yourself and you're constantly driven, then I'm sure your journey has also been uphill because the more we do, the more experience, knowledge that we have, the more value we could offer clients, the more we could give to our clients and just to everyone in general. So that's my first like tool, my first, I don't know if I wanna call it trick or whatever, but it's what works for me. Another thing too, one more thing to do. And this is what I do also on a personal level as well as implementing it inside my design, my design progress and development. And that is to work on something that I call a SWOT analysis, SWOT. And that is to write down a list of your strengths and then a list of your weaknesses, a list of your opportunities and a list of your threats. Now I was given this exercise before by a business coach and when I did that, that opened up my eyes to a lot of things, especially my strengths. So I always thought my strengths were, I had a good eye for this or you know, something design related. But when I really took time to look at my strengths, these are strengths that are like core strengths. Everybody has them, you have them. You have core strengths within sides of you. All of us do. The key is to recognize it, become aware of it. Not just the weaknesses, but also the strengths. And when you really look at your strengths and you could become aware, then you could look at the opportunities that those strengths could give you. Your weaknesses, now you could look at those as well and this is where I need to improve on. Then you could also look at, you know, your threats, the things that'll hold you back that you need to be able to counter-react to. Now, just to give an example of strengths, these are my two top strengths. Empathy and the ability to get vulnerable. It wasn't anything design related, but empathy, the ability to get vulnerable. With empathy, I'm able to put myself in other people's shoes. I could put myself in my client's shoes. I could look at things from their point of view. I could also do it to their customers. I could step out of myself and I could relate. And then getting vulnerable. When I get vulnerable, it's like I am doing right here. I'm able to do this when I'm doing right here. I'm able to connect with people. I'm able to open up things that people I want to keep close, things that I used to always want to keep close. I learned to be vulnerable is actually a strength and I love it. I love it because I love connecting with people. I like people to know you're not alone. You know, you're feeling loss of confidence, low self-esteem, you're not alone, but it could be built up. You know, this is my story. This is what I went through and I share it in hopes that it could give some inspiration and it could just prove that it's possible. Well, that's it for tonight. Thank you for listening. And if you did find this useful, you know all that good YouTube stuff, like, subscribe, leave a comment too. Let me know if you have any practices or any tips on how to overcome a loss of confidence as a designer. I know the community would love to hear it and it'd be very helpful for others. All right, I'll be back soon with more web design related content. Thank you.