Confidence: 8 Steps to Knowing Your Worth

This straightforward guide from bestseller Nafousi (Manifest) invites readers to cultivate confidence through “self-acceptance, resilience, and a deep understanding of your own value.” Unpacking the roots of insecurity, she cites the brain’s hard-wired instinct to prioritize negative feedback and criticism as well as formative failures to measure up to cultural expectations. She then lays out an eight step process to improve one’s confidence by silencing one’s inner critic and rewriting harmful self-beliefs, cultivating positive habits that boost one’s self-perception and sense of follow-through, and channeling self-criticism into helping others. Nafousi’s persuasive advice is bolstered by bullet points, doable exercises, and vulnerable disclosures about her own struggles to build confidence, a process that she makes refreshingly clear is ongoing (“I’ve learned that confidence isn’t about being perfect or never feeling fear—it’s about trusting yourself enough to take action despite those things”). Those struggling with imposter syndrome or low self-esteem would do well to take a look. (Dec.)