Nervous about asking that girl you like out to lunch or dinner? Does your heart rate shoot up, do your palms get sweaty, or do you stutter when simply trying to start a conversation with the opposite sex?

This is a sign that you may be lacking in the confidence department — a major reason for why you seem to have difficulty getting a first date with a prospective partner.

We all know that confidence is important not only for dating, but also for all your other activities, including your career. Hence, you should aim to improve your confidence level to make sure that instead of being quiet all throughout dinner parties, you can engage others in conversation and even become the life of the party.

Here are some steps on how to boost your self-confidence. Once you successfully build your confidence, we guarantee you — you’ll be landing dates like never before. Just don’t get cocky, of course.

Step 1: Gauge Your Own Confidence Level

First off, you should stop and take stock of your present level of confidence. How do you feel about yourself?

How comfortable are you interacting with other people? To do this, get a sheet of paper and make a list of your strengths and weaknesses (yes, it sounds boring but give it a try). Don’t sugar coat the things you put on that piece of paper, be frank and honest, you’re the only one to see anyway. This is important because it helps you visualize what you think of yourself and see what you like and don’t like about your personality.

Think about it, if you’re not comfortable with your own personality then how can you expect other people to be?

Step 2: Better Yourself

After you’ve made an analysis of your confidence level and your strengths and weaknesses, now it’s time to see what you can do to address your weaknesses and intensify your strengths. Say if your weakness is your health and diet, then you know that you should make that change to healthier food and more exercise. Instead of sitting on front of the TV, eating that bag of chips and drinking soda, try jogging around the park, eating more vegetables and drinking more water.

Sounds drastic? Well, it doesn’t have to be. When you start to exercise, you’ll be in pain the first time you do it. What matters is that you should be able to surpass the pain with the belief that you’re doing this to make yourself better.

If you think you’re clueless about what’s going on in the world at large, start watching the news, readings journals or newspapers, and find that one book you’ve always wanted to read. Being updated gives you more things to talk about with another person which makes conversations more interesting. These are but a few of the examples but I’m sure you can figure out a way to reduce your strengths, you’ve just always been afraid to try.

Improvement Inside, Improvement Outside

When you start changing yourself for the better by improving your character and habits, you then become more comfortable with yourself and it’ll start to manifest itself externally. You’ll have more spring in your step, you won’t get exhausted climbing those stairs, your clothes won’t be so tight and you’ll be smiling more.

To complement this external improvement, try to go shopping for new clothes to fit your new outlook. Think of it as doing away with the old you and start a new chapter of your life, out with the old and in with the new (give your old clothes to a charity, giving usually makes one feel better).

At this point, you’ll have greatly improved your self worth, and you won’t have to settle for second best anymore. You should know that you deserve to be happy and deserve the best that you can get. You feel good inside, you feel good outside, now it’s time to do a road test of your newly developed confidence.

Start Dating

Now that you’re more confident because of the improvements you’ve made to yourself, you should now be able to walk up to somebody and ask them out. Don’t worry if they say no, don’t take it to heart, just accept that no gracefully and move on to your other prospects. The more people you meet and talk to, the better you’ll become at this so just keep at it.

Rejection is generally viewed as a negative thing, when you take it to heart, chances are you’ll just revert to your old self and all your effort would be for nothing. So with this, avoid being negative or cynical, it’ll certainly drag you down and affect your external manifestation. Think of rejection as a lesson learned and additional experience, nothing terrible, just something that is. The measure of an individual isn’t how many times you get knocked, down but how many times you get back up.

Enjoy and Maintain Your Success

Once you’ve got everything right, you being healthier, happier, more interesting, more sociable and more confident you, then become more desirable for others and you become more comfortable with yourself. Don’t allow yourself to backslide into that person you didn’t like, work harder to carry yourself through the more difficult days and before you know it, everything gets easier because you know you can surpass any challenge.

With your confidence at an all time high, you can be sure that you’ll attract more of the right people to your side and by knowing your self worth, you’ll be able to shrug of rejection and criticism and view these in a different light not just now but for the rest of your life.