How to Build a Stronger Character That Will Impact Your Life

Character is defined as an individual’s mental and moral qualities. It describes your moral and ethical personality traits such as honesty, bravery, kindness, strong-willed, persistence, empathy, and many others. Every one of these traits you possess creates who you are as a person.

Why do you need to know your character?

You need to know your character because it is the foundation of how you will act or react to situations in life. Understanding your character is more than just knowing what your personality traits are.

Learning About Yourself

Learning how to better yourself starts with honesty. Being honest with others will allow others to open up to you. The more you allow others to open up to you, the happier you will be. Staying strong will allow you to face your fears. Once you face your fears, you’ll be able to accomplish anything in life. Showing kindness to others will allow you to spread kindness, which can lead to greater compassion for yourself and others.

Always remember that building your character is a continuous learning process. All your traits help you think a certain way and help mold you into who you are. By trying to better these traits, you are bettering yourself and others around you. Once you start your journey to building your character, these traits will guide you to making the right decisions that will ultimately make you happier.

Self Reflection

Self reflection is the ability to analyze your thoughts, actions, and what motivates you. When you allow yourself time to self reflect, you are allowing yourself to understand your actions and how they affected you and others. By allowing yourself time to self reflect, you are taking steps to better your character.

One way to self reflect is by journaling. Journaling allows you to write down your thoughts and feelings throughout the day. Writing down how your day went can help you become more aware of your daily encounters. By writing down how your feel throughout the day, you can identify how you react to certain situations and better your emotional state. Not only can you look back on how you used to feel, but you can track your improvements.

Try meditating as well. Mediation allows you to clear your mind and focus on the present. Once you clear your mind, you allow yourself to understand your actions and your emotional health. Understanding your emotional health can help you better your character because you’ll know what negative traits you need to improve on.

Read Also: 10 Surprising Ways Self-Reflection Can Transform Your Life

Setting Goals

Setting goals is the first step into learning how to better yourself and start positive life changes. When you’re setting goals for yourself, you want to ask yourself if these goals will better your character. Ask yourself what you’d like to achieve and what areas of your character you’d like to better. Would you like to be more strong-willed? Maybe you would like to be kinder to others and yourself. Figuring out what you want to work on will help you determine your goal setting strategy.

Once you know what you want to work on, you want to be specific. You don’t want to say, “I want to be more confident.” Instead, you can say, “I will study public speaking and practice once a week.” By being specific, you know what you’re shooting for and you will have a better sense of purpose.

Try implementing the M in SMART goals. Ask yourself, how can you make your goal measurable? How can you keep track of your goal? You can start by saying, “I want to practice gratitude more often.” You can tell yourself, “I’m going to write down 3 things I’m grateful for a day.” Not only will this allow you to track your progress, but you’re reminding yourself that you want to better yourself.

Also make sure your goals are achievable. You want to make sure your goals aren’t too hard or you’ll never meet them and won’t give yourself enough credit. Try taking baby steps and allow yourself to improve little by little.

Facing Your Fears

Facing your fears is how you will learn to be mentally stronger. Life is full of unexpected situations, and how you react to these situations will only better your ability to handle change. Every time you face one of your fears, you are teaching yourself that you can do hard things.

Instead of running from problems that scare you, embrace them and think of them as opportunities. Once you start seeing challenges as opportunities, you will realize every situation you encounter is a chance to face your fears.

You have to understand that every time you face a fear you are stepping out of your comfort zone. Stepping out of your comfort zone will allow you to feel strong and build your character’s ability to handle difficult situations. You’ll be amazed at how facing your fears can help you with future challenges that come your way.

Remember every time you face a fear you are learning more about yourself. Not only will facing your fears allow you to feel stronger, but you’ll learn valuable lessons about yourself.

Showing Empathy

Empathy is the ability to understand others. When you allow yourself to feel empathy towards others, you are building your ability to create better relationships with others. Empathy allows you to not only feel what others feel, but understand how they feel.

Start by actually listening to others. When someone you know is talking, try your best to listen instead of thinking about what you’re going to say next. You may understand them better by actually listening to what they have to say. Another way you can listen is by asking them questions. By asking them questions, you’re showing that you care and want to know how they feel.

Try putting yourself in their shoes. If you ever feel confused on how to react to a situation, pretend it happened to you. Imagining how you would react if you were in that situation can help you understand how others feel.

Not only will empathy help you better your relationships, but it will allow you to grow as a person. When you try to feel others’ feelings, you open your mindset to other ways of thinking. You’ll learn to be understanding and you’ll appreciate your relationships that much more.

Seeking Positive People

Surrounding yourself with positive people will better your character because the people you allow in your life can affect your mentality. When you are around others that build you up and encourage you, you will find it easier to allow those good qualities to rub off on you. When you allow others to help you better your character, you will be put under less stress trying to figure it out on your own. Let your friends, family, and mentors guide you on how to better certain traits you want to improve on.

Allowing positive people in your life will not only help you, but those around you as well. Everyone you come into contact with will influence you in way. If you are around positive people who you look up to, you will tend to emulate them. If they have good habits that help them better their character, you’ll want to adopt those things and do them yourself.

Learn from your Role Models

Everyone should have a role model. Whether that person is your mentor, family member, or someone you look up to from afar. Why do you should look up to them? Once you know what you admire about that person, you can learn from their ways.

Learn from their decisions. Whether they be good or bad decisions, just take in what you can from their experience. You can learn from their morals and how they choose to handle situations. Not only will you grow as a person by learning from your role models, but you can teach others how to be positive as well.

Learning From Failure

We all fail sometimes. Whether it’s from school, work, or in your personal life, we all make mistakes. No one is perfect, and at any given moment we could slip up on something that can make us upset. But what we need to realize is that those mistakes we made are what helps better us as individuals. The next time you fail at something, try thinking of it as a learning experience.

Take the time to understand what went wrong and what you can do to avoid that situation next time. By failing and accepting your failures, you are allowing yourself to be strong. The more you understand why you failed will allow you to not repeat the same mistakes.

Once you start failing and learning from your mistakes, you won’t fear failure as much. Start seeing the positive in failing because every time you fail you learn something new about yourself.

Read Also: How Owning Your Mistakes Fuels Personal Growth

Being Thankful

Practicing gratitude is a wonderful way to help better your character. When you allow yourself to feel grateful, you are training your brain to look for the good in everything you do. Studies have shown that being grateful can help you with not only your personality, but others around you.

Start by keeping a gratitude journal. By taking 5 minutes a day and writing down 3 things you’re grateful for that day, you are allowing yourself to open up to the little things. Not only will this help you become more grateful, but you’ll start to see the good in everything you do.

You can also try telling others that you’re grateful for them. Take the time to thank someone for everything they do for you. Not only will telling someone you appreciate them make them happy, but you’ll be happy too!

Celebrating your small accomplishments

When you better your character, it’s important you celebrate the small things. You shouldn’t go through this process thinking about how far you have to go. Take the time to recognize how far you’ve come and pat yourself on the back. By rewarding yourself every time you meet a goal, you are training your brain to look for positivity.

Try to look back at the goals you’ve already reached. Think about how hard you worked to get to where you are now and give yourself credit where credit is due. The more you praise yourself for the good you’re doing, the more you’ll want to continue your journey of bettering your character.

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How to Build a Stronger Character That Will Positively Impact Your Life