There are many ways to build confidence and self-esteem, tips and life coaches and personal road maps and one-on-one exercises and so on and so forth. And for the most part, nearly all of that advice works, and should be considered. But to tell you the truth, the most direct way of achieving confidence in yourself and improving your self-esteem is going to seem so simple that you may feel ashamed for not having realized it.

Experience! It's as simple as that.

Every child knows instinctively what most of us adults somehow manage to forget over the course of our lives. Practice makes perfect. Uncertainty comes from inexperience, and if you are unsure about a given thing it logically follows that the only sure thing will be your mounting self-doubt. Nothing cuts to the heart and saps your self-confidence more quickly than that.

The best way, than, to build your confidence through experience is simply to dive in. Do not let the uncertainty cloud your mind with fears and doubt. Push through it. The best experience, it has been said, is failure. That is where you learn the most about yourself and how to persevere.

Self-esteem stems from a continued foundation of knowing how you will react to adversity and obstacles. It may seem, from an outsider's perspective, that confident people have it easy, that things always break their way. But underneath this perception, what most people never see, is the many hours of painstaking efforts and failures and redoubling of efforts that have helped chisel away the excessive doubts and fears that hold them back.

The best way is simply to dive into a given task and be ready to adjust.

For example, you develop good social skills by failing, getting embarrassed. You'll live to see another day. Only when you give up and live in isolation do you loss self-esteem and fail to develop social skills.

With each new victory and each new task accomplished, you'll quickly gain self-confidence. The more you learn about how to think critically and anticipate potential pitfalls rather than simply reacting to them, your self-esteem will grow strong.

Believe it or not, you will do yourself much more good to try a thing and fail than to never make the attempt at all, if only for the certainty that comes with knowing. If you try and do not succeed, you can try again or at least acknowledge how it played it. When you are left to wonder about the "what-if" of a thing, whether you SHOULD have done a thing, you begin to doubt yourself, your confidence and self-esteem erodes in the face of mounting uncertainty.

Self-assurance and self-esteem comes from the meeting of challenges, not in treading the easy path.

Like Nike says, Just Do It.