Jessica Albas self-confidence hack might surprise you

Jessica Alba's self-confidence hack might surprise you Jessica Alba's self-confidence hack might surprise you Jessica Alba seems confident, but she admits that in the past, she’s made the mistake of placing too much weight on other people’s voices. The actress and entrepreneur recently joined Arianna Huffington on the  Thrive Global Podcast, in partnership with  iHeartRadio  and  Sleep Number, where she explained the mindset she’s developed that has allowed her to take  failures  and see them as opportunities to actually  gain  self-confidence.“I think I gained more confidence through making mistakes,” she tells Huffington. Alba explained that earlier in her career, she often harped on other people’s opinions, and even allowed those voices to interrupt her own self-assurance. But over time, she’s learned that her own voice is the one that truly matters.“When I made mistakes in not trusting my gut for long periods of time, it made me not really care about other people’s opinions as much,” she explains. “Until you’re in my shoes and you really understand the situation, it’s really difficult to understand what’s going on.”For example, Alba says that as an actress, she faced  rejection  left and right, and had no choice but to take the criticism, learn from it, and prove people wrong.“When you’re an actress, there’s nothing but rejection,” she admits. “For every yes, there’s a thousand no’s telling you every reason, in a really terrible way, why you aren’t good enough.”Perhaps that’s why Alba handled the criticism so well when she decided to expand her career to entrepreneurship and people questioned her ability to make the switch. “Everyone just said, ‘But you’re an actress! What do you know about supply chain, or this distribution model, or this business model that does this?’ ” she recalls.According to Alba, gaining  self-confidence  all came down to listening to her own  voice  and maintaining perspective. In fact, she says keeping that context in mind can make a world of a difference when people tell you youâ €™re not good enough: “Other people are just giving you their own reality and their own … perspective and their life experiences, but that doesn’t have to be yours.”To find out more, listen to the full conversation on iHeartRadio,  here. You can also listen to the Thrive Global podcast internationally for free on  iTunes.This article first appeared on Thrive Global.