In order for any relationship to work in a healthy way, you must first have love for yourself. Before you go ahead and devote yourself to maintaining a relationship with another, you must exude self-confidence and self-esteem. This is particularly true and important if you're just getting out of a relationship and your confidence and happiness are wavering. Once you're confident and happy with ...

In order for any relationship to work in a healthy way, you must first have love for yourself. Before you go ahead and devote yourself to maintaining a relationship with another, you must exude self-confidence and self-esteem. This is particularly true and important if you're just getting out of a relationship and your confidence and happiness are wavering. Once you're confident and happy with yourself, you will naturally start to attract others.

So, how to go about this? Well for starters, it's vital to refrain from dating if you are working on building up your confidence. You need to be content with yourself, as you are, before you can move on to loving other people. Use this time to explore yourself, how you've changed (and how you've stayed the same), and maybe even learn new things about yourself that you didn't know before. If you jump into dating right after a breakup, you'll be so focused on finding and pleasing other people that you'll lose the important focus on yourself.

A big part of self-confidence is being content with yourself; if you're constantly underestimating yourself, putting yourself down or wanting to change yourself, you'll be hard-pressed to succeed in increasing your confidence levels. To help achieve happiness, try immersing yourself in activities that you love to do, whether they be sports/exercising, the arts, outdoors-related activities or whatever else you can come up with. Focusing on activities or hobbies that you love to do will increase your happiness, and if you improve your skill levels your confidence levels are bound to go up. Once you start taking up activities that you love to do, you're bound to experience increased self-esteem.

Another way to boost your self-confidence and happiness is to think positively. As cliched as it may sound, having more optimistic thoughts will put your mind in a more positive frame, which will then reflect back on you the more you keep it up. And then turn those thoughts into actions. Acting in a more positive way, whether it is in your interactions with others or in your day-to-day tasks, is an iron-clad way to boost your own happiness and simultaneously, your self-confidence.

These are just a few ways you can work on building your own self-confidence. Use these as a starting point to figure out what works best for you. The most important thing to remember is that you're doing this for yourself, and not in order to be more accepted by others. Before you know it, you'll be feeling great about yourself and be ready to jump back into the dating scene, renewed and rejuvenated. Do you have any other suggestions to boost your self-confidence?

Monique is a writer and recent college graduate transitioning to the working world. She currently resides in New York.