SI Swim Search Finalist Gabriella Halikas Shares Her Tips for Extraordinary Confidence

Gabriella Halikas

Yu Tsai/Sports Illustrated

One of model Gabriella Halikas’s greatest attributes is her ability to help other women feel confident in their own skin and embrace their self-worth.

The 2021 SI Swim Search finalist uses her platform as a content creator to encourage her legion of loyal fans to love themselves just the way they are. The self-proclaimed “CEO of confidence,” Halikas has accumulated more than 850,000 combined TikTok and Instagram followers, with whom she regularly shares her tips for confidence and self-love.

Whether she’s catching the attention of 2016 SI Swimsuit Issue cover model Ashley Graham with her mindset tips or speaking out about categorizing models by body type, Halikas is the queen of self-assuredness. We chatted with the 25-year-old to learn more about her messaging of body positivity and confidence, how she deals with insecurities, ways to nix negative self-talk and more.

Confidence comes from within

For starters, Halikas says that confidence simply means showing up every day as your true and authentic self and living out your true purpose and passions.

“Confidence is having a deep understanding of yourself and your self-worth and always being unapologetically yourself,” she shares. “Confidence also means doing what you love and not caring what others think, and just knowing that your beauty and worth is not determined by your size or exterior appearance.”

Halikas is adamant that true confidence is internal, but says that surrounding yourself with positive people can go a long way in boosting your own self-worth. She states that doing so gives her a mental boost that allows her to be the best version of herself.

“My confidence comes from within and just being a good person and showing up every day as myself and giving back and helping others,” she adds. “I’m the most confident when I’m helping others feel more confident and love themselves.”

Halikas notes that while she was very outgoing and confident as a child, she reached a period of insecurity during her middle school and high school years. In order to work through those feelings of self-doubt, she says she retrained her thoughts and habits to rebuild her self-assurance. She advises that the process of reacquiring lost confidence requires a lot of soul searching and internal self-examination.

“How can you better yourself to be better around others? How can you help others? How can you uplift people when you're with them? What kind of energy do you want to bring to a situation?” she says, sharing a few notions to reflect upon. “And once you feel like you have found your true and authentic self, that confidence will shine from within.”

The way you carry yourself matters, according to Halikas, because other people can sense your confidence—or lack thereof—when you walk into a room.

“People feel that [self-assuredness] not because of what your body looks like or what size you are, but [because] you’re just happy with who you are on the inside, and that kind of shines from the inside out,” she says.

Maintain a positive mindset with the light switch method

Retraining negative self-talk is easier said than done, but Halikas recommends what she calls the light switch method for rewiring pessimistic thought patterns.

“What helped me a lot was, the second I would get an anxious negative thought about myself, I would immediately turn it off like a light switch and try to incorporate a positive thought right away,” she says. “So the second I’m like, ‘I’m so ugly, I’m so fat,’ I would literally shut it down almost like there was a switch and I would have to force myself to think of something positive like, ‘I’m so confident, I’m so happy, my body is beautiful.’ Switching [my] thoughts immediately and kind of just shutting down that negative self-talk was really, really big for my confidence.”

On the occasion that insecurity creeps up these days, Halikas grounds herself in gratitude, and whenever she’s feeling down, she says getting outdoors for a walk is a huge mood booster.

“I love to move my body because that helps me with my anxiety a lot,” she says. “And [it’s] less about wanting to lose weight, but more about just feeling very empowered and strong and healthy, and it helps me a lot with my mental health.”

An important part of confidence and self-acceptance, according to Halikas, is embracing your body exactly as it is. In order to be the most confident versions of ourselves, she advises that we shouldn’t allow society to dictate the way we view our bodies, shapes or sizes, nor should we alter the way we perceive them in order to fit into cultural standards.

“Don’t listen to what the tabloids and the media say is what’s beautiful and what’s not, because at the end of the day, that comes from within,” she states. “Really hone in on that inner confidence and don’t listen so much externally to what’s hot and what’s not, because our bodies should never be a trend.”