How To Be Humble: 11 Research-Backed Strategies That Work

Humility is a quiet strength. See what the research says about its benefits and 11 practical ways to build more of it.

A senior coach makes a call in front of the whole staff, then turns to the room and says, “Tell me where I’m wrong.”

Nobody flinches. Nobody whispers that she’s lost it. If anything, the team leans in.

That move, asking to be corrected out loud in front of everyone, is humility in action. And funny enough, it looks like pure confidence. Because it is.

Here’s the stubborn myth we need to clear up first: that humility means being meek, self-deprecating or quietly small. Nope. Real humility is a grounded confidence that boosts your well-being and pulls the best out of everyone around you.

So if you’re exhausted from holding up an all-knowing, perfect version of yourself for the world to admire (a habit that lives a lot closer to narcissism than to strength), I have good news. Humility is a genuine upgrade, and you can absolutely learn it.

Here’s what the science actually says, plus 11 ways to build more of it.

What Is Humility? (Definition)

Humility comes from the Latin humilitas, meaning groundedness. It’s long been confused with self-deprecation and modesty, but true humility is better understood as an honest, grounded confidence in who you are and what you bring to the table.

Psychologists actually split it into three related flavors, and knowing the difference helps you practice it on purpose:

• General humility: an accurate, non-inflated view of your overall worth, strengths and limits, paired with genuine care for others.
• Intellectual humility: recognizing that your beliefs and knowledge might be wrong or incomplete, plus a willingness to stay open to new evidence and other viewpoints. This is the most-studied flavor.
• Expressed humility: what other people actually see in you, things like admitting mistakes, spotlighting others’ contributions and staying teachable. It’s measured by asking the people around you, not by asking yourself.

That last point is sneaky and important. Humility is one of the few traits you can’t really brag about, because the second you announce how humble you are… you’ve kind of proven you aren’t. Researchers even have a name for this delicious little trap: the humility self-report paradox.

“I’m here to get it right, not to be right.”

—Brené Brown, from Atlas of the Heart¹

Humility is often something we pick up along the way, modeled by parents, teachers or mentors as we grow up. But let’s be honest, it also shows up the hard way. Life humbles people all the time, through a layoff, a rejection, a financial gut-punch or a very public embarrassment. Those moments leave you no choice but to face a few hard truths and ask for help you’d normally be too proud to want.

Watch our video below to learn how to be happier:

What Makes a Humble Person? 9 Key Characteristics

Spend time around genuinely humble people and you’ll start spotting the same traits over and over:

• Self-awareness: a clear read on their strengths, weaknesses and how they come across
• Authentic confidence: comfort with their true self and contribution
• Openness to feedback: willingness to shift perspective when new information shows up
• Curiosity: real interest in learning new perspectives or ways of doing things
• Gratitude: appreciation for the people and situations in their life
• Generosity: giving to and supporting others, often from a place of gratitude
• Comfort asking for help: they know their limits and aren’t ashamed of them
• Accountability: they own it when they mess up
• Forgiveness: toward themselves and others, because people are usually doing the best they can

Good news, my friend? Every single one of these is trainable. Let’s get into how.

How to Be Humble: 11 Strategies to Master

Ask for advice or help

Here’s a two-for-one: asking for advice builds your humility and bonds you to the other person at the same time. It’s a real quirk of psychology called the Benjamin Franklin effect². Let someone do you a small favor and they tend to like you more, because helping you made them feel valued and competent. Weird, right? But it works.

In our article on how to ask for advice, we lay out four steps:

• Make it personal: Let people know why you chose them specifically.
• Ask something specific: Target their expertise on a real problem you’re working on.
• Express your gratitude: Always thank people for their insight.
• Follow up with actions: Let them know how their advice made a difference.

Action Step: Today, message one person whose work you respect and ask a single specific question only they could answer well.

Celebrate and empower others

Being humble means noticing the good stuff in the people around you. And here’s the thing: it’s genuinely hard to be arrogant while you’re busy celebrating someone else. The two can’t really share a room.

In a 2023 meta-analysis of humble leadership pooling 212 studies, leaders who spotlighted their teams’ strengths earned more trust and pulled more ideas out of their people. Lifting others up actually works.

Try weaving these into your week:

• Write thank-you notes that name a specific act or quality you admire. A text or email counts.
• Introduce like-minded people in your network to each other. Being connected to someone valuable feels like an honor.
• Call out great work publicly when it won’t embarrass the person, in a meeting or on social media. It makes people feel seen.
• Ask people for their ideas on something they know well. It tells them you value what they bring.

Become a forever student

Humility means admitting you don’t have all the answers and that there’s always a new angle waiting to be learned. Being a lifelong student also means staying willing to update your beliefs when better information rolls in.

This is intellectual humility, and the payoffs are real. People higher in it tend to think more clearly during disagreements, hold their political views less rigidly and scrutinize misinformation more carefully, according to a 2022 review in Nature Reviews Psychology. They also lean toward mastery, chasing challenges and sticking with hard things instead of bailing.

One honest caveat before you get too excited: a lot of this work rests on self-report and smaller studies that haven’t been widely replicated, so treat it as a strong trend rather than settled law.

To stay a forever student:

• Listen to podcasts on topics you’re curious about but don’t know yet.
• Take a course in a brand-new skill.
• Grab lunch with a colleague you rarely talk to.
• Travel somewhere new and ask locals what you should see.
• Become a master question-asker to get to know people.

Own your mistakes

Humble people have the self-awareness to catch where they went wrong, often before anyone else even notices. And when someone does point it out? Their first instinct is to understand what happened and take accountability for their part, rather than throwing up the defenses.

Owning mistakes out loud is one of the best-supported humble behaviors in the leadership research, and honestly, it’s the fastest trust-builder there is. To apologize sincerely:

• Say, “I’m sorry”
• Name specifically what you did wrong
• Express regret
• Take responsibility
• Say how you’ll change going forward
• Offer to make it right
• Ask for forgiveness

Forgive and seek forgiveness

Humble people don’t lug around the constant need to defend whatever they feel ashamed of. Because they can own their mistakes, asking for forgiveness comes a whole lot easier when they slip. They know they’re only human, so they hand that same grace to everyone else and rarely hold a grudge.

To let go of a grudge, get curious about where the other person was coming from and ask yourself this: How does my view change if I assume they were doing the best they could? It doesn’t excuse what they did, but it makes the forgiveness part so much easier.

And sometimes forgiving someone means first telling them how they hurt you. That takes humility too, because you’re choosing to be vulnerable instead of quietly stewing in resentment.

One clear approach to confrontation comes from Simon Sinek, who calls it the FBI method:

• Feelings: State how you actually feel.
• Behavior: Name the specific behavior (skip always and never).
• Impact: Explain the effect it had on you.

In action: “When you showed up late to my birthday party (behavior), it made me feel like you don’t care about me (feeling). My worry is that if it keeps happening, I’ll slowly stop trusting you and our relationship will fade (impact).”

Practice the art of listening

Humble people pull the best out of everyone they talk to. Sit across from one and you walk away feeling valued, because they’re genuinely curious and ask thoughtful questions instead of just waiting for their turn to talk. So much of good communication is really just listening well. If you’re not listening, you’re not connecting. Full stop.

To bring out the best in people:

• Don’t make it all about you.
• Ask open-ended getting-to-know-you questions.
• Reflect back what you heard: _“So you’re saying __, is that right?”
• Encourage them: “Wow, tell me more about that.”
• Empathize: “Really? I’ve been there too.”
• Hold steady eye contact.
• Put the phone away.

Stay open to feedback

Humble people don’t feel the need to fiercely defend every single position, because they know there’s always more to learn. That doesn’t mean they’re spineless or have no values. It means they hold their views with a little room left over for maybe I’m wrong here.

Unlike a narcissist, whose insecurity pushes them to white-knuckle their “knowledge” so they never look incompetent, a humble person stays genuinely curious about new ways of thinking. (For what it’s worth, intellectual humility and narcissistic grandiosity tend to pull in opposite directions in the research.)

To get better at receiving feedback:

• Ask people how they’d approach a problem you’re stuck on.
• Ask how something you made or did landed for them.
• Ask how they’d have handled it differently.
• Nod and tilt your head to show you’re listening.
• Say, “Thank you for sharing.” Then ask questions instead of explaining yourself.

Accept praise and criticism with grace

Taking both praise and criticism well is one of the clearest marks of humility. It shows you’re willing to listen and not too proud to receive support.

When someone praises you:

• Just say thank you. When you wave off a compliment, you quietly tell the other person their kind words don’t count.
• Acknowledge their kindness: “Thank you for noticing. I worked really hard on this and I appreciate it more than you know.”
• Share the credit: “Thank you! Honestly, I couldn’t have done it without your help.”

When someone criticizes you:

• Remember they usually just want to be heard, and the feedback isn’t an attack on your character.
• Stay grounded in who you are so you can hear the good and the bad. A quick pep talk or a call with a trusted friend helps.
• Thank them for the intention, which is usually to help. “Thanks for offering. I’ll take that into consideration.” Thanking someone doesn’t obligate you to act on it.
• Weigh the input against other feedback. Any patterns? What rings true? Keep what helps, filter out the rest.

Practice generosity

Ever notice how humble people seem to have a kind of glow? It’s no accident. A 2017 study on generosity and happiness found that even committing to a small act of giving left people happier than those who spent the same on themselves.

And here’s the lovely part: even humble people of modest means stay generous with their kindness, praise and curiosity. It rarely leaves them feeling used, either, because their self-awareness comes packaged with healthy boundaries. Support from a humble person feels real. No strings attached.

To start practicing generosity:

• Keep a gratitude journal. Generosity tends to grow out of gratitude.
• Take notes when people mention things they need, want or wish for.
• Surprise someone with a small gift or an offer to babysit so they can have a night out.
• Don’t hold back praise when you notice something good. Telling people their impact goes a long way.
• Build generosity into your budget, starting small if money’s tight.
• Volunteer for a cause you care about or help a friend through a hard season.

Experience wonder

One quiet mark of humility is sensing that you’re a tiny speck of life floating in a vast universe. And no, that has nothing to do with feeling like you don’t matter. Seeing yourself inside a much bigger story tends to spark awe, wonder and gratitude all at once.

When you step back to take in things outside your own little orbit, you get out of your own head. And it’s awfully hard to stay self-centered while you’re busy thinking about your place in a wider history or a bigger world.

A few ways to feel more wonder:

• Study history, including your own ancestry.
• Spend time in nature. Research shows it’s good for your mental health, too.
• Explore other cultures through travel, new restaurants or new neighborhoods.
• Spend a week photographing anything that sparks joy, then look back and notice what you’d taken for granted.

Practice gratitude

Humble people practically overflow with gratitude, because they know that who they are and what they have isn’t all their own doing. They recognize that other people helped them get here, and they actually say so out loud. Turns out there are real benefits to gratitude too, including greater life satisfaction.

One simple trick Vanessa Van Edwards uses is the gratitude totem, a symbol in your daily life that nudges you to feel grateful. Pick an object or person you see every day, and every time you see it, pause to notice one thing you’re thankful for. A few totem ideas:

• Your morning coffee
• A red light on your commute
• A plant in your home or office
• A specific time, like 11 Y
• Your partner walking in the door

Get out of your comfort zone

When you stretch past what you’re already good at, you suddenly have to lean on other people. You can’t coast on your own competence, and yeah, you might feel a little embarrassed flailing around as a beginner. Good. That awkward stretch is a fast track to humility and a brand-new experience all in one.

To build humility this way:

• Take a class in something you’re bad at. (Ballroom dancing, anyone?)
• Ask a kid in your life to teach you their favorite game.
• Learn a new language with an app like Duolingo.
• Travel to a new city with no map and rely on locals.
• Apply for the job you don’t feel quite qualified for.

Bonus: reflect on disagreements from the outside

Here’s a technique with solid experimental backing that almost nobody actually tries. When you replay a conflict or disagreement in your head, do it from a third-person, observer’s view, like you’re watching yourself on video, instead of reliving the whole thing in the heat of the moment.

In lab studies summarized in that 2022 Nature Reviews Psychology review, people who reflected this way showed more intellectual humility than those who relived events first-person. The distance cools the ego and makes room for “maybe I was partly wrong.”

Try this: Next time you replay an argument, narrate it in the third person: “She felt dismissed, and he got defensive…” Notice what shifts.

Is Humility a Weakness?

Plenty of people quietly equate humility with weakness or low confidence. Honestly? It’s the exact opposite. True humility is an honest, clear-eyed read on who you are and what you bring to the table.

It has nothing to do with low self-esteem or letting people walk all over you. It’s understanding your strengths and your weaknesses without beating yourself up over the stuff you simply haven’t learned yet.

What Are Good Examples of Being Humble?

Here’s what humility looks like in different corners of life.

Humility at work

In the workplace, humble leaders stay open-minded, which helps them make quicker, sharper decisions. Instead of flexing power, a humble leader defines the problem clearly and actually welcomes input on how to solve it.

Want a perfect example? Ted from the show Ted Lasso. Even after he’s made a call, Ted invites pushback and genuinely works to understand people’s concerns. It never has to be his way or the highway.

Effective leaders know that staying open and flexible helps them handle crises and build trust.

Humility online and on social media

Staying humble online is genuinely tough when there’s an endless feed of people to compare yourself against. Behind every polished persona is a messy behind-the-scenes nobody’s posting. And yet, some people build a real following simply by being honest and grounded.

Take Elyse Myers, a popular creator who’s candid about herself and openly grateful to her community. That groundedness has drawn a huge audience.

Online, humility really comes down to being real. The goal is to connect in a way that makes people feel seen, messy parts of your story included.

Humility with friends

Humble friends are simply the best friends. They know exactly who they are while drawing out the best in everyone around them, and they’re never too proud to ask for advice.

Think Leslie Knope from Parks and Recreation. She showers the people in her life with gratitude, and they happily show up for her in return. Generosity is just her default setting.

Humility with a partner

In a romantic relationship, humility looks like putting your partner’s needs right alongside your own, having their back even when you disagree and owning your mistakes instead of digging in. When both people are generous and committed, the whole thing becomes a beautiful place to be.

Beth and Randall from This Is Us nail it. They’re no strangers to conflict, but they back each other up and trust one another, even when the choice is hard.

Humility with family

In a family, humility looks like mutual respect, belief in one another and a willingness to learn together.

A humble family tends to share meals with friends old and new, volunteer or give back, and stay curious by exploring new foods, cultures and places. Those habits keep everyone grounded.

The Importance of Being Humble

Humility is a real strength, and it’ll carry you farther than arrogance ever could. The best part? You can learn it, whether life teaches you the hard way or you build it on purpose.

The strongest evidence comes straight from the workplace. That 2023 meta-analysis of humble leadership, pooling 212 studies, found humble leaders earned more trust, more commitment and more idea-sharing from their teams. The benefits tracked in this and related research include:

• More employees voicing their ideas
• More proactive behavior
• More feedback-seeking
• More gratitude on the team
• Better well-being
• Improved job performance
• Higher inclusion

One honest note before you close the tab: humility shows its biggest effects on relationships and trust rather than on magically making the leader personally more competent. It works mostly through other people, by drawing out their best. Its links to health and happiness are real but modest, so think of humility as a steady, relationship-building strength rather than a cure-all.

If any of this sounds like the version of yourself you’d like to grow into, you’re already on your way. Pick one strategy from the list and start there today.

Frequently Asked Questions About Humility

What is humility?

Humility is a grounded, honest confidence about who you are and what you bring, paired with openness to learning from others. It comes from the Latin humilitas, meaning groundedness, and it sits opposite arrogance while staying clear of self-deprecation.

Is humility a weakness?

No. True humility is a strength. It means understanding both your strengths and weaknesses without putting yourself down, which actually builds trust and stronger relationships. That’s a world away from low self-esteem or letting people walk over you.

How can I become more humble?

Practice it in small ways: ask for advice, own your mistakes, stay open to feedback, accept praise and criticism gracefully, be generous, practice gratitude and step out of your comfort zone where you have to rely on others. Reflecting on disagreements from a third-person, observer’s view also helps.

Why is humility important at work?

Humble leaders stay open-minded, which leads to quicker, better decisions and more trust. Across 212 studies, humble leadership was linked to more employees voicing ideas, more proactive behavior, better well-being and improved job performance.

Key Takeaways on Humility

To get the benefits of being more humble, keep these moves close:

• Ask for advice or help. People feel valued when you ask.
• Celebrate and empower others. Notice and bring out their best.
• Forgive and seek forgiveness. We’re all human.
• Practice the art of listening. Ask open-ended questions and pay real attention.
• Stay open to feedback. There’s always more to learn.
• Accept praise and criticism with grace. Don’t be too proud to receive support.
• Practice generosity. It lifts your well-being and others’ lives.
• Experience wonder. Step back to see beyond yourself.
• Practice gratitude. What you have isn’t all your own doing.
• Get out of your comfort zone. Put yourself in spots where you need others.
• Reflect from the outside. Replay disagreements as a neutral observer.

If you or someone you know struggles with humility, check out our article Survivorship Bias: Why You Might Not Be As Above Average As You Think.

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