Confidence is a tricky thing. You can see it coming as it moves towards you. You can hear it. You can feel it. And you know you want it. But…what is confidence and where does it come from so you can get some?
Rather than being an attribute that is somehow endemic to someone’s personality, confidence or self-assurance comes from your appreciation of your own abilities or qualities. Confidence translates into trustworthiness, reliability, a quiet inner knowledge of capability, a radiation of positive energy.
Try to think of confidence as a muscle and like any muscle, confidence can be strong or weak or injured. To make it strong, train that confidence muscle just like you train your physical muscles.
Preparation is the key here. The more prepared you are, the more confident you will become. The more skills in your toolbox (market knowledge, marketing technique, presentation/negotiating skills, etc), the more confidence you will have at your disposal to tap into when you need it. The more exposure you have to adversity, the more confident you will become to deal with that adversity. The more support you have from colleagues, mentors, family, friends, the more confident you will become to stay positive.
Most experts agree that confidence is a product of repetition, a product of failure, a product of being familiar enough with failure that you can become confident when you are facing the risk of failure.
If you want to know what it feels like to fall from the top of a diving board or a ski run, try it…and then you’ll learn that falling won’t hurt as badly as you feared. Not trying from the top of that diving board only means becoming more fearful, tense, slow and less confident. Remember…babies learn to walk by falling…and then babies become so confident that they simply take off and run.
Learning how failure feels, how to prepare for it, and, most importantly, how to embrace failure as a learning tool is where confidence comes from. By repeatedly hitting bottom, dusting yourself off and climbing one level higher until whatever heights you reach feels like the place you were supposed to be all along is where confidence comes from.
