cranking up your confidence

Posted by mary on Monday, 13 July 2020

Confidence - that inner self-belief that you can take on pretty much anything you want and if you don’t succeed, you’ll simply try another way. Why is it that some people just seem to ooze it? For others the mere thought of speaking in public, leading a pitch, doing a presentation or following up on a potential sale just fills them with fear. A fear that’s so real it brings on nausea, sweating and racing heart. It ruins any chance you have of taking on particular challenges, realising opportunities or engaging with certain people.

When confidence is low you simply don’t believe that you can accomplish whatever it is that’s in front of you. Lack of confidence stands in your way, maybe leaving you in a frenzy of indecision or massively frustrated that you just can’t seem to do it. If you do close your eyes and jump in, anything but rampant success will crush your confidence further, leading you to hold back even more as you slide into a spiral of ‘what if’ behaviour and hey presto! - you’re stuck.

Confidence levels usually go up and down in line with what is going on in your life – if things are going brilliantly for you, you may feel ready to take on the world, potentially breeding more confidence and, in turn, more success. But when you just can’t seem to make any progress with the things you want to do or when everything you touch seems to go wrong, you can drive yourself down into a rabbit hole and find it hard to re-emerge.

And it’s when you’re in that dark and uncomfortable confidence-free zone, that you may find it hard to accept the notion that confidence can be created. External praise and pats on the back won’t build lasting confidence. It comes from within. Building it is a skill and therefore confidence can be developed.

With the challenges and changes that many of us are facing during Covid-19, it’s now more than ever that you may need to feel confident. If you want to stop worrying, understand your value and stop the negative self-talk, here are my top 10 tips to help you get cracking:

1. Stay in your zone of genius. What do you do best? Try a SWOT and aim to integrate your strengths into what you do every day. When you focus on what you do well you’ll work from a position of strength. You will be interested, enthusiastic and more confident.
2. What are your weaknesses? Understand what is holding you back and make a plan to work on it: swot up on a hot topic or new ways of doing things, book some training, learn a new skill, engage with different people or groups at work.
3. Have a growth mindset. Remove the low confidence label that’s in your head. Be curious. How can you change? What can you do differently?
4. How do you want to show up at work or in your business? Try acting ‘as if’ and form the habit of believing in yourself.
5. You’ve had some great achievements and some small ones. Remind yourself of your successes, celebrate them and don’t put down or underestimate things you have done well.
6. Staying positive can be difficult when we’re living through such challenging times. Try focusing on the solution, not rehashing the problem. When you catch yourself thinking negatively, stop and challenge yourself to find positives in the situation.
7. Failing is honestly part of the process. Take the learning from it. Understand what you would do differently with hindsight, draw a line and move on.
8. Ah then there is perfectionism! Refuse to engage in it. Good really is good enough.
9. Remember that comparing yourself to others will just lead to negative self-talk.
10. Use strong, positive language, ‘I will’, ‘I can’ and avoid ‘just’, ‘but’, ‘should’ and ‘I need to’.