We need to first understanding the structure of confidence. Think of a triangle. The first point is self belief, the second point of the triangle is self value and the third point is self assured. When these three things are in balance, you will be confident.
So getting up to full confidence is different for different things but what level of confidence do you have access to generally? You are either a reasonably confident person or you lack confidence on most things.
Think of your old job when you had high confidence. You were a master at your old role. You knew everything about it. Then you changed to a new job, and automatically you experienced lower confidence. How long did it take you to get back your confidence?
My advice for when you are learning something new is “be gentle with yourself”. I see my clients beating themselves up for not being a master of something while they learn it. Be gentle with yourself while you learn and you’ll learn a lot faster. Beating yourself up won’t get a better performance. Being gentle with yourself will and you will build your confidence quicker than being mean to yourself.
To be confident, you have to have self-belief. You have to think it will add value to you. Then you have to be self-assured enough to stick with it long enough, to get good at it.
- So let’s take public speaking for example. Do you believe you could learn to speak well in public?
- Do you think that it would add value to your life if you were to learn to public speak?
- Do you think if you did have to speak that you would prepare, practice and be organised?
If you can answer yes to all three questions, then you are likely to get confident on that issue. If one or more of the 3 areas are out of balance, then you won’t be confident on public speaking.
When asking someone whether you should do something scary or not, go to someone who would say ‘why don’t you give it a go’. What do have to lose? Rather than someone, who isn’t confident either.
Confident people have a mindset of taking a chance, giving things a go. If you start with good self-belief, you are more likely to think it will add value to your life and you are more likely to work on it, until you are good at it.
Whereas, people with low self confidence, tend to think they can’t do something, so won’t try. They are quick to talk themselves out of it, so failure is inevitable and they will be proved correct every time that they can’t.
Remember that saying? If you think you can’t, you can’t. If you think you can, you can.
You will always be correct.
