Positive Tip #7: It’s all about confidence

Think about some of the people you look up to in this world. I’m talking about maybe your parents, celebrities, your boss or maybe even your saint. When you think about these role models and heroes, think about their traits. You can usually begin to get some consistent themes among role models and one important one is CONFIDENCE.

We look up to people because we like some facet of their life. Something just fascinates us about them and in a sense we want to model our lives to some extent to what they’ve done. These role models have been able to do something well, excel at it and inspire people in the process. This takes a lot of confidence in themselves and could be from years of experience in a certain field or activity.

For some people, confidence comes pretty easily. These are the charismatic individuals who just always happen to say the right things at exactly the right times. They make good salesmen and great motivational speakers. These are lucky individuals, they have a sort of innate skill that will serve them well.

There are others who take awhile to develop their confidence and it comes from continually and relentlessly pursuing a subject and becoming almost a subject matter expert. This subject doesn’t have to be something technical that other people can’t understand such as programming. It can be as simple as the act of being a father. One cannot be a good father unless one has the capacity to be confident around his kids and bring them up in the best way possible.

Whether you’re a charismatic person or it takes some time to build up the confidence, it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that you possess confidence in yourself and everything that you do.

Having confidence in yourself will allow you to keep moving forward. It will allow you to continue having great passion for your area of expertise. Having confidence will inspire others and allow others to be more trusting in your decisions. Having confidence will allow you to pick yourself up when you do make a mistake and say hey, that was a great learning opportunity, now I know how to be better.

I can tell you I fall in the bucket that isn’t innately confident to begin with. There are a lot of things that I can be hesitant about and would rather think first and then make a decision. However, I’ve found since working in the real world that even if you don’t know every single thing, you need to have the confidence to ask questions and get people behind you. Build up support and a foundation and the confidence in your decisions will rise.

Realize that you are going to make mistakes in your life. Realize that sometimes you will fall flat on your face. But also realize that you’ve got to have the confidence to accept these realizations and to better yourself from them. If you have that, you can get through any situation.

Specific tips to build confidence:

- Change your mindset to being optimistic. Believe in everything that you’re doing. If necessary, write out reasons why you’re doing a certain thing and show yourself it’s important, you should do it and that you can do it.

- When trying to build up confidence for a speech, take a quick look at some of the best motivational speakers. Analyze what they do best with hand movements, body language, and the content of their speeches. Identify one thing you want to work on first and practice that in front of a mirror or to a friend. Practice that in your next real speech or meeting. Then move onto the next identified practice from the speaker.

- Get people to back you up. The more people that believe your ideas are good, the more your confidence will be. Try getting more than an affirmation of “Yes this is a good idea” and get them to help you do the activity or spread the word about it.

- Power talk. This might seems silly but sometimes if you look in a mirror and do self-affirmations like “I’m going to win this sale today”, it will go a long way to shifting your line of thought. This will give you a good confidence booster since you’ve set the expectation that you are going to succeed today

- Adapt to your audience. It’s important that you use different techniques and tactics depending on who the audience is. For example, you don’t want to be the forceful one in a meeting where everyone likes to talk and share ideas. Research your audience and adapt as necessary.

- Start a blog or a journal. Sometimes writing it out when no one is looking first is the best way to really think about what you want to convey before actually doing it. Consistent entries will help continue your thought process.

I hope these tips have helped you out. They’re pretty broad but if you have any other situations where you want some thoughts on, I’d be happy to provide some structure for you!

-The Lermz