Increasing Your Self-Confidence!
Confidence underpins all performance. Whether you're asking for referrals, networking, closing the sale, you need confidence to perform. Here are five great ways to increase your confidence.
1. Believe in yourself. Don’t put yourself down! Stop believing the negative comments that others send your way. If you tell yourself you can’t do something then the chances are that you won’t. Sometimes we say to people, ‘You're amazing at that... I wish I could do it but I’ll never be able to!’. This is negative and will not help your cause. You're basically telling your sub-conscious that you don’t have any confidence in your own abilities. My mother always let me know that you can do anything if you really put your mind to it. Try it!
2. Make a point of writing down what your strengths are and what you have achieved in life. Don’t touch on any negatives. Don’t tell me you don’t have any – that’s rubbish. We all have some achievement or other. Writing down positives is a CHOICE. I often tell my daughter – ‘You can choose to be positive or you can choose to be negative – it’s up to you but if I were you, I’d choose to be positive’.
3. Ask for help. Ask someone you trust to look out for you, to hold you accountable on your ‘positive quest’. Ask them to help you in setting daily/weekly/monthly self-confidence tasks and goals. Write down what you are planning to achieve and review it at the end of the day. If you fail – so what! Get up and get on with it. The only failures I know are those who fail to try. As you start achieving your targets and goals your confidence will grow and the more you come to believe in yourself the more confident you will become.
4. Dream about being successful. Picture yourself and where you will be a year from now. Keep setting yourself achievable targets. Think positive thoughts over your life.
5. Get around good positive people. Be around people you respect and admire; glean from them and be mentored by them. Everyone has someone in life that they want to be like and look up to! If it’s someone at work – why not ask them to help you. Can they give you any tips? When you find yourself in a situation where you feel your confidence is being sapped – start thinking about the person you admire. What would they do in this situation? How would they react?
If you are not naturally confident, I can see that none of the above is going to be painless for you, but growth in any area always brings an uneasy feeling. Keep pressing on! I challenge you to try the above for a month and at the end you can email me your success stories! Prepare for the new super confident you!
Rob's Quick Tips
The word confidence comes from the Latin con-fidence, meaning ‘with faith’. All of your networking, referral generation, relationship building and reputation enhancement comes from three centres of application:
Confidence: your faith, your enthusiasm, your appetite for the fight, your motivation, your attitude and your belief.
Competence: your talents (what God gives you), your skills (what you give yourself), your technical ability, your knowledge, your power scripts, your systems and processes.
Consistency: your durability, your long-term perspective, your resilience.
Here are six reasons why you may not be as confident as you could be:
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Your Past. You’re facing forward, and although the past is what has brought you to where you are right now, it is not vital in taking you where you want to be in the next 3 to 5 years. What is more important is your future, because that’s where you’ll spend the rest of your life. So surrender it!
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Your Fear. A little fear is good. It guards you and helps you prepare. It ought not to paralyse you. They say that anything that does not defeat you makes you strong, and by breaking through and facing what you’re scared of, you conquer it! So embrace it!
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Your Negativity. The loudest lies you tell are to yourself. All of that self talk that goes on in your head telling you it’s impossible or you’re not worthy is all hot air! Counter it with strong affirmations, get around positive people and celebrate your wins. You can turn the negatives into positives. So neutralise it!
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Your Failure. All roads to achievement lead through the land of failure. Give it a friendly name - it's simply the price you pay to achieve success. Never judge your whole life based on one incident. Remember failure is an event, not a person. You're not a failure until you think it and admit it. So conquer it!
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Your Insecurity. There are things you’re great at, and things you will never be great at. When you compare yourself to others, are you comparing ALL OF YOU to ALL OF THEM? They may be better at selling, but they’d give their right arm for your happy family life or your health. You don’t need their approval if you’re happy with who you are. It’s a matter of perspective. So rationalise it!
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Your Rejection. Everyone gets it. Life is about ‘knowing your no’s’. Most of the time a ‘no’ is someone's rejection of your offer of help rather than you as a person. Look for the lesson learned and use that to drive you forward to do better next time. Open it up, pick out the lesson and send it back. So use it!
The battlefield is in your mind. That’s where the biggest battles are fought. You’re unique, and God made you that way for a reason. Only you owns that unique blend of skills, talents, humour, thoughts, looks and values. Yet through a combination of external circumstances (rejection, failure) and the way you react and internalise them, your confidence is dented.
Here are the five ways again to become more confident. Try them every day for the next month and be prepared for big differences and changes in your life and self-confidence:1. Believe in yourself
2. Make a list of your strengths and positive qualities
3. Ask for help
4. Dream about being successful
5. Find yourself a role model
I look forward to hearing how you did!