- 'With confidence you have won before you’ve started' Marcus Garvey, political leader, journalist, publisher, entrepreneur
Confidence is life’s natural enabler. It enables us to believe in our abilities, to brave new situations, to flourish in the moment. It’s the magic that helps us to speak up, the oil that greases our performance, and the belief in our value that enables us to negotiate what’s important to us.
Confidence is not a veneer of bravado, it's not an outfit you can put on for a performance. It’s the catalyst that turns the combination of opportunity and competence into long term, meaningful success. Confidence is as essential in today’s corporate workplace as basic communication skills, and yet it remains for many of us, elusive and something we still need to learn to cultivate.
I've suffered from lack of confidence and a surplus of self doubt for much of my life. I'm familiar with the crippling nerves, sick feeling in the pit of my stomach and, on occasion, the dread that comes with an impending high stakes appointment. I know what it feels like to want to offer an opinion or challenge a point of view, only to be paralysed by feelings of inadequacy. Even when I have felt sufficiently expert on a subject, my lack of confidence has held me back. It's slowed my career progression, prevented me from demanding what I was due and led me to settle for second best. I've tolerated and (even subconsciously encouraged) people to take advantage of me because I lacked confidence.
I started working on my underlying confidence issues 10 years ago when a wonderful business coach helped me through the initial process. It’s been liberating to see how my level of success at work and home has consistently improved as a result. My confidence level is now, according to the Confidence Code Assessment, ‘at a medium level’ - middling or average in comparison to others. I hail this as a victory!
This may surprise those who have worked with me over the years, after all, I have been very successful in a series of high stress, high profile roles. Whilst I have always been open when asked about my confidence, most people have automatically judged me as being ready to take on the world. My sustained effort to build confidence and the use of short term hacks have helped me enormously and so I want to pass them on here.
Building sustainable confidence is a long game. Like preparing for a marathon, you need a program that builds stamina, fitness and skill and you need to practice, practice, practice. It’s about taking repeated action, doing things outside of your comfort zone. Confidence is won at the school of 'hard knocks' where failure breeds success. This might sound counter intuitive, surely if we fail at something we will feel less confident to try again and therefore less likely than ever to succeed? No, apparently our brains get wired to want to learn from the experience of failure so next time we get closer to success. So the program for building confidence involves getting out of your comfort zone and practicing at failing.
'Experience tells you what to do, confidence allows you to do it' Stan Smith
If taking action is the single most important thing we must do, there are 5 confidence killers to avoid:
- Overthinking. Overthinking freezes decision making and action. Taking action will rewire the brain to make it easier to take action again and again.
- Manage your NITs. Negative Internal Thoughts are the aggressive army of creepy crawlers that take over your brain in stressful situations. There are very effective ways to reverse the endless loop of internal talk and turn a critical army into a challenging friend. See my blog on Managing Your Inner Critic.
- Hanging onto failures and ...
- Not owning achievements. Internalising setbacks is one of my own enduring confidence challenges. When combined with playing down successes, you get what I call the Teflon/ Velcro challenge. Teflon is a brand of non stick-coating you find on cookware, which miraculously makes everything slide effortlessly off. Velcro is a brand of incredibly tough fabric fasteners which hook together and take a good deal of effort to dislodge. I have a tendency to hang on to criticism and setbacks like Velcro and let praise and recognition slide away as if on Teflon, and this really damages confidence in the long term. The challenge is to reverse your thinking. Instead of brushing aside praise and ruminating over missteps, try applying the Velcro to the successes and Teflon to the setbacks. Like everything else associated with building confidence, this takes time and practice but awareness is the first critical step.
- Perfectionism. If ‘Perfectionism is the enemy of good’ Voltaire, it is also the enemy of confidence building. How do you know when something is perfect anyway? Striving for that impossible perfect ensures you get stuck and can't take action - the thing most poisonous to our confidence. If you are stuck in the trap of perfection give yourself a deadline for finishing whatever it is you are stuck with, and then publish, launch, present ... take action!
Knowing real confidence is built over time, what can we do in that critical moment to help ourselves feel more confident? Just like the occasional energy bar is no replacement for a long term healthy eating program, there is, in my opinion no lasting silver bullet when it comes to true confidence.
Despite calls to ‘fake it ‘til you make it’ my experience is this can backfire, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, unless you are used to taking centre stage in amateur dramatics, pretending to be something you aren’t, increases anxiety causing your body to go into typical ‘fight, flight, freeze’ stress response. This reduces blood flow to the brain and actually stops you being able to think clearly - hardly the result you are looking for! Secondly, body language will probably give you away. The darting eyes, restless limbs and shallow breathing we experience as an unconscious side effect of stress will almost certainly show up.
My alternative is to feel the fear and own it. Denying how we feel is usually a disaster, our emotions will surface anyway. So when you are lacking in confidence, recognise it, own it and take positive steps to manage those feelings, even harness them to help you perform better.
The good news is there are some smart hacks to give yourself the boost you need, just when you need it. Next time you are feeling mounting anxiety over that important business meeting, presentation, interview or conversation what can you do to instantly boost your confidence?
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'The most beautiful thing you can wear is confidence' Blake Lively