Confidence
I talk to a lot of professionals and salespeople and even entrepreneurs, people starting their own businesses, and they want to learn how can I develop more confidence or even just get myself a bit of confidence so that I can be more successful in what I do.
You have to realize what confidence comes from and what confidence means.
Confidence is your ability to take action and feel good about yourself. Feel like whatever it is you're about to endeavour into, that you can do a good job and that you can come out of the other end of it looking good.
Now, this doesn't happen by accident.
When you look at the way confidence appears in our lives, it appears as a result of doing things over and over again and developing a proficiency from it.
Confidence, in and of itself, is not something that you're born with or not born with. It's something that's developed over time through practice and through repetition.
When you first learn how to walk, when you were let's say 12 months old or 13 months old or whatever it may be for you, you were not very confident at walking. In fact, you couldn't walk. But you were determined to try.
You stood on the side of the sofa, and you pushed yourself off, and you would fall. You would try it again, and you would fall, and you would do it over and over again.
Your level of confidence, in the beginning, was tiny. In fact, there probably was no confidence. But you were so determined to do it, that you kept going.
Eventually, you took a step, you followed that with another step, and soon enough you were walking, and now you're an adult, and you can walk from one side to the other of a room or a hallway or whatever, and not even think about the act of walking.
It's just something that comes to you naturally.
If someone were to ask you your level of confidence on a scale of 0 to 10, how confident you are that you could walk across the room, you'd probably say 11. It doesn't even occur to you. You just do it.
The same thing goes for confidence in all areas of life, including your professional life.
Let's say your success right now requires your ability to sell. To sell a product, to sell an idea, to sell a service, sell a training program. I don't know what it is for you.
Well, you might not be confident right now in your ability to communicate the value and close a deal, AKA sell. However, how are you going to get that confidence?
You weren't born with it. Right now, you think about yourself going into a situation where you might have to sell somebody, and you're nervous. How do you get to a point where you're confident in doing it?
Well, you go through the nerves, you go through those comfort zones, you put yourself in situations where you're probably not all that comfortable, you're a little nervous, and you do it.
You learn from it, and you make mistakes, and you fall on your face, just like you fell on the ground when you were learning how to walk.
But you do this once, and you get a bit of feedback, you get a bit of insight. Maybe your manager was with you on that sales call and saw a couple of things that you could have improved on and gives you that feedback.
