Confidence has a huge impact on how you show up for your business. From marketing and being visible to how you present yourself and how you talk about your work, it impacts the photographs you choose, how comfortable you are in networking, and even the types of marketing you do. Creating confidence is key to growth.
The bad news is there really isn’t an endpoint of creating confidence. You can always be more confident. And it’s unlikely you’ll ever think you are confident enough.
Because confidence is often situational
- You may be as confident and bold as a lion being interviewed by someone for their podcast
- But shy as a church mouse if you were to start your own podcast and became the interviewer.
- You might be totally comfortable going live on your Facebook but terrified of going live in a group.
As you expand your business there will always be more confidence mountains to conquer.
- Writing social content becomes needing to write sales pages
- Going live for a few minutes becomes delivering hour-long live training sessions
- And you are consistently going to need to increase your price to reflect your experience
All of these have an element of confidence.
I don’t say all of this to discourage you, because creating confidence can be achievable! You can borrow and build and buy more confidence.
But you need to understand the impact it has on you and how YOU interact with confidence.
So what is confidence?
Confidence is defined as a feeling that you can rely on someone or something.
So it’s achieving a sense of everything will be okay – you’ll survive whatever the thing is. Even if it turns out to be the worst outcome in the world – really you’ll be okay in the long run.
Confidence = faith and belief
So when it comes to self-confidence that is a feeling that you can rely on yourself, on your ability to be okay with whatever happens…
Self-confidence = faith and belief in yourself
You might completely forget your speech. But you’ll be okay.
Of course, there might be some short-term impacts but in the end, you’ll be fine.
It’s not bravado or being 100% certain.
It’s about trusting you have what it takes to survive.
You might be embarrassed for a while. But eventually, it could become a funny story. Inspirational even to those who aren’t yet confident.
- 10 minutes = awful, worst moment in my life, can the ground open up please?
- 10 days = cringe, I can’t believe I did that.
- 10 years = do you remember that time I got on stage and completely forgot my speech and had to wing it? How great that I don’t do that anymore but I learnt so much about how to get through any situation.
So often we associate self-confidence with having the skills and self-belief to do the thing amazingly and have the perfect result, but the reality check is that self-confidence is being able to rely on ourselves to get through and survive whatever happens. If we fail we learn, if we succeed we learn. Neither need to mean anything about us or hinder us in any way.
If you hear yourself saying, oh I could never, I can’t, I wish I could… then check in to see if a lack of confidence is holding you back.
How you can borrow confidence
There are areas in your life where you have confidence. You might not associate them with confidence per se but when you take a good look you can find them. Maybe you are great at making phone calls to people (or even strangers) – that’s confidence. Maybe you are passionate about giving feedback – that’s confidence.
You can borrow from the areas where you have confidence by finding similarities to where you would like more confidence. So if you’re great at phone calls then what skills translate to getting on zoom sales calls – building rapport, clear communication, listening? There are skills underpinning your feeling of confidence that you can tap into and mold to fit the situation.
How you can build confidence
Confidence is a skill, knowing you will survive almost any situation is built on experience. It’s built using courage to create competence, which in turn builds evidence that you can.
When I first started delivering training I was a nervous wreck, standing up in front of people and telling them what to do. I knew the topic BUT teaching other people the topic was an entirely different ball game. But I build my training confidence one training session at a time. Just do the first one, then another. The one with more people. One with people I don’t know. Then one on a topic I’m not an expert in. I now LOVE training. Curveball questions that demonstrate people are paying attention and trying to apply it to their situation. I love the little subconscious nods people give when the content is landing for them. This was built by delivering possibly hundreds of training sessions over a number of years.
Confidence is built one experience at a time. And when things don’t go right it builds even quicker. So, see any failures, any time something doesn’t go as you expected, as a confidence booster.
How you can buy confidence
Quite simply, expertise. If you need to write a sales page working with a sales page expert or copywriter can really boost your confidence. You don’t need to spend hours second-guessing what works well on a sales page – you have an expert to guide you.
Now, this is NOT a magic fix-all. Outsourcing is NOT delegating all care and responsibility. There are still elements you need to provide like an outline of the service, branding, keywords for your audience, symptoms and, desires, etc.
But it really can help you to be confident that you have a great sales page. Without days of your life piecing together the information that you think might be right and then holding back from publishing because you really aren’t sure.
What do you associate with confidence?
What would you like to have more confidence to do? How would creating confidence make a difference for you?
- Share your message – whether that is starting a podcast or going on stage in front of people.
- Pitch your offer – whether that’s in written format on socials or live on sales calls.
- Say no to things that don’t serve you, potential clients that aren’t a great fit or activities that you know are aligned or energising for you.
We put a lot of things on the other side of more confidence.
Aka we put a lot of our dreams on hold under the guise of not having enough confidence to do them.
The key to breaking through this perceived obstacle is understanding what ‘confidence’ is for you and how you can create that – whether you call it growing your confidence or you find other ways to fulfill what that is for you.
And guess what the number one way to figure out you’ll be okay is – by going through the experience.
Of course, you can prepare for going on stage, pitching or saying no. You can rehearse your speech or pitch, you can practice saying no in the mirror.
Evidence is needed
But the only EVIDENCE you can collect that PROVES you’ll be okay is to go through the experience.
- Get on the stage and speak
- Deliver the pitch
- Tell someone it’s not a good fit
Of course, it might turn out you aren’t okay, you fluff the pitch, fall off the stage, and end up turning down someone who could have been a dream client.
But it’s unlikely to be anywhere near as bad as you perceive. You’ll probably live to see another day, there’ll be another pitch, another speech, and another client – IF you treat them as learning. IF you don’t allow them to mean anything about you other than you gave it your best shot on the day and you’ve grown because of it.
Having experienced it already means that you are better than you were, you understand yourself more, you understand the situation more. You are more prepared simply from having experienced it once already. You are creating confidence as you go.
It’s the learning curve
The first time you go live on Facebook you have no idea where the button to end the live is, you spend a good thirty seconds at the end of the live looking for the button, panicking because you are still live and haven’t said anything for thirty seconds.
The next time you know the general vicinity of the button on the screen, maybe it’s 15 seconds. Each time you are more aware and soon you are a pro at finding the button while still talking and ending it as you say the last words.
You don’t start the learning curve UNTIL you take the action!
You don’t get more confident until you take the action. Create confidence in action.
So where do you start?
Knowing what difference confidence would make in your business is a clue to the things you are holding back from doing.
Figure out what would more confidence mean for you and your business. Build the desire to be confident in taking actions that are currently outside your comfort zone.
Borrow, build, buy so you are creating confidence so you can achieve the actions needed to create your dreams.
If you are struggling with a lack of confidence in taking the actions needed to get your business growing then reach out to book a confidence booster session – over 90 minutes we address the confidence you need for the situation to see how you can get your dreams happening for an introductory price of just AU$175.