“Confidence isn’t walking into a room thinking you’re better than everyone, it’s walking in not having to compare yourself to anyone at all.”
As communications professionals, I can’t stress enough on how important confidence is to our careers. If we want to create true impact and make ourselves heard both internally and externally, we need to have oodles of confidence working for us. I have been told in my growing up years that I was overconfident and today people ask me where I get my confidence from.
One thing stayed with me through all the phases of my life and that was my confidence. Even when I was a nerdy awkward looking tomboyish girl (excuse the stereotype), I used to still have the exact same amount of confidence and my teachers then used to call it overconfidence. I had the spirit to turn a deaf ear to the world and its perceptions of me.
Grooming is important, appearances matter but having said that confidence trumps it all, if you have confidence, you can own it and get ahead…
What is the context of confidence?
Confidence is being sure of ourselves and our abilities. This essentially doesn’t have to be in an arrogant way but being more realistic and secure of who we are. It’s also not in relative superiority to others but a quiet knowledge of being capable.
- Confidence and self-belief stem from positive thinking, positive friendships and relationships
- Self-belief or self-confidence is thought to be the way that you feel about your skills, abilities, appearance and behaviour
- Confidence can also be described as the way we project ourselves to others
How do self-worth and self-esteem connect with building confidence?
- Self-worth or self-esteem describes the way we feel about ourselves, regardless of our appearance, achievements and capabilities
- Self-esteem relates to how we compare ourselves with others
How do we evaluate self-confidence?
- Our physical presence
- Our social confidence
- Our status confidence
- Our peer independence
- Our stage presence and overall persona
How to build confidence?
Work consciously to remove negativity from life
Things can always be difficult and so can people. There will be rough days, and times that are tough; removing negativity does not mean we won’t have bad times, it means we will charge ourselves up with what we can, to do the best to get past these stages. Negativity has a way of settling into our lives, so it takes conscious effort to keep it at bay and this can help build confidence.
Change your body language
It can be as simple as straightening the posture or standing in the superman pose or rolling out the shoulders. Body language can do a lot for confidence and keeping the chin up, straightening the back are known to scientifically improve stance and circulation and spiritually, they stimulate energy centres and can unlock these for better confidence.
Avoid accepting failures and buckling with them
Failure is real, failure is normal and giving up at the first sign of failure means accepting it, when this happens, people tend to give up and stop trying. Failure cannot be a detriment to trials, it must be a trigger to be more and to try harder.
Be prepared
When we build our minds up for resilience and for myriad outcomes, in all likelihood, whatever the outcome, just being prepared helps with managing it. A lot of us are never prepared for what comes next and the uncertainty and newness of the experience is what pulls us down but being prepared for these can help boost morale and build confidence.
For particularly tough instances, create lists – Gratefulness
We all happen to be pessimistic when it comes to looking at our own lives and we forget to be grateful for what we already have, and this approach can put a spanner in the works when it comes to working on confidence. The easiest thing to do is to make a list of what makes us happy and what we should be grateful for…
In the next one in the confidence series, we will look at more ways of how we work on our confidence parameters and how we hone them.
Love it
Beautiful. Permission to lift your words