YES! Self Confidence is a skill, and you CAN develop it. But what if I become over-confident and it backfires on me, and my decisions? Well it’s not a push button that will transfer us from being shy, scared, or nervous to being Mohamed Ali. It’s a skill that we need to develop. It’s a trait that we can enhance.
Whether you are an introvert or a social interaction addict, self confidence helps you get closer to your goal, or your passion. It basically helps you get places that YOU aspire. It will help you press the “send” button on that text that you have always wanted to send, or to ace that interview that you’ve been waiting for. It can even help you sell that product that has been sitting on the shelf for the past 6 months.
Ask yourself, what are the first few thoughts that come to my mind when I’m in a stressful situation? Majority of the answers will be: Maybe I’m not good enough! Well how can you be good enough if the first thought was a negative one?
I mentioned the infamous Mohamed Ali as he always used to refer to him self as “the greatest of all time”. If You don’t believe that you are the greatest, or if you don’t push yourself to be the best at what you do, then how will others portray it in you? We all have self talks at least once per day, when we wake up in the morning and say, I’m having a bad hair day, or I certainly look lame in this outfit. Or even when you apply to a job and say: yeah, most probably they wont call me back, and then if they do, you will be a in a negative mindset where you are already drowning in the thought that you are not good enough for that company. And trust me, it will not help you during the phone interview, or IN the actual one.
So how can I boost my self-confidence? PREPARATION, REPETITION, PERSISTANCE.
The biggest factor in crashing our self-confidence is being unprepared. Imagine yourself sitting in a meeting, whether in a board meeting or an interview, and someone decides to ask you a question that you have no idea how to answer, because you decided not to put some effort in preparing yourself. How will you feel? You will start feeling the room getting smaller, your palms getting sweaty, it starts showing on your facial expressions and body language. Unless you have an outstanding poker face, you might blush and start stuttering. To top it, your mind will go numb and start thinking that you are stressed, which even causes more stress, like a snowball rolling down from a mountain.
But what if you were well prepared by doing your research, and you practiced your answers properly? Not only that, but you also repeated your preparation to master your answers. And by repeating, you might come up with new techniques on how to answer tough questions that you may have missed in the beginning.
But let’s be honest, you might still face rejections, or some kind of failure, so here we should be persistent. Being persistent is not letting those failures hold you back, but keep on trying till you believe that you are good enough.
These 3 factors to boosting self-confidence compliment each other. If you prepare and you don’t repeat, you might forget. If you repeat but you are not persistent, you will give up. If you are persistent but you’re not prepared, then you will fail over and over again. Believing in yourself is not enough. Self-confidence is a skill that you have to develop, train and boost.
Surround yourself with people that won’t drag you down, stay in an environment that will actually compliment you on the things you do right, and not only point out your mistakes. Invest time and effort in what will affect your daily interactions and decisions, as well as your long term goals.