Confidence

Whether you are in sales or management, confidence is the key ingredient that will allow you to succeed. When your confidence goes up, your competence goes up.

People who believe in themselves put more into the task at hand and persist longer, increasing their chance of success.

Learning new sales or management skills alone is rarely enough, you also need the confidence to use them. Building confidence in others is a key part of leadership.

In more than 40 years of running training courses at all levels – from starter to boardroom – there are 3 underlying fundamentals we’ve learned about confidence.

Fundamental 1.

EVERYONE who has ambition lacks confidence. Not just you – everyone!

Think about your present job. You earn a certain level of income, you have a certain amount of job security, responsibility and fulfilment. Think about where you are now and where you want to be.

If your objective is to go higher – to achieve more, to have more job satisfaction, responsibility and fulfilment – of all the things that might happen to you, one thing is for sure…

You are going to encounter self-doubt.

Because there is only one way you could have 100% confidence to do that bigger and better job – and that would be if you were already doing it.

It’s important to appreciate that everyone who sets a stretch goal, who aims higher than where they find themselves, will encounter self-doubt. If we think our lack of confidence is unique to us, then we have difficulty dealing with it, but the moment we realise that everybody else in similar circumstances has the exact same lack of confidence then our competitive nature takes over. “Well if they can fix it, I can fix it.”

Fundamental 2.

This is a corollary of the first. If you, or someone you know, says they never feel a lack of confidence it means you, or they, are busy going nowhere. And as you’ve undoubtedly heard many times – the person who is going nowhere normally gets there.

Fundamental 3.

To understand the third fundamental, let’s look at the difference between how the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ person handles these feelings of self-doubt. It’s a popular misconception that positive people always feel confident – in fact, the opposite is usually true because the positive person aims higher more often and therefore encounters self-doubt more frequently. The difference is what happens next.

Let’s take the negative individual first. On aiming high and encountering the normal level of self-doubt their reaction is: “Oops, I’m aiming too high for me”.  The negative person’s response is to reduce their aim, to compromise their ambition and justify with such thoughts as “I’m not cut out to get to the top”, “I leave such things to others.”

On the other hand, the positive person who aims high and encounters the identical self-doubt, has the reaction: “Good, that proves I’m challenging myself. Now what can I do to strengthen my confidence?”

The negative person compromises their ambition. The positive person takes steps to deliberately strengthen their confidence.

So, how can you build your confidence and self-belief?

To help you answer that question we have posted a new bitesize training session in the Free Resources section of this website. When you watch you’ll learn powerful, proven tools you can use immediately to strengthen and reinforce your confidence. Watch Build Your Self-Belief & Confidence.

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