Hey you, I really wanted to share this quick post with you about how to be more confident in your daily life, career and when you are facing new and exciting times in our lives. I watched a very empowering video by Matt Lavars one of Australia’s top coaches and one of my personal mentors about people who feel that they just don’t have the confidence to take on new things.
A lot of the time, we find ourselves in new and challenging situations and realise that we don’t know what to do next or how to move through it and sometimes we even miss out on great opportunities because we decide that it’s too scary and feel that it’s not the right time. Our avoidance of trying new things and telling ourselves that there will be plenty of opportunities next time just serves to make us hold back even more. It’s fine to suggest that there will always be a “next time” to motivate ourselves, but using it as an excuse isn’t helpful.
Did you know that the BIGGEST difference between someone who sets goals and doesn’t achieve them and someone who sets goals and does achieve them is CONFIDENCE? And another way of looking at confidence is a CERTAINTY. Certainty, as you may know, is a feeling of sureness, a feeling that ‘I’ve got this’, ‘I’m capable’, ‘I can’, ‘I’m able’ and so on.
So why is it so important for us to have certainty?
Our behavior is deeply influenced by our level of certainty. The more convinced we are of a view, regardless of how objectively right it is, the more resilient it will be and the more impact it will have on our actions. When people make decisions, they are uncertain. In a business setting, for example, someone who comes to you for something is experiencing uncertainty. They are filled with doubt about their decision and are uncertain of who they should do business with. In this case, your certainty needs to outweigh their doubt and this is really important to understand for all areas of our lives. When we are facing a challenge and start to experience uncertainty, we need to start by taking a step back and really focus on cultivating certainty that outweighs that initial burst of uncertainty.
For us to be successful (in any area of our lives), we need to cultivate certainty, because unless we have that, we won’t take the action that we need to take to achieve our goals.
How do you cultivate certainty?
The way to build confidence is through building COMPETENCE. This means you need to get really good at the specific things you want to do, for example, public speaking. If we do the thing (in this example, public speaking) as much as possible, we will start to build our competence. The fastest way to get confident at doing something is by doing the things that we are afraid of or that we are finding challenging as often and as much as possible,
The more competence you’ve got, the more feelings of confidence you will experience. and when you have competence the things you say and do, you will do with confidence because you know that you have done it well and many times before in the past.
So it’s not just about taking action when you feel great but also in the moments of uncertainty and when you don’t feel like doing it because its in those moments when you ‘build the muscle’ of certainty, competence and the end goal, confidence.
When you turn up in these moments and tell yourself, over and over and over again “I don’t feel like it but I’m doing it anyway” and “I don’t feel like I can but I am showing up anyway”. That is the mission for cultivating certainty. Because we need to know that we are enough, that we can handle challenges and that we can handle setbacks and mistakes.
The only way to do that is to move forward into the setbacks, challenges, mistakes and keep on going and at the end of it all, we will still be OK. Think about it, no one has EVER spontaneously combusted into thin air whilst learning from mistakes, facing challenges and building their confidence!
Competence and confidence will come from cultivating certainty and clarity. The only way to know if we can handle things is by doing them, by having a go and seeing how many things we can handle and by taking action and knowing we are ok for the result to unfold. It’s not about taking action and nailing it all the time… it’s about taking action and then getting feedback, calibrating and learning from it until we do nail it.
Thank you for taking the time to read this quick post, and I trust that it has served you as it has me!
Until next time,
Jeanelle
xx
