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Can You Teach Confidence?

26 August 2013

Confidence is essential to business success. It underpins our ability to network, trial new products and ask for the order when we are selling to customers.

I was asked the other day if I could teach confidence and after some thought, my answer was that I couldn’t teach it directly, but I could offer people tools and techniques to enable them to increase it. Confidence results from the experience we have and the self-talk that we run in our head in difficult situations. So, here are three things we can do to change our thinking and so increase our confidence:

1. Practice. When I work as a speaker I always practice at least 3 times beforehand and have my opening sentence written down. When we get up to speak the first thing that happens is that our head empties of all useful thoughts, so having my first sentence written down means that I can begin my routine in auto-mode and give my brain time to switch back on. When could you find time to practice?

2. Positive Set-up. If our self-talk is full of ‘I’m no good’ or ‘this is bound to fail’ or ‘I never get it right’ then what will tend to happen is that we live up (or down) to our self-talk. Instead we can say to ourselves ‘I can learn from this experience’ or ‘I’m not expected to be an expert’ or ‘I have done this before and it went well’ or ‘I can have a go’ …and so on. How could you change your self-talk?

3. Let It Go. If something doesn’t go our way it is tempting to hang on to it and use it to justify why we can’t repeat the event in the future. All that does though is to keep us down, when if we practiced and changed our self talk the outcome could be so different. If you’re hanging on to past failures then let them go…we can put down these heavy bags that burden us and look forwards instead of backwards. Past experiences are there to be learned from, so don’t be hard on yourself and instead just let it go – tomorrow is another day.

We can all do, say, and think things that increase our confidence. What will you do this week to help yourself?

Next week: A fresh look at sponsorship