It Takes Confidence to Build Confidence

It feels hard to portray yourself as a confident person when you don’t feel confident. This is especially true when you start a business and you really want to attract customers.

When you don’t feel super confident, because you don’t have a lot of experience, it can become a barrier to getting started. Your lack of confidence becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You don’t feel confident because you don’t have experience so you avoid situations because you are afraid that people will sense your lack of confidence. Ultimately, you are afraid that if you try you might fail, and the only thing worse than failure is failing in front of someone you want to impress.

Don’t let your fear of other people’s perception of you stop you in your tracks or you may never start. When it comes to confidence, you are your own worst enemy because we are often highly critical of ourselves and do not see all the greatness within us that is apparent to everyone else.

So, how do you do this? It’s not easy, but it is also not impossible. I have been told by people that I “exude confidence.” This is something I find quite funny because confidence is something I work on every single day.

This is how I do it:

1. Take Care of Yourself

Self-confidence comes from feeling good about yourself and in order to feel good about yourself, you need to take care of yourself.

Create a morning ritual that lends itself to making you feel confident before you hit the office. I get out of bed at least two hours before my first appointment, usually three hours. During that time I meditate, read, write in my gratitude journal, go for a walk, shower, do my hair, put makeup on and get dressed.

When you meditate, it shrinks the amygdala in your brain leaving you feeling less fearful, and more centered and calm. When you read, you are building competence and that makes you feel more confident about what you know. When you journal, you spend time noticing all the good things that happen in your life and gratitude is the ultimate juice for confidence. When you walk, you jump-start your energy, clear your mind and feel good about yourself because you took the time to exercise. When you shower and “get ready” you look and feel better about yourself too.

It’s easy to skip these things every day and rationalize why you don’t have time. If you really want to build confidence, I suggest you try this for two weeks and see the difference it makes in your life.

2. Get Clear

Most people don’t know what they want and that is why they don’t feel confident about taking action. They have big ideas and those ideas are all over the place. When you don’t know what you want, it becomes really hard to focus.

When you have clarity as to what you really want in your life, you feel energized and inspired to take action and you are able to focus on meeting those goals. Clarity helps you feel much more confident about the path you are on and leads you to the next step, baby steps.

3. Baby Steps

When you take action toward your goals and you reflect on your progress daily, you start to believe more in yourself because you can see your wins. If your goals are really big, they can feel intimidating and instead of inspiring you, they can overwhelm you.

Take your big goal and break it down into tiny steps and celebrate your progress along the way. If you can, hire a coach to help support you through this process so you don’t give up and stay stuck. When you get stuck, you lose confidence so it only stands to reason that when you take action, you build confidence.

When it comes to taking baby steps, recognize that when you take your first step, you may fall down. Babies do it and they get right back up and try again.

The first time I got into the pool for adult swimming lessons, I did not learn how to swim.

The first time I spoke in front of 1000 people on stage I got so nervous the night before that I forgot my talk.

The first time I did a video, I wanted to delete it and never do a video again.

Your first is often your worst, but if you keep taking those steps, you will reach your destination and you will build confidence and belief in yourself to overcome anything.

Here is a blog post by Zen Habits I that I love on confidence.

The best book I have ever read on the topic is The Confidence Code.

Now it’s your turn, what’s one thing you have done that has really helped you to build up your confidence? Please share it in the comments, I would love to hear your tips on this very important topic.