Do you feel like you need a career transition or want to take your business to the next level? Last week, we spoke about MK who made a huge (and successful) career transition in her 40s. She took courage, determination, risk but she succeeded. MK wasn’t confident overnight!
An article in the Harvard Business Review says Less-Confident People Are More Successful. The article says you need to have confidence but you cant be obnoxious or a nincompoop.
The article highlights that less confident people are less arrogant and deluded so people generally prefer towork with them. An example to illustrate this, was this week I was playing a role play in an Insead Global MBA course called Your First Hundred Days and all the role players feedback was that…. if you are too arrogant people are willing to give you less.
The research also says that less confident people pay attention to negative feedback and are self-critical to improve, they also are prepared to work harder and are more motivated towards their goals.
The message I want you to walk away was beautifully summarized by psychologist Jean Twenge in her article for the BBC Does confidence really breed success? .
Of course changing you career or trying to grow your business can be difficult but what’s crucial is that you need to believe you can do it. If you don’t then your battle is over and you shouldn’t even bother wasting your time, because that self belief will affect how much time, commitment and dedication you will invest in the new change.
A lot times we simply just limit what we can and cannot do.
5 Tips for Overcoming Self-Doubt and Build Self-Confidence to Launch and Grow Your Empire
1. Overcome Fear
Make the decision that you fear the most. Being decisive is one of the biggest assets to success in business, life and relationships. Human beings are very adaptable and even if you make the wrong decision you can use the lesson to do the right thing. Your decisiveness will inspire many people.
Remember, you are not your past. You will have to step away from who you were, what you did in the past in order to open up the doors of possibility.
Tip: Thinkers don’t often DO. No matter how much you think a decision through, without action, you will never see the endless possibilities until you take the next step.
2. Define YOU
Who are you? What is your passion? What are your goals? What inspires you? You are so much more than a woman, mother, wife and colleague. You are what drives you. When you don’t know who you are, you face the unnecessary pressure of living up to some image you aspire to, rather than living a life that inspires you to do even more.
Tip: Money and fulfillment are magnetized towards confidence, so building your natural confidence in who you are is the essence of success.
3. Model Success
Once you know who are, you’ll be able to look for admirable traits in other people and model them. Note, it’s not about becoming just like them, but rather modelling their traits that inspire success. It’s almost impossible to launch a successful business and not changing (for the better) along the way. You have to flip your mistakes around and see what it is you really want to achieve.
Tip: Think about someone you admire. What is is that inspires you? Is it the way they shine full of confidence? Is it the way they are revered for their deeds? Is it the way they conduct themselves around other people? Now you can use what you have learned and work it into who you are.
4. Surround Confidence
Many success gurus advise that in order to become successful, you have to surround yourself by successful, inspiring and capable people. That means that you must focus most of your interactions on people who inspire you; people who have achieved success already and those who are working, like you, to achieve success.
Let’s face it – we all have dream-stealers in our lives. Dream-stealers are those people who don’t share our vision, who’d rather see us doing something that doesn’t make us happy, and those who might envy our success just a little bit. If you have spent a lot of time in the past doing what others wanted you to do, your unhappiness is probably partly to blame on their faulty assessments of what would work for you and what wouldn’t. Remember, the only person you have to answer to is YOU.
Tip: You may have to attend training courses, talks or seminars to listen to people who succeeded in the face of opposition. It may mean that you have to step out of your comfort zone and start meeting people who share your desire to succeed. But it will be worth it – you will meet creative thinkers, inspirational people.
5. Focus and Persist
Without those people who have persisted in the face of failure, life would be boring today. Every failure is a step closer to success. It’s a matter of keeping going; taking a few more breaths when that yoga pose (or financial stress, or relationship, or business growth) is tough on the muscles – to discern the difference between pain and strain. It’s about working through the strain to see 
the flow of success afterwards.
Focus goes hand in hand with self-discipline, and success is reliant on these two values. You have to live and breathe your vision of success before it will happen. If you’ve heard of the Law of Attraction, you will know that there is scientific evidence to back up the fact that your beliefs transmit electrical energy throughout your body, which determines the frequency at which your body resonates and attracts the same frequency in opportunities and experiences.
Tip: Get on the right frequency. If you think you will, or you think you won’t, you will be right on both occasions.
Confidence and Launching Your Business Take-Away
Before you can start your business, you need to first believe enough in yourself to make the decision, and take the action steps to grow it.
The secret to success lies inside, not outside. Only you determine the secret of your own business’ success. You have the desire and you can use your self-confidence to make a success.
A Question to You:
Do you have any inspiring self-confidence stories to share? We’d love to hear your lessons on how you built self-confidence.
Knowing who you are and modeling people who have already done it is essential, but what we often forget is taking action. It’s so easy to read about it and talk about it, but the hard part is to it – but that’s the part that actually makes us better.
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