Confidence is probably one of most important ingredients you need to be successful. No matter what you do, being confident is going to play a huge role both in your professional and personal life.
There are people who are naturally born with a lot of confidence, but it’s not as easy for the majority of us. So, what do we do? How do we build self-confidence? Is there any magic potion which will make us more confident and remove all our anxieties and fears? You know there isn’t.
However, there ARE several little things you can do which will make you a lot more confident. Before we delve into that, let’s first answer a very simple question.
What is confidence?
Here is how Wikipedia answers this question, “Confidence has a common meaning of a certainty about handling something, such as work, family, social events, or relationships.”
Not very helpful, I guess.
Let’s try again.
This is what Psychology Today says about confidence, “Confidence can be described as a belief in one’s self and one’s ability to succeed. Striking a healthy balance between too much and too little confidence can be challenging. Too much and you can come off as cocky and stumble into unforeseen obstacles when you overestimate your own abilities or fail to complete projects on deadline because you underestimate the time and effort they require. At the same time, having too little confidence can prevent you from taking risks and seizing opportunities—in school, at work, in your social life, and beyond.”
Again, not so helpful. So, what really is confidence?
In my opinion, being confident is the ability to communicate your thoughts to others with a sense of conviction and trust in your abilities to do so, with the sole intent of making them understand easily. And while you do that, our goal is to accomplish the purpose of your communication whether it be to inform, to educate, to convince, to persuade, to dissuade, to sell or plainly, just to impress. It’s a state of mind where you feel 100% confident in your skin and don’t long for people’s approval to feel good about yourself. You understand your strengths and weaknesses. You know what you want to achieve in life (or at least, working towards it) by doubling down on your strengths while being mindful of your weaknesses. That’s what I think being confident means.
How to become a super confident person?
Everyone is different. As I mentioned earlier, everyone has their unique strengths and weaknesses. The ultimate goal is to know yourself. Instead of trying to fit in with someone else’s definition of confidence, define your own. In most cases, people confuse being extroverted with being confident and being introverted with being less confident. That’s just irrational.
There are hundreds of articles on Internet talking about ‘10 ways,’ ‘Quick Tips,’ ‘Become,’ etc. etc., and I am not going to talk about any of that. Instead, I will urge you to remain less-confident. Yes, you read it right. Don’t aspire to be a super confident person. Why? A little nervousness is a positive emotion that keeps you in check, keeps you humble and doesn’t let you be overconfident and arrogant.
Let those “butterflies” fly, but not in your “belly”. Train them to “fly in formation” around you and enhance your aura.
If you want to take one key takeaway from this article, let this be your mantra: analyze your strengths and weaknesses, enhance on your strengths and do not allow your weaknesses to overpower or overwhelm you.
In the next article, I will talk about how to identify your strengths?
This is part 1 of series on How to Build Confidence? Stay tuned for more.
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