How to Be More Confident: In Life & Business
Some think confidence is something you’re born with, a natural je ne sais quoi or even a magic power.
Despite how they can sometimes look different, confidence in the business world mirrors confidence in everyday life. A confident employee can appear intimidating, competitive, and indestructible. Similarly, a confident friend or stranger can also look intimidating and on top of the world.
What separates these alien-like beings from the rest of us? Is it possible to develop and improve your confidence?
The short answer is yes.
Continue reading to learn how to be more confident in business and life!
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The Confidence Loop
Almost everyone wants to be more confident because confidence leads to success.
Working on self-confidence is essential for every area of life. If you’re looking to start your own company or receive a job promotion, confidence helps you achieve your goals.
However, how on earth are you supposed to be confident in uncharted waters? How can you muster up a sliver of confidence for a job without previous experience or a new relationship with someone you’re just starting to know?
This is where self-doubt and anxiety can creep in.
If you always lose, how can you expect to win? Further, if you never win, you’ll always expect to lose.
This reality of losing and expecting to lose because of few wins creates a perpetual confidence loop. In other words, a continuous circle of needing the confidence to win but needing to win to have confidence.
Thankfully, there are a few things you can do to get yourself out of this futile life cycle and become more confident!
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How to be more confident
If you think your current personality is allergic to confidence, be prepared to surprise yourself. Here’s a full breakdown of what confidence is and how you can be more confident in both your work and personal life.
Fake it ‘till you make it
When you look at confident people, what do you see? You see symbols of success, physical attraction, and happiness.
But that’s just your perception. Just because someone has something doesn’t mean that person is confident in themselves.
Even widely successful figures like supermodels, business CEOs and billionaires, and celebrities can lack confidence. In essence, many people fake it by making themselves look confident.
This leads to a powerful lesson one can learn about improving confidence: confidence is not based on external factors; instead, confidence is based on self-perception, regardless of any external reality.
Confidence is both a state of mind and an emotional feeling; it’s the idea that you have everything you need for the present and future.
Copy others
Given the first approach of believing you're perfect just the way you are, people may find this impossible, considering everything wrong with society.
Another way people improve their confidence is by reading a plethora of articles online about what specific actions confident and high-achieving people make.
Then, they copy their actions.
From implementing a new routine, regular exercises, and enhancing personal style, to practising eye contact and handshakes, people follow the actions of others.
It sounds bad but this is actually a very natural thing to do. From the first few months of life, babies learn facial expressions and social interaction by mirroring their parents' behaviors.
The good part about this strategy is that it promotes change and action.
However, any improvement in confidence from this technique is short-lived because you’re pretending to be someone you’re not. Moreover, like the first technique, this strategy focuses on external factors of confidence, which is also why it doesn’t work.
To reiterate, no amount of external things can sustain a person’s confidence.
Own it all
We’ve covered the first two strategies that many people resort to because they seem easier and faster. Nonetheless, whether it’s pretending to have the confidence or taking on the character traits of someone else, both techniques disempower you and eventually backfire.
So, what’s the answer?
The only way to be confident and sustain that confidence is to become comfortable with what you lack.
Confidence isn’t about being comfortable in everything we can succeed at, but rather, being comfortable in everything we don’t succeed at.
Ah, the sweet irony of life.
This finding leads to the next major takeaway about improving confidence: those confident in business are comfortable with failure, and those confident in relationships are comfortable with rejection.
Ultimately, by owning everything that you are and everything that you do, you can improve your confidence.
Fail you way to success & confidence
Being comfortable with failure can be a tough pill to swallow.
The best way to increase your resilience to failure is to experience it repeatedly. Numb yourself to it, if you will.
Many people are quick to avoid failure at all costs, but how else do you learn?
In this way, confidence isn’t something you’re born with; confidence is something you can acquire through life experiences.
Being comfortable with failure doesn’t mean you’ve accepted defeat, where all resistance is futile. Feeling comfortable with failure enables you to take actions without fear, interact without judgment, and love wholeheartedly.
No one said improving self-confidence was going to be easy.
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Final thoughts
Whether you’re looking to improve your confidence in the business world or in personal relationships, working on your confidence can transform your life.
Ultimately, those that avoid failure avoid success.
Confidence isn’t about material success, physical attraction, or fame, it’s about self-perception and being comfortable with what you don’t achieve.
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