Confidence Part 1. Fake it till…

Hello again folks. Its been a while since I’ve bent your electronic ears with some of my hyper positive cheer leading, so I figured I’d come back and discuss a subject we all need help with at various points in our life – Confidence.

When you get down to it, nothing in life is more important to your individual success than confidence in yourself, your goals and your abilities. If you seek success in a group project, you must have confidence in your team and your coaches which in turn must also have confidence in you. We all like talking about that moment when we are truly confident in ourselves and (almost) our actions, so FIRST let’s talk about that least desirable part of our own quest for confidence. I mean that part in the beginning when you don’t have much confidence at all.

Most of us have heard one person over time mention that sometimes you gotta fake it till you make it. I’m not breaking news by mentioning it here. That said, in your quest for bullet proof, unflappable, no doubt,  REAL confidence (part 3 of this series) the truth is that you have to start out fake. Completely FAKE.

Before you get all high and mighty on me, let me tell you this: if the alternative to faking it is to have zero confidence, I would gladly choose to have “fake confidence” for a few months while I build some real confidence. OK So how do you fake confidence?

Exaggerate! Exaggerate your abilities, your skills, your everything. This is different than boasting or bragging about yourself although from the outside it might look the same to a third person. It’s about doing some positive self-talk to yourself in a bid to put up high your morale and reinforce your self-image which is crucial to confidence. Look in the mirror and tell yourself – “sure you can do that!”.

Let’s be honest here, when you are building confidence, a mirror is the first place to start because that person is the only one who will listen to you. Choose a thing that you want to increase your confidence in and start telling people you are better at it than you are. When other people know that you have (said you have) skills in a certain area, they will start expecting you to demonstrate those skills. Here comes the important part. That pressure will cause you to study and work on that skill so that when you are eventually called on to demonstrate it, you will have something to show.

Something? Oh yeah, at first when you do something new, you are not going to be a champ at it but you are better off than you were before you did it and you have a new baseline to build confidence upon. To put it in another way, the next time you do it, if you do it a little better you will be more confident in your ability.

Those lessons are painful up front guys but all the rejection or falling on my face all seem funny when I look back on them with a confident mind so the trip was definitely worth the pain.