Tag: Experience

How To Develop Confidence

Achieving Goals, Leadership, Relationships, Success

On the way into work yesterday it was quite misty, but it wasn’t thick enough to be fog. It reminded me of something I heard about how driving in fog is a metaphor for life. Often, when moving forward with a new venture, a new relationship, or anything that takes us out of our comfort zone, we are scared because we don’t know what the future holds. This is like driving in fog when you can only see 10 feet in front of you. The way to get clarity on what is ahead of you is to move forward 10 feet and then you can see the next 10 feet.

The lesson here is that we will never be able to predict the future 100%, but this should not stop us from moving forward. The best strategy is to work on your skillset and learn from your experiences. With skills and experience you can make wiser decisions and you can pivot where needed, depending on what life throws at you. If you trust your car brakes, steering, lights etc, then driving in fog is less stressful because your car and you can handle whatever you come across.

In order to improve your skillset and experience, you have to put in the time to try things out and develop skills. However, confidence also comes from our mindset, we have to believe in ourselves and our abilities or the actions we take will largely be ineffective. This mindset has to be a growth mindset, the ability to be agile and flexible requires it. Having a fixed mindset will cause your confidence to crumble when you hit the realities of life.

So, confidence requires skillset, mindset and experience. A seemingly obvious statement, but we often think of confidence as something we are born with. In reality confidence comes from how we behave on a moment to moment basis.

The final piece to the puzzle of confidence is our environment. If we feel safe enough to try and fail and try again, then our confidence goes up. If failure is treated with rejection, then we will develop a fixed mindset, we won’t believe we can do anything and we will not gain the required experience. This is why we need trusting teams at work, and supportive relationships in our lives. Add together all of these elements and you have the recipe for confidence.

Your Best Self Is Yourself

Leadership, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

Many of us want to be like Steve Jobs or Michael Jordon or Barak Obama, but the world already has these people. If we are to strive to be like anybody else we lose, because we lose ourselves in the process.

We can certainly learn lessons from these people, in fact we should learn their lessons, but more important are the lessons we teach ourselves through trying and failing and trying again. When we try new things we learn how We do such things, what our strengths and skills are and how we can use them effectively in the world.

Don’t strive to be the next anybody, strive to be the best version of yourself that you can. Read, watch and learn the lessons of others, understand the wisdom that has come with their experience, but never avoid going out into the world and gaining your own wisdom through your experience.

If nothing else, learn how to be yourself and seek to make a difference in the world, and you will.