What Builds Self-Confidence?

Hi meaningful leader,

So happy you showed up to our weekly date! I hope your week has started out great and I hope you are super productive, yet well rested

The title of today’s article is a question I get asked often, so as promised last week, I want for us to unpack what builds self-confidence.

And before we start I’m going to be 100% honest with you, because that’s what friends do…I don’t have a magic formula or a step-by-step framework for this one, but I’ll share with you all I’ve learned about it so far, so you can get a clear picture.

Self-confidence is achieved by doing…that’s it!

Lemme elaborate…

Last week we spoke about the framework for effective team-building and one of the elements we discussed was the importance of following through with the commitments we make, because it creates confidence and builds trust. And frankly, we don’t want to be the person that leaves others hung out to dry…not cool!

Now imagine the negative impact to our self-confidence when the person we left hung to dry is ourselves?

Nobody starts out feeling confident and getting good at something, requires congruency and consistency; yet as confidence starts to develop over time, it becomes directly linked to our ability to approach trial-and-error with a growth mindset.

When we take action and it pays off, like in a bank account, our confidence balance goes up. But when we take action and the outcome is not what we expected, we have two choices: we either take it as a mistake and lose sleep over it while beating ourselves up because “we should’ve known better; which directly translates into a debit into our confidence bank account; or we take is as a learning opportunity on how not to approach that type of situation in the future, and we gain a valuable lesson and add another credit towards our confidence balance.

As humans, we have the tendency to over-analyze our failures, but when it comes to successes, we tend to pass right through them, like achieving small milestones was not a big deal, but it is.

By taking a pause and reflecting on what was that we did differently that led us to achieve that specific milestone, we can identify ways in which we can maximize the strengths and skills we used and that we might be taking for granted; and then apply them to future goals as these can be duplicated and help us to succeed.

I’m a firm believer on the power of compounding and little daily wins over time, turn into huge conquered mountains. One example of this is the book I wrote. I put down ideas, an outline, concepts, quotes for a period of months. I copied and repasted my ideas, moved them around and reframe them, but I also deleted chunks of paragraphs. Yet from all the brain dumps I had over a period of nine months, a cohesive structure for my book was born. Writing a book sounds like a huge goal to achieve, yet writing a few paragraphs each day, was super manageable.

I started this blog as a way to test the waters on the leadership content I’ve been creating since last year, and as I’m publishing my 35th consecutive article this year (the one you are now reading), my self-confidence as a writer and the quality of my work have grown a hundred fold.

So you see, the secret to build self-confidence is found in braving up and doing something that scares us a little bit each day. Big goals are scary and they can feel unachievable, but when we work at them a little bit each day, our abilities and skills develop in parallel.

As we often say in continuous improvement:

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at the time! (the elephant being the huge task at hand, no real elephants are part of this equation, we are nice people!)

I can openly share that if you would’ve asked me a year ago, where I saw myself in the next 12 months, not in my wildest dreams, I would’ve said that I’ll be an author, yet the book is written and coming out in September 2022.

A dear friend asked me last week if I didn’t feel tired from all the things I’m currently juggling, with not only the final details of the book, but the demands of my job, my coaching business, a couple of certifications I’m currently working on, but my answer to her was no, I actually feel fired up!

Moving the needle forward when we work towards making our dreams a reality, lights a fire that give us an energy that creates a higher level of performance and productivity, and when you start operating at this level, two things start to happen:

1. Patterns start to show up and thing start to align
2. Our self-confidence is boosted and we grow closer to the version of the person we were created to be

Remember that goals without a plan and a deadline are just dreams. I hope you go for it, even if you feel unready and awkward…that how we all do it at first.

If you’re still here, thank you for reading and I truly hope you found value here today. If you did, please share with one person, like, comment, and subscribe. I’ll be sharing details of the book pre-sale and release with my mailing list. I also posted a video on my YouTube channel, summarizing this idea, in case you’d like to check it out, and if you also subscribe to my channel, then you’re truly my tribe 🥰

I’d love to hear about your quick wins, I’m rooting for you 🎉 so please don’t be shy…remember that I write this for YOU.

Have an awesome rest of the week and God bless,

Maria