Practical Ways to Gain Self-Confidence

At work, the dominant and confident individual is always the one who gets promoted and receives incentives. Maybe you are thinking that confidence is inborn. While that may be true for some, confidence is actually something that you can work on. Here are some practical ways to boost your confidence:

Know what you want to say and do. Ask a professional mechanic to repair equipment worth a million pesos and he will do just that without a hint of doubt. Ask professors to explain their most complicated lessons in front of a crowd and they will do just that. Confidence comes from knowing what you have to do and what you want to say. If you find yourself hesitant or unwilling to take on an unfamiliar task, ask your supervisor. Clarify your problems. Ask for assistance. In the end, the only way for you to be confident in what you are doing is to learn and grasp its concept to the point that doing your tasks feels like a walk in the park. If you know how to execute a task completely, there is no reason for you to doubt yourself and feel insecure. You just have to do it.

Immerse yourself again and again. You know you might get humiliated, rejected, beaten down, and stripped away of your spirit—but the fact is that everyone, at some point in their lives, has experienced the same. Those who are on the top of their game have experienced them before, know that these may happen anytime soon, and prepare for them. The point is not for you to get beaten down day after day until you reach the point of quitting, but rather to get beaten down until you learn how to succeed the next day. Immerse yourself in new tasks. Forget being afraid. Ask your bosses for new and harder tasks. Challenge yourself over and over until you don’t see them as challenges anymore.

Embrace critics. Instead of hating on your “personal critics” to avoid any trouble, consider them “friends” who point out everything wrong about you—they may be telling you things that you actually need to improve upon. Instead of feeling insecure, why not try listening to them? Some of their criticisms might truly be just random babbling to make fun of you, but some of them may be telling you to improve yourself. Developing yourself is one of the first steps for you to develop self-confidence.

Set a goal. Having a goal means that you have an incentive for doing things. Newfound skills and relationships are just some of them. Without a goal in mind, you will soon find yourself living from one paycheck to the next. What does having goals have to do with confidence? When you achieve a goal, don’t you feel great about yourself? Set small goals that you can accomplish within a week’s time, then for a month’s time, and eventually a year’s time. By doing so, every time you accomplish a goal, you build your confidence to go the next level, take on harder tasks, and set a more ambitious goal that you can achieve.

*Originally published by the Manila Bulletin. C-6, Sunday, September 21, 2014. Written by Ruben Anlacan, Jr. (President, BusinessCoach, Inc.) All rights reserved. May not be reproduced or copied without express written permission of the copyright holders.