When I ask questions about what women need when starting a business or what is the hardest thing starting your business. It’s over and over again Confidence and Self-Worth!
In my video, about the key ingredients to get paying clients, I talked about 4 ingredients.
Ingredient #1 is Confidence & Self-Worth
In this video, we will talk about what confidence is and how to deal with it.
First things first
What is Confidence?
When I was doing some research for this video. I found this definition of confidence
Confidence is the willingness to try!
I had to think about that and if I agreed with this definition. Soon I realized that confidence and courage go hand in hand.
If you have the willingness to try and you act on that you’re displaying courage and building your confidence. I am convinced that confidence is something everybody can learn but I also know that this is something you will never completely master.
Let me explain …
If being confident is the willingness to try. it means that with every step we take we have to be willing to try so we can build confidence but with every new step, we start all over again.
From my experience, it will get easier when you are willing to try. With every new step, it will become more of a routine and you will act faster and build that confidence.
I also know when I was willing to try something and it didn’t work out, it became harder to be willing to try again.
My advice would be to keep trying. You probably have heard the phrase or quote.
Failures don’t exist, they are simply lessons to move you forward
The same with confidence.
You can only build your confidence if you are willing to try over and over again.
The second thing I found and experience is
If you aren’t doing anything, nothing will change!
You need to see confidence as a muscle, you need to do the exercises again and again if you want to make that muscle stronger. Sometimes it will hurt and you will experience muscle strain.
If we stop working on those exercises because it hurts the muscle won’t get stronger and will even weaken again over time.
The same with confidence.
If we are not willing to try AND DO anything to strengthen that skill, nothing will change and it could even get worse.
I want to give you some examples that help you understand why it is so hard to take action.
When you were little you probably learned how to ride a bike.
Even when we fall we got up again and tried until we succeeded and could ride that bike without sidewheels and any help because we learned this at a young age we don’t know any better.
Riding a bike is something we do often and even if we didn’t ride for some time it won’t take much effort to do it again.
Another example is the staircase in your home.
Have you ever found yourself on a bridge or maybe a mountain where you were scared to fall? I know I have.
Lately, I wondered why I walked down the stairs in my home with my hands full or in complete darkness and even both without hesitation or being scared.
We learn how to climb the stairs from a very young age, even at an age we hardly remember anything from.
So we don’t know any better.
That’s what makes us almost fearless as it comes to climbing the stairs.
We even make it harder by caring down a child, a basket full of laundry, or anything else.
We even walk down when it’s dark or have little light because we know exactly what to expect.
But when we climb a ladder, walk across a small bridge without any rails, or walk on a mountain near a canyon we can feel scared and afraid of falling and hurting or even worse.
I’ll bet that people who are raised in an environment we call dangerous won’t agree because they don’t know any better.
So the only way to change a situation where we feel scared or anxious is by doing it over and over until we don’t know any better.
My advice to you would be …
Follow these steps:
- Search for the reason why you want to be more confident in a particular area
- This is your motivation to try again and again
- Take little action steps to practice this skill
- Start with small steps
- Repeat over and over again
- Success or not, just keep trying
- If you succeed, make the steps a little bigger to grow your skill
I am confident that you can handle this
You’ve got this!
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