From the start, I wasn’t a confident person.
I knew I had the potential to be confident, but I lacked the tools to truly embody that quality.
I set standards for myself that were unreachable, and with that, my confidence ebbed away. I’m not alone. I’m just not as alone as I once was.
We all experience changes in confidence at different stages of our lives
It’s a part of life that we’re learning to get comfortable with.
Your confidence can be high one day and low the next. Sometimes it can be months between these shifts. This doesn’t mean you’re not working hard, just that something else is happening in your life.
I spoke with Kegan Blount, Social Media Specialist at ElevateUp, to find out more about how our confidence changes. Kegan said:
“What I can tell you is what I’ve personally seen at ElevateUp and what we see overtime at all sorts of companies is that at any given time, there’s a good amount of variability.
But when you think about where it’s important to keep your eye on is where your confidence was at a certain time versus where it is now.
So if you think about a five-year period, there’s a good amount of variability in confidence. But if you think about a 30-day period, there’s a good amount of variability.
“This is where you need to start. You need to start by understanding your confidence. And then you need to learn to take what you know about yourself to ensure that you’re always getting better and moving forward with improved confidence.
If you don’t, you’re at risk of not doing what’s best for you. So if you’re going to set standards for yourself and learn to stay grounded, know who you are, and be consistent, then I think it’s an easy thing to do.
But if you don’t have that, you’re at risk of not growing in the right direction.”
Here are five things that can be influencing your confidence:
- Low self-confidence
- Lack of self-confidence, “shoulds” and expectations
- Introverted personality
- Fear of failure
- Long-term concerns
Self-doubt
When you feel good about yourself, you feel confident in your ability to take on new challenges, which means you will be confident in your ability to accomplish your goals.
Being confident doesn’t mean you won’t make mistakes. Having self-confidence is having confidence that you can learn from your mistakes.
Kegan said:
“There are things you can do to help bring yourself back to that place. Don’t think about things as success or failure.
When you make a mistake, there’s nothing wrong with it. When you make a mistake, you’re learning. Make sure you take those learning opportunities.
“That’s why it’s important to look at that internal confidence meter. And you’ll know when you’re at a place where you’re low on self-confidence.
When you’re low on self-confidence, you might have low self-esteem, low confidence in your ability, and/or low confidence in yourself.”
If you are low on self-confidence, it’s very important to take action to bring yourself back to your place of self-confidence, or you will continually be stuck in a low place of confidence.
You don’t want to be there.
Here are two steps to taking action and keeping your confidence up:
When you make a mistake, learn from it.
Just make sure you take action and learn from your mistakes. Don’t sit there and beat yourself up. Take action, and learn from it.
When you feel low on self-confidence, here are some things you can do:
Start a routine or discipline, such as going to the gym, keeping a journal, meditating, journaling, reading positive things about yourself.
Have a positive mindset. For example, you might say to yourself “I am good enough.”
“One of the things that I love about our company is we’ve hired a lot of people who are introverts.
In a sense, they’re more self-aware than extroverts. They understand themselves.
They take action. They are more self-aware than the extroverted type.
They’re more confident. They are not threatened by the unknown.
“They’re not threatened by challenges. They learn how to adapt.
They do things differently. The way we run our company is completely different than how we would run a company if we were introverts.
But because we hire introverts, they’re extremely good at being the CEO of a company who is introverted and they are phenomenal at running an extroverted company.”
An extroverted CEO
Gavin recalled:
“There was a situation where the CEO of the company was extroverted. He would walk in with his team and make decisions on his own.
And people were fed up. They just thought, “This is a waste of time. This isn’t our business.”
They were open to me changing things. They were open to listening to me. But he just didn’t see it.
“I was like, “No. We are not going to be on a second-by-second basis, not only because we are a different type of team, but because we are a different type of company.”
Here are some things that he did that helped our company go from a second-by-second organization to a first-by-second organization:
He had an objective. We want to be the number one company in the world, and to do that we are going to have to win, not only the support of our customers but the support of our suppliers.
We need to win. So it’s not just a PR campaign. It’s an attitude and a mentality that is going to win us this business.
If we want this business, we’re going to have to win.
So we created an employee development program. We hired an executive coach. And we started a company-wide objective to win.
It was called “Go Global.” “I used to go into his office every two weeks and we’d go through our go-global plan. We’d spend at least an hour going through our go-global plan.
“I went up to him one day and I said, “Can I give you something?” I was still relatively new and in his office.
“I said, “I’d like to suggest we change the objective. It should be global. I don’t know if that’s going to change the objective.”
“He got this smirk on his face. I thought he was going to shoot me or something.
I thought I had messed up the go-global plan and everything was going to be changed and that he was going to fire me.
But he said, “You’re absolutely right. Let’s give it a try.”
So we had another six months to go, and our objective was to be the top global company in the world.
