You get it by taking action when you don’t have it.

You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.   -Eleanor Roosevelt

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I posted this meme earlier this week on Facebook. It seemed to resonate with a number of people.

 

Later, in a discussion with a group of women business owners, one woman mentioned she didn’t have the confidence to quote her prices to others.

 

It’s a funny thing, confidence.

 

Here’s what I’ve learned.

 

Confidence is not something you’re born with. That’s the good news, because it means anyone can get it.

 

It’s not something you can take a pill for. Bummer.

 

Confidence is something you must earn. And it comes from within you. It’s like a gift you give yourself. A gift you richly deserve.

 

And the way you earn it is by doing the things you can’t imagine yourself doing.

 

Believe me. I’ve tried every other way to get it.

 

• I’ve tried having other people believe in me. (Ok, that helps a little.)

 

• I’ve tried psyching myself into having it. (Did you ever see the Friends episode where Bruce Willis stands in front of a mirror and psyches himself up?)

 

• I’ve tried faking it until I make it. (Not a bad strategy.)

 

• I’ve tried visualizing myself HAVING confidence.

 

• I’ve listened to hours of Zig Ziglar tapes. Highly recommend, but there’s no transference happening there.

 

• I’ve tried pretending I was other people who HAD confidence. Good for modeling.

 

Maybe some of these will work for you. They didn’t work for me.

 

Here’s what worked for me.

 

What I’ve really truly found about confidence is I get it by Taking Action. Not because I AM confident, but because I NEED confidence. I wish I could tell you it was more magical or mysterious than that. But it’s not.

 

And I’m not talking about Big Things. I’m talking about things that are an inch or two beyond where I was comfortable.

 

1. Hitting the ‘send’ button on the first ever newsletter. Whew, that is a scary one! What if everyone sees that newsletter and unsubscribes? What if no one reads it? What if people think my ideas suck? What I missed a typo!!
2. Doing my first tele-class last fall for new grads. What if no one showed up? What if they were all like, “Yeah, we know that, what else you got?”
3. Telling someone no when they wanted to buy a $1,500 coaching product for half price. What if they walk away and no one ever wants to buy a coaching program from me again???
   
4. Posting my first video on YouTube. It’s pretty awful. Probably 25 record and deletes to get one bad video. What if I end up sounding like an idiot? There’s 8 million videos on that subject, why would anyone watch mine??

 

What I learned.

 

All those questions I posed above, and the ones you have, are enough to keep you from doing ANYTHING.

 

You will always feel the discomfort of conscious incompetence when you do something new. Remember when you learned how to drive?

 

But here’s the leverage point: Once I did those things, the questions DIDN’T MATTER AT ALL.

 

Not all of those things went perfectly. But when I did them, I was ready to do it again. And then again. And still, I keep going.

 

Because the REAL victory was in the doing.

 

Instead of asking all those worst-case scenarios, what I should have been asking is:

 

“What is the cost of NOT taking this action?”

 

If you are avoiding something because of questions like the ones above, I urge you: Stop waiting.

 

Start doing.

 

You will not believe the feeling that lies on the other side.

 

And when you feel that, you will want more of it.

 

Because no one can do it for me.

 

And no one can do it for you.

 

Your action for this week: Take one action you are avoiding because you don’t feel confident enough. Then please leave a comment below and let me know what you did, and what happened.

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