Would you agree that with confidence comes competence?
Some of us are lucky to be naturally confident, and like all of us this can grow and develop with age as well as exposing ourselves to new experiences in our lives. Competence, however, comes with practice, as the saying goes, practice makes perfect, enabling us to become more competent.
To become more confident and self-assured with our own abilities we need to believe in ourselves, know that we are more than able to tackle new things, take ourselves out of our comfort zone. It is hard but never trying new things will only make us feel like we’ve failed in some way and missed opportunities in life.
We can gain more confidence by learning new things, building up our knowledge which helps us develop the skills we already have, learning new skills along the way. When we do this our performance is improved. These experiences help us to develop the potential in ourselves to become competent in our abilities sufficiently enough we naturally will grow our self-confidence.
Have you ever noticed that leaders are seen to be confident, totally competent, in control, able to empower others, as well as seemingly having the ability to lead others, and for others to want to follow them? They seem to have the self-confidence in themselves. Were they born that way? Is it a learnable skill? Can we all have the confidence to become competent, not only helping ourselves but others along the way?
Here are seven steps for you to feel confident in becoming competent:
- Be open to trying new things and feeling okay if you don’t succeed
- Be prepared to learn new skills, whether this is in work, your business or a hobby
- Listen to yourself, start with yourself, believe in yourself
- Focus on what you can do, not what you can’t do
- Tell yourself you can undertake new things successfully
- Diarise at least one new task or action once a week if you can and try it
- Review how you felt when you tried new things embracing the feeling of achievement!
