Listen very carefully.
You can feel self-confident ONLY when two things happen at the same time.
One; you need to be capable.
Your capabilities come from your knowledge, experience, and skills.
And two; your mind needs to be convinced that you are capable.
These are two very different things.
You may be an extremely capable professional but your mind may not be convinced that you
are.
And the only way your mind will be convinced that you are capable is if you win.
What is a win? it can be a praise from your seniors, a completion of a project at work,
an achievement, positive feedback, these are all wins.
Wins lead to abundance of selfconfidence, and naturally, failures lead to lack of selfconfidence.
A great example of this is those who lack confidence to drive a car after a big accident,
or multiple small accidents in a short period of time.
In corporate world, that big accident is equivalent to getting fired from your job which may destroy
your selfconfidence and small accidents can be equivalent to getting negative feedback
from your seniors.
Now, here is a very important thing.
This process requires calibration.
It’s a simple process of matching your real capabilities with how your mind perceives
them.
At one end of the spectrum, you have self-doubt and at the other end you have arrogance which
is what I personally suffered from early on in my career, almost 15 years ago, in fact,
this was the primary reason why I got fired from a great career with Standard & Poor’s,
S&P.
Now, once you complete your calibration, to achieve self-confidence, you are left with
just two moving parts; First option is that you can simply become
more capable towards the challenge you face.
You can increase your knowledge, skills, or experiences.
Or, the second option is; you can change the intensity of the challenge, meaning, you may
need to accept a less demanding role, maybe what you need first is a stepping stone.
Let me give you a good example of a stepping stone from my own career, even before I joined
PwC Consulting, PricewaterhouseCoopers, I already was a management consultant for quite
a while and I was at the age and experience level of a manager.
But even then, I insisted on transferring as an associate manager, not as a manager
immediately.
I wanted to first calibrate my real capabilities towards this unknown challenge.
It worked wonders, I served as an associate manager for an entire year, learning their
internal systems, the extremely high level of consulting they provide to their clients.
And at the end of my first year, I got promoted to manager, only when I was ready.
That was my stepping stone.
Had I joined as a manager, I might not have made it.
Now, I want to talk about 2 very common issues related to self-confidence.
First one is related to a scenario where you are properly calibrated, and you also get
a lot of wins in your career.
But you still feel lack of confidence when presenting your ideas or speaking with others.”
This usually happens when you don’t have the right communication skills to showcase
your capabilities.
Think of your communication skills as a road.
A road where your technical skills, experiences, and knowledge drive through.
If that road has bumps, the message won’t get to its place smoothly.
And you won’t get the positive feedback that you win.
If you don’t get the feeling that you win, then you won’t feel self-confident.
It’s not even a conscious process.
Writing and speaking is something so fundamental.
You’ve been practicing for all your life.
So, it’s difficult for the mind to properly calibrate where you fall in that proficiency
scale.
How can you not be good in a skill you’ve been practicing for 20 years?
The mind doesn’t realize that work environment requires a different level of communication.
You see this a lot with fresh graduates, also with those who work in technical fields, like
software development, accounting, architecture, research,
For example for fresh graduates, until that point in their lives, they started their messages
with Yo, Dude, girl, they whatsapped eachother, never checked their emails twice before sending,
their emails had colors, flowers, emojis, no attention to the grammar or the flow of
the email.
Because they simply didn’t need to.
Then when they find themselves in a corporate environment, they realize they constantly
get bad looks, and negative reactions most often without even understanding why.
The road was broken and you were unlucky because none of your managers cared enough about you
to help you fix this problem.
If they were capable, and cared about you, they would hold your hand and teach you step
by step.
It’s an unknown unknown.
You can’t fix it on your own if you don’t know it’s broken.
That’s one of the many reasons why I am a big advocate of working for large multinational
firms.
Even my premium program; LIG, focuses on getting you jobs with multinational firms, not with
small firms, not a job, but “the job”.
And there’s a good reason for it.
One of the many reasons is the fact that it is significantly more likely that you will
come across someone, your manager, your colleague, manager of a different department who can
spot these issues and help you fix them immediately, before they destroy your self-confidence without
you having any idea why it happened.
If you work for a small business with 5 colleagues, what are the chances that one of them is this
ultimate mentor who is extremely capable and willing to help you, not impossible but less
likely.
Now, I want to mention one final situation.
This time you have the perfect capabilities in every area, including your communication
skills, but you still lack self-confidence because regardless of how much you try, you
just simply can’t calibrate.
This usually stems from wrong convictions.
See, we’re always bombarded by micro feedback on a daily basis.
It could be a weird look to your presentation, an email from your manager that you misunderstand,
a small argument with a colleague; all of these implant negative thoughts in our minds.
The thought that; what if I am incapable?
What if I am not good.
Then you start looking for confirmations around you, and trust me you can find subjective
evidence to anything, whether you are the greatest or that you’re the worst.
And eventually these little thoughts with those confirmations turn into beliefs that
you’re incapable.
Enough time past, these beliefs turn into convictions.
Think about those cult members who never in a million years could imagine that their beloved
group of friends was actually a cult.
Because it became a conviction.
The best strategy is that you go find a mentor and seek their advice before it becomes a
conviction.
Before you go, I want to make a recommendation.
If you haven’t yet watched my special video The Hidden Secrets of a Successful Career,
please do watch that video entirely and do it now before I remove it and include it as
a bonus to my LIG members.
In that video I teach you how you can have consistently higher salaries and increased
job security every year and get on the track for making even 7 figure salaries, that’s
million dollars per year.
They are not unicorns, hard to get, fine, but they exist and I’ll teach you how you
can achieve that.
But if you’re watching this video on LinkedIn then you’ll have to visit my YouTube channel
because it’s longer than what LinkedIn allows for an upload and when you do that, please
remember to subscribe.
See you next month