Written by Elyssa Desai, who is a certified Confidence Coach based in London.
3 Steps to Develop Your Confidence and Make that Dream a Reality
Starting a business and growing it can be scary. You’re venturing into the unknown and your confidence, or lack of, can stop you making your dreams a reality. But it doesn’t need to be that way.
Confidence isn’t something we automatically have or don’t have. It’s something we can build and cultivate. Follow these 3 steps to start developing your confidence today and take a step closer to your dreams.
Step 1: Know Your Strengths
Acknowledge your strengths, what you’re good at and what makes you unique. Start collating a list by considering the following:
- Have you received any positive feedback? It can be from a colleague, your boss, friends, family or your partner.
- What comes easily to you or feels second nature?
- What do you enjoy doing? Do you have strengths in these areas?
- Is there something people always ask you to help with?
Once you’ve spent some time reflecting on what you think your strengths are, reach out to friends, co-workers or family to ask what they think your strengths are. Sometimes people can recognise things in us that we can’t see.
Collate all of these together and save them somewhere you can come back to. Make sure you keep adding to this list as you learn and develop new strengths.
Our brains tend to focus on the negative and what we don’t have more readily than the positive and what we do have, so use this list to give yourself a confidence boost when the doubt starts to creep in. Key thing to remember: you are capable of much more than you think.
Step 2: Develop a Growth Mindset
I am going to make an assumption that your journey to making your dreams a reality is going to involve some things you’ve never done before. Some things which on first glance you might not feel you can do.
When situations like this occur, it’s vital we approach them from a growth mindset rather than a fixed mindset. A fixed mindset assumes that your skills and abilities are relatively fixed – “you’ve got what you’ve got, no matter what” attitude. Whereas a growth mindset understands that challenges are part of the learning process and through learning and adapting you can develop the skills and abilities you need to overcome new problems.
The next time you face a problem, utilise your growth mindset by asking yourself the following 5 questions:
- What do I need to learn to be able to do this?
- Who can I learn from?
- Who could provide useful feedback?
- What could I do differently next time?
- What can I learn from this experience?
Remember if you don’t know how to do something, you can learn. We spend our entire childhoods learning, failing and learning some more until we’ve figured things out. nce we become an adult, we place much higher expectations on ourselves that we need to have everything figured out straight away. Instead, embrace your inner child and remember that failing is just an opportunity to gain resilience, knowledge and experience.
Step 3: Face Your Fears
At each new stage of your business you may feel fear as you try something new and push yourself out of your comfort zone. Instead of running from fear, use it as motivation. Feeling fear is a positive sign you are pushing yourself.
We need to step out of our comfort zone and utilise our courage to move through the fear zone, to the learning and growth zone, so we can acquire new skills, live our dreams and reach our goals. The more we take small steps out of our comfort zone, the more it will grow and so will our confidence.
Think about your business and ask yourself, what am I scared of?
Start to collate a list of ways you can start pushing yourself out of your comfort zone. And remember you don’t need to start with the most terrifying thing (unless you want to!). Every step is a step in the right direction.
Elyssa Desai is a certified Confidence Coach based in London, who helps women stop self-doubt and master their mindset to get the life they want. Follow her on Instagram for confidence and mindset tips.