Confidence Is Empowering

There was an ad for an anti-perspirant a couple of decades ago with the slogan "never let them see you sweat". It promised to keep you dry during those tense moments, when you start sweating under your arms during stressful times, though it had a humorous bent to it.

Bilal Kamoon via Compfight

There's nothing more powerful than being confident. When you're confident you do your best work. When you're confident people respond to you in the most positive ways. Confidence is infectious if it's genuine.

Just to get this out of the way, there's a fine line between confidence and arrogance. Sometimes people can't define which one it is, including the person who's confident. Telling someone how you accomplished something fantastic can be taken in different ways based on the audience you're delivering it to, and how you tell the tale. I believe discriminating people will figure it out, but sometimes you can't control how everyone will see you, especially in the current time.

The strange thing about confidence is how many people lack it. Those who lack confidence might not always be ready to accept yours. If you're confident that you're going to be a success in business but other people have no background in what you're trying to do, they'll find it difficult to see things your way. Thus, either inadvertently or on purpose they'll try to diffuse your confidence with "common sense". If they don't know what they're talking about shame on them; just go on with your bad self. 🙂

Without a doubt, sometimes confidence is a liar. Doing something 10,000 times doesn't always make someone proficient in anything. Trying to change a new habit by doing it 16 consecutive days won't make it feel natural if it turns out not to be the best thing for you.

What confidence will do for you is help you to never give up trying to find what's right for you. It will help you to be your best in whatever it is you want to do. It will also help you on your quest for happiness; who doesn't want that in their lives?

Let's discuss what brings about confidence. Here are 5 ways to identify confidence, and one or two of them are going to throw you off. These are my thoughts on the subject; give me yours later in the comments.

1. Confident people often have a pattern of successes. It may not always be coming in first place but if you're sometimes the top dog and up near the top more often than not, that breeds a sense of confidence that's hard to overcome. Whether others like it or not, that's hard to ignore.

2. Confident people have a great sense of what they're about. They haven't waited around for someone else to tell them how good they are. They know when they've written something or done something that it's good work, because they either followed all the rules or broke all the rules and came up with something better. And they know it... even if it's not true. 🙂

3. Confident people don't worry that someone else shares in their achievements, but they're always on guard of being superseded. Truly confident people aren't worried about being upstaged here and there, and definitely don't mind working alongside others and sharing success with them. At the same time they don't want to be metaphorically asked "what have you done for me lately", so they're always trying to improve and always working on staying informed.

4. Confident people are doers. Taking time to research something or experiment to try to get something as correct as possible makes logical sense, but at some point it's time to act. Even if it's not perfect or close to perfect, you'll never know until you actually do something and put it out to the world whether it works or not.

5. Confident people aren't afraid to challenge others who might think they're better than they are... in the spirit of competition of course. Maybe you can beat all your friends at tennis and you feel pretty good about that. Confident people enjoy that for a while and then need the next challenge, someone who might be better than them at something else, which they won't know until they get a chance to take them on. If they lose... so what, they keep coming back for more, getting better, even if they don't ever win. It's about the process of growth sometimes because you can't get better staying in one place.

Where do you fit on this scale? What are you willing to do to become more confident? Maybe this old video below will give a bit more insight; enjoy!