Confidence Will Make All the Difference to Your Hustle Confidence is not arrogance, it's just being comfortable with who you are.
By Tim Denning Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Confidence is a trait that can make all the difference to your daily hustle. You go to bed, wake up, and then have to overcome obstacle after obstacle. It's like being in an asteroid shower, and all you have is an umbrella to shield you. Confidence is how successful people overcome the daily obstacles. It's that swag that you see on the new guy that's just joined the company, has no idea what they're doing; yet they still win all the big accounts. Confidence is what entrepreneurs use to start businesses when no one else believes in their rubbish vision for the future.
To have confidence is not to have a big ego but to be comfortable with who you are. It's that voice inside your head that says, "Everything is going to be okay/ You've got this, buddy."
Here are eight ways to be more confident:
1. Believe you can do stuff
Overall, confident people believe they can do stuff that other people think is too hard. They're willing to have a go even without the university degree that says they're qualified to operate a spreadsheet full of financial data.
Related: Feeling Overwhelmed? Here's How These Entrepreneurs Stay Productive.
2. Be in control
Rather than blame the outside world for all the stuff that can go wrong in a day, confident people stay in control. They they just get on with it. Instead of standing around discussing the whole story surrounding the difficult challenge, they're outside walking it off, speaking with a mentor and preparing to tackle the next challenge.
These things happen to everyone, so let's not repeat the story to our entire network so we can create even more of a downward spiral to our week.
3. Don't give up.
Anything that's worth achieving is bloody hard; sorry to be the bearer of bad news. If you want to be confident, you have to dust off the failure like it's nothing and keep on trying.
When all of your competitors say that your idea is stupid, you have to be the one to believe. Just like when the movie about electric cars being dead came out, and then Elon Musk created Tesla. Confident people are confident because they use their positivity to keep hustling away. They know that even if their current strategy doesn't work out, they will learn valuable insights that they can apply to the next project.
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4. Break all the rules
Rather than follow the rules, confident people break them because they know that their end game will eventually work out. Confident people are perfectly okay with explaining why they broke the rules. They believe that everyone will be okay with it once they see what has been accomplished.
On the other hand, people who are afraid follow all the rules because they don't believe in themselves. They think that to break the rules is a cardinal sin and avoid being confident at all costs. They call confident people arrogant, and they hate on them at every opportunity. I'm not talking here about breaking the rules so you can prove you are cool; I'm talking about breaking the rules because you are confident that by doing so you can create enormous value.
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5. Forget about opinions
What stops us from being confident is getting lost in other people's opinions. The moment you over- think an action, you put aside your power to act confidently and give in to fear.
Confident people are not trying to make themselves look good: they are trying to make everybody look good. Their sense of self-worth comes from within their own heart. Confident people don't need validation from someone with a fancy job title, because nothing is better than their own approval and feelings of success.
6. Try not to react, young Zen master.
Confident people are the Zen masters of life. Rather than react to every negative situation that comes up, confident people choose non-reactivity. This is an art taught in meditation.
Using your limited energy supplies reacting to everything around you is exhausting. That's part of the reason why your neighbor comes home every day tired as hell and has to drown himself or herself in sugar, and lie on the sofa until passing out from disempowering emotions. A simple trick that I love is to avoid tooting your horn when you are driving. No matter what happens, always choose not to beep your horn.
If you want to become a Zen master, try to smile at the person who just cut you off. Confident people don't get worked up over the little things. If someone has an angry conversation with someone else, they know that both people probably didn't have enough sleep. They move on to the next thing.
7. Have the tough conversation.
Another difference with confident people is they are not afraid to have the tough conversation. It takes sheer guts to tell someone something that you know they are going to hate you for. It's so easy to avoid these conversations and procrastinate on other tasks so that you don't have to be uncomfortable.
Sometimes, the best thing you can do is look deep inside yourself and remember a time that you achieved a goal that was scary. Using prior examples is one way to bring yourself back into a state of confidence when you may not have any in the moment.
What confident people understand is that until you have the tough conversation, you can't move on with the next major task in your life. Avoiding the tough conversation makes you feel dreadful, and it occupies space in your brain that could be used to help you in other aspects of your life.
No one likes to be rejected or be yelled at, but having confidence in yourself is what allows you to brush off this short-term negativity and get back to your hustle. I've had to have my fair share of tough conversations, especially in the last twelve months. It's confidence in myself that has allowed me to stand up straight and deliver a difficult message to someone who often does not even know it's coming. I could have faked my way through, but then I would become incongruent.
Often, the tough conversation you dread having can turn out to be completely different from what you expected. It can even be a blessing in disguise, and you may actually get something that you have always dreamt of. Awesome things, in my experience, don't come from lots of easy conversations. They come from the 10 mind-bending, unbelievably challenging conversations that scare you and make your stomach churn. That's where you can use all of this confidence advice the most.
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8. Do the stuff that's loaded with fear.
If you think that you would instantly like more confidence, then all you need to do is have a go at some items on your to-do list that are loaded with fear. It sounds easier than it is, but it will build the confidence muscle faster than anything else. I've always found that doing the tasks I fear regularly has helped me foster confidence. You don't need confidence so much in the good times; when you need it is when you are jumping out of an airplane and your parachute doesn't open the way it should.
It's in the times when everything seems to be going backwards for you, and you make the decision to keep on hustling. You can't comfortably achieve your goals and change the world at the same time. The only way to get the most out of your life is to use your fear, and turn it into unstoppable confidence that makes everybody stand back and admire who you are and what you're becoming.
