How to build confidence

A few weeks ago I was asked this question.

How do you build confidence?

This is a common question, and if you do a quick search you find results that are cosmetic: body posing, grooming, mindset changes. Those are absolutely needed, but it is situational. And it does do the very thing that helps you build confidence, but it doesn’t build confidence itself.

Confidence is absolutely important to living life and getting out of bed. But, deeper than that — confidence leads to courage. And courage leads to cataclysmic shifts in our world that leads to lasting impact.

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear. — Franklin D. Roosevelt

I used to think perfecting skill sets and “being good” at something is how you build confidence. But how do you get good if you have no confidence because you are not good? Let’s look to kids.

Kids are born not being good at anything. They can’t walk, sit up or even roll over. All new parents lose a lot of sleep just trying to comfort the child and make them feel happy. Many contraptions are created to simulate the baby being back in the womb and slowly get them familiar to this new world — so they can try things.

Kids only have instinct and emotion as tools. As a kid, many emotions are clear, simple and often binary. Kids are happy, sad, anxious or fearful. Happiness is an indication that they are comfortable. If they are comfortable, then they will continue doing it. As they continue doing it over and over again, then it becomes practice.

Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.- Malcolm Gladwell

If a person is practiced enough, two things happen:
a) They gain familiarity
b) They get better

…..which yields confidence.

Every person has a temperament that pre-disposes them to preferences. But that’s just the start. It doesn’t determine the end point. What is in between determines the end point.

The slope matters much more than where you begin or where you end.

Virtuous cycle of building confidence

Get well-practiced at trying at the fastest rate possible.

To increase confidence, set a personal goal activity and do the following steps to achieve confidence in that activity. This not only applies to people building confidence but also building confidence as a startup or company.

1. Get Familiar
   Create safety nets around the situation. For example, if you lack confidence in public speaking and have been asked to speak, get a photo of the stage, know what is surrounding you, will there be a podium? Is the mic hands free? etc… If you are running a company, before you start, research the market, talk to people in that market.

2. Try
   Walk out on stage and give that talk. If you are running a company, try many experiments , oftentimes unscalable in the beginning.

3. Get feedback
   As difficult as it is, review tapes of your talk. Have the organizer or a friend give feedback on items you have been practicing. If you are running a company, review the results of the experiments

4. Try Again
   Say “yes” to the next speaking opportunity so you can gain confidence. If you are running a company, create a framework to do multiple experiments.

5. Practice
   Once you found what works for you, practice practice practice. If you are running a company, this will build your core competency which will lead to your competitive advantage.

Don’t get comfortable with failing, get comfortable with trying.