Tag Archives: competence

How Do We Build Confidence?

This is no simple question.

Our confidence is greatly affected by our memories, values, previous decisions and environment. I always tell people that competence is the flip-side of confidence. When you get good at (doing) something, your confidence rises. And likewise when you get more confident at something, you perform better, which raises your competence at that task. So it is like the old riddle – “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” The answer is it doesn’t matter, as long as you have both a chicken and an egg, as they are interlinked and there could not be one without the other.  So it is with confidence and competence.

Lesson for today: build your competence in your targeted task, job or hobby in small steps to gain more self-trust and positive feedback from others, so that your confidence rises up a few notches. That will in turn show on your face and in your voice and body language, starting off a very positive ripple-effect. After a while of small successes you can look back at your journey and see the great accomplishments, and feel the stronger confidence gained from your personal goal-achievements.

Now go climb a small mountain! (figuratively, of course!)

Confidence is Competence!

They are twins. They are the flip side of a coin. As you build up your belief in yourself to do something you gain the nerve to do it. Once you do it or attempt to do it you start to notice what you are doing right, that it wasn’t as bad as you had imagined it, and that maybe next time will be even better.

As you feel more competent at the activity you start to believe more in your ability to improve and maybe even get good at it. This gives you more confidence, even if it is mostly visualization at the beginning. So I could go on with this email but I think you can see my point. The confidence leads to taking more chances and doing things better, so that increases competence, and the increased competence increases your confidence. It will radiate out of you.

Dale Carnegie said it best: Do the thing that you are afraid of. That is the one sure way of conquering your fear! (He was talking about public speaking, but it can be related to many things).

Until next time!