Acknowledge Your Fears and Conquer Your Low Self-Confidence
Fear can be one of the most crippling influences on your business success. If you take the time to sit down and list out all the fears you face as an entrepreneur in today’s world, the list can get quite long, quite fast. These are some of the most common fears business leaders experience:
Fear of trying new things
Fear of failure
Fear of losses
Fear of letting others down
They are all valid fears, especially if you own a business that employs others. That means other people rely on your success for their livelihoods and security. However, when these fears prevent you from moving forward, they become largely self-fulfilling. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to break free from these fears so you can accomplish the success you deserve once and for all. This is how you begin.
Know Your Own Value
If you don’t know it already, take a little time to discover that you are more than the sums of your parts. We all have strengths, weaknesses, knowledge, and talents. Some people are fortunate enough to have outright gifts they choose to share with others. It’s not a lack of experience or ability that is holding you back. It is, however, a lack of confidence. Until you understand the gifts you bring to the table, you’re going to struggle with self-confidence.
Find Ways to Improve Your Value
Some people choose to focus on eliminating the negatives but that isn’t always the best choice. It takes far more time to eliminate negative tendencies or overcome knowledge deficiencies than it would to improve your skills and talents and hire someone to tackle the tasks where you are less skilled. For instance, if you have a real gift for empathizing with people but aren’t as gifted at keeping your finances in order, hire a bookkeeper to work part-time handling those tasks while you develop your talents to grow your business.
Invest in Yourself
Take a class to help you develop the skills you need to grow as a person and as a business leader and innovator. If you lack self-confidence, taking classes in the areas where you feel deficient will help you grow your confidence. Knowledge, as they say, is power. Classes help you not only gain knowledge but also develop your talents and interests so you can accomplish impressive things with your business.
Get over Yourself
This isn’t meant to be negative or insulting. Sometimes, you are your biggest obstacle. This is often the result of the fear of failure rather than a lack of confidence. You have to risk failure in order to find amazing success.
Eliminate Negative Self-Talk
Finally, mute the voices inside your head that feed your doubts and fears. If you can’t turn them off, drown them out with positive affirmations, building yourself up, and reminding yourself of all you’ve accomplished until now – and that you’re not finished yet!
Conquering low self-confidence is all about changing the narrative in your mind. Once you’ve mastered that, you’ll open yourself up to greater success.
How Taking Small Actions Can Build Your Confidence and Your Business
Building your business requires action; success is not something that can appear out of thin air or be granted by a magic genie. As the old saying goes, “Slow and steady wins the race,” but sometimes you’re simply overwhelmed by the list of things to do that wait for you. It’s not about moving mountains in the course of a day or taking over the Western world of business in a single year.
Success in business comes by taking small actions daily. More importantly, these small actions compound over time and lead to small successes that build your confidence, creating momentum for larger successes down the road.
It Only Takes a Spark to Start a Fire
If you’ve ever watched a group of scouts trying to learn how to start fires, you understand what this means. Different troops use different tactics to create that spark:
Flint and steel
Magnifying glasses
A bow and spindle
Two rocks
Each of these methods requires small actions to create the spark that becomes a fire. In business, you don’t even need to take all the small actions in a single day, week, month, or year. The key is to take small actions consistently so you can make great things happen.
Use that Spark to Fuel Your Confidence
Those tiny sparks start more than fires for your business. The small actions used to create the sparks have cumulative effects on your business. They build, one on top of the other, while also building your confidence along the way.
When was the last time you noticed the look on someone’s face when he or she accomplished the task at hand? The sense of accomplishment? The enormous personal pride? Each time you accomplish one of these small tasks for your business, you will have that same sense of pride, accomplishment, and confidence.
Break Down Larger Goals into Smaller Tasks
According to Inc.com, one of the reasons highly successful people are able to accomplish more in a day than the rest of us is because they understand the value of breaking large goals into a series of smaller tasks. This gives them the opportunity to accomplish something every day that gets them closer to their larger goals.
Accomplishing Tasks Keeps You Looking (and Moving) Forward
Business owners always want to be moving forward. The more steps you take toward your goals, the faster your business can grow and evolve. The more you do to help your business get there, the greater your sense of accomplishment, confidence, and purpose.
One of the real secrets for success is not to sit back and relax once you’ve accomplished one of your larger goals. While you may want to take a moment to congratulate yourself on a job well done, now is the time to shift your focus to new tasks and goals.
It's amazing how important it becomes for business leaders to continuously strive to accomplish more. It’s part of what separates those who are content to settle in their businesses from those who might someday take top spots in their fields and industries. What small actions have you taken today? What’s on your list for tomorrow?
How to Boost Your Self-Confidence Before a Media Interview
Media interviews can be incredibly useful tools for helping to share your message with your community in addition to introducing yourself and your business to a wider, local audience. However, in order to truly shine during a media interview, you must first have a healthy dose of self-confidence to get you through the interview process.
Create “Talking Points”
When preparing for the interview, it is often best to have the main list of talking points you hope to stick with. Depending on the anticipated length of your interview you may want to have a few brief talking points, or you may be able to address some of your main points more in-depth. Your “talking points” list is helpful either way.
This helps keep you in familiar territory throughout the interview, allows you to tailor your message to the audience you’re addressing, and keeps the topic from devolving into the realm of the unfamiliar. It’s a huge confidence boost to you to have a list of talking points you can draw from because it keeps the interview in familiar territory.
Remind Yourself that Someone Wants to Hear Your Story
Whether you’re launching a book, introducing a new product to the world, announcing a workshop, or simply educating audiences about the risks and rewards of the services you provide, someone was interested enough in your message to conduct an interview. That has got to boost your own inner confidence a little.
Embrace Brevity
You don’t want to re-invent the wheel with your interview. Keep your answers brief and avoid going “over the heads” of your audience. Besides, keeping answers brief helps the audience stay engaged and increases the odds that your message will resonate. You know your stuff. Now put it into words the average person can understand.
Stay on Target
Resist interviewer attempts to take you off the topic at hand. Keep your questions and answers on target so you’re never in dangerous territory. Stick to the topic you know best and let your knowledge, expertise, and experience shine during the interview process.
Familiarize Yourself with the Show
Watch a few video clips of past interviews to allow you to get to know the interviewer, the interviewer’s style, and whether the interviewer tends to try to lead guests off-topic. This will help you prepare for whatever he or she throws in your direction while training you to identify these characteristics for the next media interview you must endure.
List Your Accomplishments
Write them down on paper. This isn’t for anyone but you. You just need to review the list before going into the interview so you can remember your value to others. The better you understand that value, the greater your confidence going into the interview.
Media interviews can be intimidating, especially if you haven’t done many up until this point in your career. They do not have to be intimidating, though. The steps above can help you develop the confidence you need to ace your interview while feeling calm, prepared, and relaxed the entire time.
How to Build Trust with Your Clients When You Really Want to Hide
Building trust with your clients is essential for maintaining effective long-term relationships with them. However, some business leaders struggle with building these types of relationships. There are many reasons this can be a struggle:
Lack of confidence in your abilities
Low self-confidence
Imposter syndrome (you may feel as though you’ve lucked into success and haven’t really earned it)
You’re holding back because you’re afraid they won’t find you worthy
Any one of these fears can create a wall between you and your clients that prevents you both from the type of relationship and results you desire, especially if you’re trying to hide essential parts of who you are from your client. Fear can be devastating to your attempts to build trust but there are things you can do to stop hiding from your clients and build the type of trusting relationship you both deserve.
Be Responsive
Whether your clients call, send emails, send text messages, or fill out help tickets on your website, you need to respond promptly. This makes them feel like their concerns matter to you and that you are listening to them. That will help them trust you more and it’s something small you can do to build it. Of course, this doesn’t mean being on call 24/7. Set your business boundaries and explain to your clients when they can expect to hear from you.
Be Clear in Your Communication
The written word is beautiful. It has been used to create marvelous works of fiction, letters of love, and treaties of peace over millennia. It is also notoriously imprecise if you aren’t careful. Think about it: People argue over what songs mean, what poets intended, over what the framers of the constitution meant.
This lack of clarity is the precise reason we need lawyers to look over contracts before signing them. People are deliberately imprecise at times. Don’t give your clients the appearance that this is your goal. Write clearly in plain language. Make your message heard. It shows trust in their interpretation of your words and confidence in your ability to convey your message.
Give Extra
Perhaps the biggest thing you can do to build trust with your clients is to always give them more than they expect. Whether it’s an extra bonus item, a condensed study guide, or even an easy-to-use flow chart of the information you’ve gone over with them. When you give more without asking for anything in return, it breeds trust and sets the expectation that you’re dealing honestly with your clients.
Their faith in you boosts your own confidence creating situations in which you’re building deeper connections and trust unconsciously.
Building better trust with your clients when you’re feeling as though you’re not worthy of their business can be very difficult, but it’s not impossible to overcome. If you take a few moments every day to address their concerns, answer their questions, and, most importantly, solve their problems (address their pain points), you will cultivate incredibly loyal customers for life. You cannot really ask for better than that when working to grow your business.
Why Staying in Your Comfort Zone is Stunting Your Business
Comfort zones. We all have them. They are fuzzy. Warm. Comfortable. Many people, in life and business, can be perfectly content remaining in their comfort zones forever because it’s comfortable there.
It’s like your favorite, threadbare, flannel pajamas. You might live in them when you’re not headed out for a day at the office or lunch with friends. But you’re not really going anywhere as long as you stay in those pajamas.
The same holds true for business comfort zones. You gather a collection of clients you’re comfortable with. You develop a few key skills you’re familiar with. Then you hit a holding pattern. You’re not losing business but your business also isn’t growing. It isn’t evolving and it will never become all that it can be as long as you remain firmly planted inside your comfort zone.
How do You Break Out of Your Comfort Zone?
When you reach the point where you’re no longer expanding your business into new markets, bringing in new clients, or learning new skills to grow your business, you’re going to need to shake things up to get the growth you seek and that your business deserves. These are some things you can do to help shake things up and take a walk outside the lines your business has been boxed into.
Design a new product. Not only does this exercise increase your personal creativity but it gives your business a new way to reintroduce yourself to your existing customers and to reach out to new audiences.
Write a book. Writing a book introduces you to a much larger audience. The book doesn’t have to be about your business, but it will certainly help you grow your business, not to mention establish you as an expert in your field if it’s business-related.
Consider public speaking. Groups are desperate to have speakers come in for a variety of topics. In fact, many of them struggle to find professionals and business owners willing to take the time to do so. However, speaking to these groups gives you much-needed exposure, helps you make new contacts for your business, and may even introduce you to potential joint-venture partners along the way. You can ask at your public library, your local chamber of commerce, or even local civic groups if they need public speakers.
Teach a class. You know what you do best. You certainly know it well enough to build a career around it. Helping others to learn about the things you do every day or offering a sample of the skills you teach in your in-depth classes can bring you more customers than you ever thought possible. Most communities offer adult learning or adult education classes. Volunteer to teach a class on a topic that showcases your individual talents.
Your comfort zone may feel comfortable for a while. Before too long, though, you will begin to understand that it’s really stifling growth for your business, preventing you from taking risks that fuel giant growth and training you to settle for less in business and in life. Don’t settle for your comfort zone. Be bold. Be unpredictable. Be innovative and watch how quickly your business grows.
