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How to power your success with these three critical elements (Part 1)
This topic on confidence, discipline and persistence has been broken down into two parts. Part one will tackle why confidence is so critical to your success. Part two will examine discipline and persistence to complete your success pyramid.
Confidence, discipline and persistence influence and are influenced by each level of your success pyramid. For example, if you are low on confidence, security in a job may be your top value, your goals will be less significant (why try if you can’t get there?), your mindset will be sub-optimal for success, you won’t proactively strive to become better at what you do and you definitely will avoid networking situations.
This will all lead to a SIGNIFICANTLY lower success outcome.
With things that matter, I am excellent with discipline and persistence. For example, my health and fitness. I’m a bit tired, I go to the gym. When I get there, I perk up. I can’t be bothered, I go to the gym anyway. I have a work function on during the week, I swap rest days. It’s cold and wet, I drive to the gym (normally I walk) or do something at home.
Laser focus. Nothing gets in my way of my health and fitness.
Learning the guitar. I listen to Slash from Guns n Roses and think that would be awesome to play like that. I need to dedicate 1-2 hours a day (at least), every day. Yeah, not going to happen!
As it’s not a major goal in life, but a hobby, I lower my sights and try to practice a few times a week, most weeks. I won’t be as good as Slash ☹. But I might be reasonable some day.
You have to pick your targets (your main goals) and focus your efforts there. And if you have followed my posts up to this point and done the work, you will have your own set of targets.
Confidence, this is the area where I struggle. For whatever reason in the past, confidence is not natural to me. I have to work at it.
My Achilles heel is: If I can do it, it’s not that special.
As a PT, I had trouble selling my skills because if I was able to be fit and healthy, it wasn’t that hard. People didn’t need my help.
I have two undergrad degrees, two Masters degrees and a Post Grad Diploma. If can do it, it’s not that hard.
Therefore, if I can do something, anything, it’s nothing special.
Therefore, anything I do or have done will never be of much value. Why? Because I can do it.
Strangely, I had the confidence to go out on my own and start a PT business, but I never had the confidence to promote it! My head is a strange place!
Does that mindset stop you from taking risks (calculated risks), exploring options and making the most out of life?
Absolutely.
Confidence
According to Dean Graziosi “Millionaire Success Habits”, your state of mind and your level of confidence are critical factors in order for you to become a high achiever (that is, successful).
How can you ever do anything amazing when your confidence is low?
Important definitions:
Confidence – the quality of being certain of your abilities or of having trust in people, plans, or the future.
Arrogance – the quality of being unpleasantly proud and behaving as if you are more important than, or know more than, other people.
Narcissism – too much interest in and admiration for your own physical appearance and/or your own abilities.
Whether it is true or not, don’t ever feel that you are better than someone else. Don’t act superior to others. Yes, you may have superior knowledge or skills compared to others – but so what? The people you are trying to deal with, will not like or trust you. So how can you be effective?
Arrogance is an external focus. You are always trying to show to everyone that you are the greatest person in the room. You are the centre of the universe!
Confidence is an internal focus. You feel strong in your belief that you have the capacity to do or learn what is required. If you are not confident, then work like crazy to get confident or have the confidence to say that it is out of my area of skill and I recommend that someone else helps you.
The major problem with many people’s confidence is that the outside world determines their confidence. We let other people dictate how we feel about ourselves. If we do this, then we are never in control of our own confidence.
But we are also very good at shooting ourselves down too. This is where I’m trying not to excel!
Confidence lives at the top of a spectrum
Confidence is not an all or nothing thing. It’s more like the volume control on your music player.
Dean Graziosi believes that if your confidence levels are not at 100%, that dent in confidence can be a killer to your aspirations, goals and dreams. Even if you are only 5% off.
The first step in gaining or boosting confidence, is to take control of it.
There may be people in your life who dent your confidence. It could be a spouse, partner, parent, sibling, neighbour, colleague or boss.
Or, if you are like me, it’s the little voice of negativity in your head. That probably came from a person a very long time ago who dented my confidence. The voice had to come from somewhere! When I mean voice, I mean the self-talk you have. Not some “other person in my head” telling me bad things.
If the confidence killer is a person, then you have to evaluate that relationship. I’m not a psychologist and I don’t want to give advice where I’m not qualified, but this toxic person must be dealt with in a sensible way. I would suggest reading further about this topic or speaking with a trained specialist.
You can either manage the person, tolerate the person, distance yourself from the person or remove the person from your life. This really comes down to the relationship you have with the person.
Manage: Have a conversation with the person and discuss how they make you feel and if they are aware of it. They may not be.
Tolerate: If it’s a parent or other family member, one that you may only see occasionally at family events, sometimes you have to just cop it but have strategies to deal with it.
It may be the aunt you see only at Christmas that never fails to tell you that you have put on weight since last Christmas. Or an arrogant cousin who always tells you how much better than you he is.
Some friends can also be toxic. If they put you down, it makes them feel better about themselves because deep down they’re miserable.
And some people are just jerks!
Whomever it is, you need strategies to help you become Teflon (non-stick).
Distance: Just see less of them or in a social setting, avoid them.
Remove: Cut ties with them. If it’s someone in your workplace, if you can, leave (get another job first). If it’s a friend and you’ve tried to talk to them about it, time to go. If it’s family – that’s a tricky one. But in extreme circumstances you may need to make a tough call.
These strategies are designed to put you back in control. You control the confidence volume.
Build Confidence
Tony Robbins (tonyrobbins.com) offers some practical strategies to help build your confidence.
- Know your values: To truly learn how to be confident, you must know what your values are: loyalty, appreciation, creativity and so on. When you know your values, you’ll be able to make value-driven choices, which leave no room for doubt. When you’re living up to your own standards, you’ll have absolute certainty.
- Accept your emotions: When you’re learning how to be more confident, it’s tempting to focus on your “ideal self” – the person you wish you were. When you accept yourself unconditionally, you’re able to look at your feelings objectively and realize that they are there to teach you something. Lack of confidence is your brain protecting you – from embarrassment or discomfort – and it’s a signal that it’s time to get outside your comfort zone and face your fears.
- Practice positive thinking: Feeling confident starts from within with positive thinking. When you’re building confidence, learn how to reframe your mindset to start thinking more positively and feel more self-assured as a result. First examine your limiting beliefs – the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. Are you nervous in social situations because you’ve always told yourself you’re shy? Do you tell yourself you could never be brave enough for public speaking? These beliefs are only holding you back from a life of confidence. If you find yourself asking negative, limiting questions when it’s time to be confident, stop yourself. Think something positive about yourself instead and begin focusing on all the reasons you’ll succeed instead of why you’ll fail.
- Change your physiology: Even if you don’t feel confident all the time, you can appear confident when needed by adjusting your body language. Research suggests that, when you project confidence through your actions, the degree to which you “feel” those actions makes the confidence feel real, too. You can “trick” your brain into feeling confident. Stand up straight, chest up and take a deep breath. Focus on feeling the confidence you’re projecting. With practice, building confidence becomes natural. (This can be an instant confidence builder).
- Practice your communication skills: Communication is a vital soft skill that allows you to build rapport with others, and it’s less about talking than it is about listening. Communication involves respect, compassion, empathy and deep listening. It means learning how to mirror others to build a sense of solidarity. When you feel good about your communication skills, you’re mastering how to gain confidence with every interaction you have.
To complement this, Dean Graziosi has the 4 C’s of confidence.
- Courage: Courage is walking through a door and not knowing what is on the other side. If you want to find courage to act, find your “why”. When you have a vision and clarity, the ability to be courageous grows exponentially.
- Commitment: You must commit your self to what you want to achieve. If you just stick your toe in the water, go half-hearted at something, you are not going to succeed. If you want wealth, success, a new business, to lose weight or a new relationship you must commit yourself to your goal.
- Capabilities: You have already decided what you want to achieve and how you are going to get there. Now you need to acquire the specific capabilities to achieve your goals. Read articles or books or hire a coach/mentor. With the right capabilities, when you hit a road block, you’ll know how to move around it and continue your progress.
- Confidence: Once you have achieved the first three C’s and take action, you will gain confidence. When you align the three prior C’s to achieve one goal and one outcome, your confidence will skyrocket.
Confidence is a precious resource
You can never live at 100% confidence all of the time. Something will come along and shake your confidence. If it doesn’t, then you could argue you are too deeply entrenched in your comfort zone.
Having said that, it is essential to protect your confidence as if you are protecting the most important item in your life. Your car, Rolex or Chanel handbag! People often treat their possessions better than they treat themselves.
When we stuff up and make a mistake or when things get stressful, we tend to get negative. We focus on things we’ve failed at, or not accomplished or the other mistakes we’ve made. We berate ourselves for making the error. We get down on ourselves. Does this ever help? No.
Do our best ideas come when we are down? Do we perform at our best? Generally, not.
Activity: Write down 10 things you have done in your life that you are proud of. And then write down 10 things you love about yourself.
Don’t just think about it. Write them down. It will make more of an impact on you.
Look at that list. Hopefully it makes you feel good. Hopefully it turns the volume up on your confidence levels.
Affirmations
Positive affirmations are defined as statements that affirm something to be true. To explain, positive affirmations generally mean positive phrases that a person repeats to themselves to describe how they want to be.
I use the reminders in my phone for this purpose. I have about 10 items that pop up in the morning and another 10 in the afternoon. I have also created a printed list as well.
They remind me of:
My goals – being the best parent I can be.
Motivational sayings – success comes by giving great value to the world, or Confidence builders – everything you’ve ever wanted sits on the other side of fear or I deserve to achieve my goals and dreams, I deserve to be happy and successful.
Everyday I try to cram positivity into my brain. If you don’t, the negativity can easily creep in.
Strengths and weaknesses
Negativity kicks in when you work on things you’re not good at. So should you work on your weaknesses? Dean Graziosi suggests working on your strengths and not your weaknesses. He says that working on your weaknesses robs you of your confidence and that working on your strengths will help you overcome anything you consider a weakness.
Is your time better spent working only on your strengths?
A matter up for debate.
On one hand, I agree with him. Your strengths will get you paid. If you’re good at something, that’s the value you can bring to the world. Develop your strengths to enhance your value.
Dean argues, if you put energy and focus into the things that you’re good at and become great at them, you can eventually pay for someone else to do the things you are not good at. Becoming exceptionally good at one key skill is far more valuable than struggling for years and years to become average at the things that you find difficult.
Dean is a business owner. Therefore, he can pay others to do accounting, marketing, sales etc.
What about if you’re an employee?
Can you afford to focus on some parts of your job and do well, where other aspects are left to slide?
I guess that depends on how important the other parts of the job are to your long-term success. If your long-term goal requires you to be at least good at a particular skill, for example, networking, then I believe that you will have to put in the work.
Unfortunately, this approach will knock your confidence. No one feels great about things they aren’t good at, especially when it’s visible to others.
I also think that there are some fundamental life skills that must be developed for your success. A key one is relationship building. In my career, I’m a paraplanner (the technical person who assists a financial planner). If I become the best paraplanner in the country from a technical perspective, but I’m terrible with people, there is no doubt that this will hinder career progress. So I have to work on the essential weaknesses.
Therefore, the question you must ask yourself (or your bosses) is – What are weaknesses that MUST be addressed and what can be ignored?
Confidence must be independent of your achievements
Confidence should not be attached to your achievements. For example, I only feel confident if I’ve had a great day at work and got through everything I wanted to do. Or, I hit my sales target today.
Confidence is a state of mind that is based on who you are. If you miss your sales target this month, are you any less of a person compared to when you hit them last month? Of course not.
Plus you can’t afford to kick yourself and create another sub-par month. You have to pick yourself back up using the techniques here and in your personal research.
The wrap
Confidence is key.
As you can see, building confidence is not just a do one-thing approach. It’s a multifaceted strategy to build and protect your confidence at ALL costs.
Confidence is so important to achieving your ultimate dreams. You will not get as far in life as you want to or are capable of doing without confidence.
You don’t need to be pumped up and wired all the time. But it’s helpful to turn it up when you need it.
You need confidence:
- To try something new or difficult.
- When things go wrong and you need to be able to handle it.
- To know when it’s time to try a different path.
As we can see, confidence is a critical factor in you reaching the top of the pyramid.
Now let’s discuss the hard work!
Up next …..
Take action in your life.
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