If you think about the people you respect and admire, what is one thing they all have in common? They are likely confident. Often under-recognized, but correlated with personal and professional success is having a positive level of confidence in your abilities. Having confidence should not be confused with being arrogant. In fact, those two traits share less in common than you might think. Bonnie Marcus, executive career coach and Forbes.com contributor explains, “A lack of confidence can have a dramatic effect on your career,” she writes, “It will keep you in your comfort zone because that’s where you feel safe with little risk of failure.”
So how do you know if you’re deficient when it comes to being confident, just right, or skewing toward pompous, and what can you do about it?
Assessing your confidence level
If you’re unsure about how you rank when it comes to your level of self-confidence, you can start by taking an assessment. This assessment, found on mindtools.com is a straightforward, fairly short exercise that will even give you context around what your results mean. In addition, it’s followed by helpful advice users can put to work if they’re not happy with their assessment results.
You could also try seeing where you fall in the Rosenberg Self-Esteem-Scale. Created in the 1960’s by Morris Rosdenberg, it is widely used by psychologists and sociologists, according to statisticsolutions.com, to gauge self-esteem levels.
What to do if you need a dose of humility. . .
If you find yourself in the “over-confident” category, Jessica Stillman, an inc.com contributor cites four tips from David Dunning, Cornell Psychologist, to avoid being seen as overestimating your talents or overvaluing your contributions.
She suggests these four ideas to stop your overconfidence in its tracks:
- Always Be Learning
- Beware Beginnings
- Slow Down
- Know When to be Confident
How to improve your self confidence/ self-esteem
A quick Google search will give you all the advice you need on how to start on the path to positively changing how you feel about yourself. However, all the experts agree, there is no “quick fix, one-size-fits-all” solution, and you should choose exercises that you are likely to stick with. Here are 51 of them you can choose. As Chris Dunn, Founder & CEO of Skill Incubator explains, “Self-confidence is something that you learn to build up because the challenging world of business, and life in general, can deflate it.”
As with most things in life, too much confidence can cause you more issues than the benefits it can bring. Whereas, not having enough of it can leave you feeling stuck in your career, relationships and life in general. Building your self confidence takes time, a mindful commitment to improve it, and a regular assessment of how you’re feeling. However, you can improve it, and the investment you make in yourself will likely not only pay off for your mental health; in fact you may just find yourself getting that new job or promotion you didn’t believe was possible before you started going to work on your self-confidence.