If you’re like most people you hate the idea of making mistakes. Who wouldn’t? We get taught from a very early age that making mistakes is bad. All through school, you get punished for making mistakes and rewarded for not making them.

Imagine if the teacher said to you: “I’m so pleased that you got 51% of this test wrong”. It doesn’t happen. In fact, even if you got 90%, the teacher would concentrate on the 10% you got wrong.

And so we develop the erroneous belief that we must avoid making mistakes at all costs. But the problem is, when we aren’t making mistakes we are also aren’t learning.

Think of a baby learning to walk. Babies fall over all the time when they are learning to walk. Unless she makes mistakes, she’s not going to even be able to stand. She has to keep trying, learning a little bit from every mistake and finally taking her first steps. It’s only by making mistakes that you learn what works and what doesn’t.

Ask any successful person and they will tell you that they learnt far more from their mistakes than from their successes. Most successful businesspeople have a few failed companies and bankruptcies in their past that set the groundwork for their subsequent success.

Part of being confident is being able to try new things. To cross over from your area of competence into new areas and not feel intimidated and immobilised by fear. When you venture into new areas that are not your strength, you are likely to make mistakes. But it is only with making mistakes that you learn and with the lessons you learn you broaden your experience.

In other words, success in any field means you need to be willing to make mistakes. So how do you make yourself cope better with mistakes. Again, like with much of confidence building, it’s about modifying your beliefs. What are your beliefs about mistakes? Do you feel like mistakes attack your self-worth? Do you feel like mistakes mean you are less of a person. The most empowering way to think of mistakes is to stop calling them mistakes and instead describe them as learning. It is part of learning. And to add to this, the more mistakes you are making, the faster you are likely to be learning.

The person who makes the most mistakes learns the fastest.

In other words, if you want to learn quickly, you need to be out there making as many mistakes as possible. And surely, we all want to learn things as fast as possible. What’s the benefit in slowing down your progress?

The more comfortable you can be with mistakes, the more likely you are to succeed.

Action Step:

Today, notice if you make any mistakes in anything you do. See what you learn from it. I can guarantee you will learn more from the mistake than you would from a flawless performance. You just need to look for the lesson.

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I often get asked by clients I work with on confidence issues, whether they will need to be free of anxiety to be truly confident. The image they have of truly confident people is someone who is pretty much relaxed about everything. They think that a confident person is so full of self-belief that this prevents them from experiencing anxiety.

This is a myth, since even truly confident people feel anxiety in certain situations. Confidence does not mean the absence of fear. It does not mean the absence of anxiety. Confident people may get anxious in certain situations that they are not comfortable in. But the difference with the confident person is that they respond to anxiety and fear differently.

A less confident person sees anxiety and fear as unpleasant and a trigger to either not act or to run away from the situation. A truly confident person, on the other hand, feels the anxiety and fear but uses this as a trigger to take action. They have felt the fear, but are able to act in spite of it.

Remember someone who has practiced a particular skill like playing the guitar may be confident in that particular skill, but that doesn’t make them truly confident. Their strong confidence while playing the guitar might crumble when you put them in a social situation like a drinks party. Confidence is the ability to take action even in situations where one is not so comfortable or practiced. Confident people will still feel uncomfortable in certain situations but it doesn’t stop them from acting.

Knowing that confidence doesn’t mean the absence of fear can be very liberating. Some people say that they thought they could never be confident because they felt so anxious. But again, it’s not whether you feel anxiety that determines whether you are confident, but what you do with that anxiety.

Imagine being confident? Imagine what would happen if you were so confident that you could walk into a room, feeling totally secure in yourself. You could talk to anyone, anywhere. You were unruffled, relaxed and comfortable. When you read that paragraph, most likely you formed some kind of experience in your mind. This could have been either a mental picture of the experience. It could have been the sounds associated with the experience. Or it could have just been feelings associated with the experience.

We tend to dismiss people who daydream as living in a fantasy world. We think that their daydreaming is just a waste of time and has no impact on the real world. But the fact is, daydreaming can be a very valuable tool in developing your skills. For the mind uses mental images and feelings to prepare for real situations. In extreme cases, it can be difficult for the mind to distinguish between a real situation and an imagined one. You may find this hard to believe, but think about it.

You could be in the safety of your home. You could be sitting on your sofa. And if you suddenly thought of a traumatic event that was upsetting, you would immediately notice your heart rate increasing and your breathing becoming shallow. Some people can get very distressed thinking about an event, even if it was in the past. The mind is reminded of the situation and has a resultant response to it, even though you are currently safe.

We can use this response to our benefit. Olympic athletes do it. You can too. By picturing yourself as confident in different situations you are creating the feelings in your mind. This is an extension of the “fake it till you make it” strategy. If you can continue to feed your mind positive empowering images of your desired behaviour, you can influence your own actions.

So, next time you catch yourself daydreaming, don’t be so hard on yourself. If you can harness this power, you can gain confidence and make incredible improvements.

So you’ve realized that you’re actually not very good at something. Can you develop confidence in something that you’re incompetent at? Yes. Will being confident make up for the incompetence? No.

Confidence without competence is not a particularly good idea. As they say in marketing, if you’re promoting yourself before you get good, you just speed up the rate at which people find out you’re no good.

But, wait a second. How do you get competent? Competence requires time and effort. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice. So once you put in the time, you will get the competence. But this is where confidence comes in. If you’re good at something, but don’t have confidence in yourself, you will continually undersell yourself. You need confidence in yourself and in your abilities to push yourself further to achieve more.

But confidence also plays a role before you get good at stuff. Confidence allows you to venture into an area that you otherwise are no good. Confidence helps you to develop competence. People who are truly confident are able to transfer their confidence to areas where they wouldn’t normally feel comfortable. That transferred confidence allows them to have a superior attitude, which enables them to pick up new skills quicker than someone who was lacking in confidence.

When we develop our skills and abilities in a certain area, we go through 4 distinct stages. The first stage is that of unconscious incompetence. That’s when we don’t even know what we don’t know. Then comes conscious incompetence. That’s when we realize how little we know, and how much we need to improve. This can be frustrating and demoralizing. This is where, the truly confident person distinguishes themselves. They have confidence in their ability to learn and become skilled in this new area. They push through to the third stage, which is conscious competence. You know what to do, but you have to be fully attentive when you do it. The final stage is unconscious competence. You know what to do, and you don’t even need to be attentive, because the skill is imprinted.

So you see, confidence without competence is no good. But it can help you push through and make the effort required to be competent. Once you have both confidence and competence, you are unstoppable!

Have you ever seen a baby try and walk? Babies who are trying to walk, try to do it over many weeks and months. They make a small effort, usually fail and then try again. It is only after many efforts that they eventually master the skill.

What does that have to do with confidence?

It seems to me that even though we see all around us, that anyone that developed a difficult skill took a long time to do it, we somehow kid ourselves into thinking that we can achieve a new skill overnight. We expect to learn a language in a few hours even though you took months and years to learn your own language. Part of it is advertising that promises quick results. Part of it is we have become a society obsessed with speed. But the fact is, you can’t make big changes overnight. Sorry, but it’s just not possible.

So when I see people who expect to be transformed overnight from unconfident to confident, I have to give them a dose of reality. It ain’t gonna happen! If you are serious about developing your confidence, you are going to have to accept the reality. It won’t happen immediately. You have to be patient. You have to apply yourself every day and have a firm plan for action. If you don’t do this, you will never succeed.

Remember, patience is the key. As they say, a desire for instant results can be the cause of a lifetime of failure. Don’t expect results too soon. If you are getting a little better every day, not only are you guaranteed to get there in the end, but the skills you develop will be much more stable and secure. You will have earned the achievement.

Resolve today to apply yourself every day to becoming confident. It’s only with a commitment to day by day improvement that you will get to your goal of being an impressive socially confident individual.

One of the ways that we judge our abilities or our performance in life is by comparing ourselves to others. This seems to make sense, since it would be a good indicator of how we are doing. “Am I earning enough? Let me look at my friends. They seem to be earning less than me, so I must be doing ok. No wait, they are all earning more than me. I must be doing terribly.” His kind of comparison is of course the root of the “Keeping up with the Joneses” phenomenon.

But it is also the root of much low confidence. Why?

When we compare ourselves to others, we are almost never in a position to do it properly. We almost never have all the information. And our perception of them is almost always colored by our own beliefs.

An example would be comparing yourself to a friend who appears to be making more money than you. He lives in a big house and drives a fast car. Lucky guy! Don’t you just feel absolutely awful about yourself when you compare yourself to him? But let’s take a closer look. Let’s take a look at some of the information that you may not have had access to when you made an interpretation about how he is doing compared to you.

Firstly, he is up to his eyeballs in debt. He doesn’t own either the car or the house. He has massive loan repayments that he sometimes struggles to make.

Secondly, he has a terrible relationship with his wife and children. He hates coming home at night, because things are so bad.

Thirdly, he actually feels jealous of you, because he thinks you have a great lifestyle.

Fourthly, even if he had 400 fancy cars, that actually has no physical effect on you, your lifestyle or your ability to be happy. When you take a step back you realize that it’s all in your interpretation of what his success means to you.

When we compare ourselves to others we almost never do it from an objective point of view. We never have the information to make a proper comparison. And it hides the fact that comparison does not actually give a proper measure of your success. You could be comparing to the wrong people!

If you want to know how to gain confidence, there are two sides of the equation. One is making sure that you do things that build up your confidence. The second is being able to deal with things that can potentially drain your confidence.

Think of this example. At the Smith Company office, John and George have just been told off by their boss. Told off is putting it mildly; they were screamed at. John feels awful. He feels like his confidence in his abilities has been wiped out. He goes home miserable. Now, looking at this situation, it is easy to understand why John feels that way. He was screamed at by his boss. We can easily understand that being screamed at by his boss made him feel miserable. That makes sense.

But does it really make sense. When you look at George’s case, you start to doubt the cause and effect relationship. George was screamed at even more by the boss. He feels a little bad about it, but understands that it really only applied to that one particular mistake that he and John made. The screaming has no impact on his self-esteem and he goes home and is able to relax and forget about it.

So why did the boss screaming at John make him miserable while not really affecting George? The reason is their beliefs. The beliefs they have colored their perception so that one felt bad while the other felt OK. John’s belief was that the boss screamed at him showed that he was incompetent. So he felt bad. George interpreted the screaming as simply related to one mistake and didn’t think the boss thought that he was incompetent. So he felt OK.

So the beliefs you have affect the way that you interpret the situation. Now who was right in this particular scenario? We don’t know. But who has the better attitude and maintained their confidence? Clearly, George.

Next time you are in a situation that there seems to be a natural response to feel bad, question it. You will discover that underlying the bad feeling is a belief that makes you feel that way. If you change the belief, you will change the response.

It’s an interesting fact of life, that most of us are very bad at picking who’s confident and who’s not.

It’s almost a good rule of thumb to acknowledge that most people are actually not confident. Most people could do with increasing their confidence.

The thing that confuses us, is that many people who appear confident are actually not. It’s because we tend to forget that true confidence arises when you are broadly confident over a wide range of domains. So someone who is confident at work, in social situations, even in unfamiliar environments is truly confident.

On the other hand, someone who is only confident in one area of life, but not confident in any other areas is actually not confident.

An example would be someone who is an incredibly confident doctor. They are very good at diagnosing and treating patients. People come from all around to see this particular doctor. She knows she’s a very good doctor and she knows that she has incredible skills. She is very confident that she knows what she is doing in a professional sense.

But when you put her in a room full of people at a party, she is a completely different person. In this environment all her confidence saps away. She is nervous and uncomfortable. She can’t look anyone in the eye. She can’t bear talking to people.

If you had only seen this doctor in a work setting, you would have imagined that she is one of the most confident people you have met. If you had only seen her in a social setting, however, you would have realised that she is not very confident at all.

Her confidence in her work setting simply comes from hard work, study, practice and experience. It is not the form of confidence that can be applied in other situations.

If you want to be truly confident, you need to be able to have firm self-belief in yourself that crosses over from familiar well practiced situations to unknown, unfamiliar situations. This is not common, but it is definitely learnable.

Confidence isn’t just for the good times. In fact, the mark of a truly confident person is that they maintain their confidence when times are bad. People who are only confident when things are going well for them have a fragile confidence that you can’t really call true confidence.

So how do truly confident people maintain their self-esteem when things get rough? Well, part of confidence is knowing that you can deal with whatever situation comes your way. In other words, you have the ability to deal with problems. Let’s face it, problems are a part of life. It’s even been said, if you’re not having problems, you’re probably dead.

So it makes sense that we should learn to deal with problems as best we can. But if dealing with problems is a sign of confidence, conversely having confidence can help us deal with problems. It’s kind of a self-powering loop. The better you get at solving problems, the more you confident you feel. The more confident you feel, the better your attitude, and therefore it will be more likely that you will be able to solve problems.

So how do we get better at solving problems? We get practice! We deal with every single small problem we can find and then build our way up to larger and larger problems.

The key to problem solving is keep a solution focus. Don’t get too hung up on the problem. You can spend all day thinking about the problem and make yourself feel worse and worse. Instead focus on the solution. Have faith that you can find a solution.

First of all, define the problem. Write it down on paper if you need to. Then start trying to come up with solutions. Write as many as you can. At least 20. Yes 20! The more the better. Often people find that the 20th is the best solution. Once you have written down as many solutions as you can, pick the best three or four. Apply the solution to your life. If it works, great, you just solved a problem! If it doesn’t try the second, third or fourth options. Repeat until this works.

If you can, also ask the help of someone who has had a similar problem before. Why reinvent the wheel? If they already have found a solution, you can borrow theirs’ and avoid the time taken to discover it yourself.

Once you get good at problem solving, you will feel more and more confident.