How do you become more career confident?
By Cham Posted Date: November 07, 2016
Building professional confidence is no easy feat, and no matter how we perceive confidence, it’s never as easy as putting on a brave face. Career confidence can significantly contribute to your success in the work environment and is a very useful trait to have. Regardless of whether it’s to be heard at meetings and discussions or request for a promotion and pay rise, confidence is key.
Having the right mentors to look up to is a good start as they can be a great source of confidence and motivation. However there are several other ways you can also improve your confidence at work so you can be even more successful, we discuss some of these points below:
- Strategize: Becoming more confident at the work place entails a variety of things and at times it can be confusing figuring out where to begin. The best way to do this is to approach it like you would with any other problem or task, strategize and create a plan, break it down into a set of achievable goals, how you seek to achieve them and set a deadline. (eg: for instance you want to be heard at meetings, so set yourself the goal of bringing up a few points at your next project discussion/meeting)
- Identify your areas of improvement: Increasing workplace confidence isn’t the same for everybody, hence there is no one size fits all model. It’s important that you identify which areas you are weak at and strategize to do what’s necessary to improve your confidence in them. For instance for some people it would be public speaking, whereas others it could be dealing with difficult people at work. Whatever your confidence issues maybe, list them out and make a plan to tackle each.
- Identify your positives too: Another important part of building and improving career confidence is to be aware of what your good at. Dwelling too much on the negatives only tends to bring your confidence levels down, but if you start identifying what you are good at then you can project them better and this confidence will drip through to other areas where you lack it. It’s a necessary part of how you think about yourself which attributes significantly to the confidence levels you hold.
- Find good mentors: A powerful mentor and role model can be everything and factors greatly towards improving your confidence. Being inspired by a strong leader means you can learn a lot from them which in turn will help hone your confidence in the professional environment. There are a lot of things you can learn from your mentors, such as the way they resolve workplace conflicts, their body language and even the way they speak.