Becoming more confident at work can have a great benefit for your career. In this post, you’ll learn 6 things you can do to be confident in work and life.
Self-confidence is an important trait to have in all aspects of life. Specific to the workplace, self-confidence can affect your communication skills, your decision-making ability, your overall job performance, and your job satisfaction.
Confidence is also a highly visible character trait. Your colleagues will notice your self confidence, or lack of. It may help to build trust in your skills and abilities.
Confidence in your work can also boost the morale of the team, especially when you are in a managing or supervising role!
Luckily there are some techniques you can implement immediately at work to improve your self-confidence.
How to Build Self-Confidence to Live the Life You Want
In this article, I’m going to share with you 6 steps you can use to build confidence in your life and work.
The 6 steps you can use to become more confident are the following:
- Use Affirmations to Become More Confident
- Focus on Small Daily Accomplishments to Build Consistency
- Know When to Ask For Help to Get Advice
- Expand Your Skillset to Grow Personally
- Know Your Worth to Get Paid Appropriately
- Look the Part and Look Good to Feel Good!
While this article focuses on your professional life, you should also realize that these principles could be applied to other parts of life, such as relationships, health, and money!
Let’s dive in to each of these specific tips! 🙂
1. Use Affirmations to Become More Confident
Using affirmations is one of the most underrated self-improvement techniques out there, and one of my favorites.
An affirmation is quite simply just a statement of truth. The power of positive thinking through making affirmations effectively convinces yourself that you are someone great, that you will do something today.
Affirmations are best made in the morning before work. You can self-reflect using your phone, pen and paper, or just by talking to yourself. Here are some examples of affirmations that involve your professional career:
- I am a valued member of my team at work.
- I have a great work life balance right now.
- I do deserve a pay raise.
- I am asking for that pay raise today.
- I give my best effort at work, today and every day.
You may notice three similarities with the above affirmations. These will help you write affirmations of your own:
- I started my affirmation with “I”
- Taking control of your life is critical to becoming better.
- I wrote in the present tense
- Right now, I’m focused – not, I’m going to focus (if I’m going to, I never will)
- The affirmation was positive
- Positive thinking is incredibly powerful and will lead you to where you want to go.
Don’t forget that these can be made for other areas of your life, such as personal finance or fitness. I encourage you to give these confidence-boosting affirmations a try. You may be surprised at how effective they can be!
2. Focus on Small Daily Accomplishments to Build Consistency
You will not be able to change yourself and build self-confidence all at once. It still takes time, no matter how hard you try.
In that case, you should work smart, not hard. Small improvements on a daily basis can have tremendous results in the long term. Improving 1% every day means you are improving 7.2% per week, 36.1% per month, and 3778.3% per year! This is exactly why I think focus and consistency outperforms hard work.
In the workplace, daily accomplishments may look like:
- Catching up on all your emails
- Re-organizing your office / desk
- Giving a successful presentation
- Completing a specific task, or well-defined sub task
A daily planner is a surprisingly effective tool for tracking consistent small accomplishments. I recommend writing down a couple career related tasks at the beginning of the day, and review the list at the end of the day to see what you accomplished.
Remember, your daily accomplishments don’t have to be limited to your professional life! Going to the gym is a great daily accomplishment, and so is having a “no spend day” where you make no unnecessary purchases.
3. Know When to Ask For Help to Get Advice
Knowing when to ask for help may seem counter intuitive at first. How can needing help be a confidence builder?
Part of self-confidence is knowing your current limitations, not just your strengths. Failure to do so may make you overconfident. If you don’t know something, accept that you don’t currently know it, and proceed to figure it out.
“If somebody offers you an amazing opportunity but you are not sure you can do it, say yes – then learn how to do it later!”  – Richard Branson
This applies to both knowing how to do something, and knowing about something as well. You should be asking questions and learning all the time during your career.
You should also share knowledge with others! Being confident enough in your knowledge and abilities to teach others is a powerful trait.
You may be afraid to ask questions early on in your career. You may be afraid of looking clueless or incompetent as well; this is common especially when starting a new job. These feelings are normal, but you need to overcome them.
It is better to ask questions and possibly be annoying, than not ask questions and possibly make costly mistakes.
4. Expand Your Skillset to Grow Personally
One way to improve confidence in yourself is to literally improve yourself. Developing a new skill can be very rewarding, both personally and financially! The harder the skill, the more income you can earn.
Technical skills are always in high demand, especially coding. Picking up a relatively easy to learn language such as Python, Java, C++ , or even Visual Basic can set you apart from others in your field (assuming this is not a skill that is already a requirement in your field.)
People with soft skills tend to be “a dime a dozen”, but they are still essential. You can have the best technical skills in the world but no one will want to work with you if you have zero soft skills (especially communication).
Luckily, soft skills can always be improved! These skills are highly correlated with self-confidence.
For example, someone who has self-confidence is more likely to excel at public speaking, negotiation, etc., and vice versa.
Building these skills through practice is a great way to build self-confidence, since they are so interconnected.
5. Know Your Worth to Get Paid Appropriately
Know your worth, and then add tax!
Being underpaid is discouraging. Many people sadly take what they can get when it comes to new jobs or pay raises, being too afraid to negotiate with the employer. This in turn can lower job satisfaction and even possibly your self worth.
If this sounds like you then you have a big hurdle to leap, however it is worth it. In fact, it is the best way to increase your income with no side hustle!
How do you know how much you deserve to be paid? My favorite tool is payscale.com. This site has the biggest data pool of salary information on the web to dig into.
Follow the instructions and enter as much information as you are comfortable inputting; the more information, the more accurate the answer.
With this newfound information, you can see if you are being paid what you’re really worth.
6. Look the Part and Look Good to Feel Good!
Finally, don’t forget to look the part. Take care of yourself, your appearance, and your workspace. You don’t need to wear designer clothing, but you should at least wear high-quality and presentable clothes that you feel good about yourself in.
Your workspace is also a reflection of yourself, especially if you work in an office.
Next time you work, come in a little early to the office and organize your desk. Clean out unnecessary stuff and old paperwork.
By tidying up, you can help your productivity, and make you feel mentally organized and capable as well. After all, you are a product of your environment!
Building Self Confidence In All Aspects of Life
With these 6 steps to becoming more confident, you can start showing confidence at work and building the career you dream of building.
Although this post focused on your professional life, many of these concepts can be applied to other parts of life as well.
Affirmations can set a positive mindset for whatever you will do, and tracking your daily accomplishments will reward you for it.
Asking questions will help you avoid making costly mistakes anywhere in life, and expand your skill set in the process!
Finally, feeling good about your appearance and your environment will lead to great things, whether it be at work or out with friends.
Thank you for reading!
