Big Outcomes are the Result of Immense Confidence

by Michael Yacoub


During my recent visit to Dubai I had the privilege of taking part in a Conference for Entrepreneurs and Business Leaders. More than 400 local UAE business leaders were competing for the Business Decision Maker of the Year Award.

Each business leader had just 20 minutes to describe two strategic decisions they’d taken the previous year and describe the impact of their decisions on both their business and leadership. I was truly amazed and inspired as I listened to all the innovative resolutions that some of the delegates had executed.

Truth is each one of us has the ability to come up with creative and amazing decisions. It’s just that most of us don’t tap into this potential as often as we could.

The overriding criterion for being a skillful decision maker, besides being creative, is having available choices and an abundance of confidence. To begin with, it’s easy to choose to stay in the comfort zone with limited means of thinking and rely on what’s worked for you in the past. After all, it’s familiar. You don’t have to change your patterns or learn something new. Besides, if you do experiment with something different, there’s a chance you’ll make mistakes and end up with nothing brilliant to show for it. Along the way, you could get yourself in deep waters and things could get sticky. So it’s perfectly natural to feel uncomfortable when you think about moving into uncharted waters.

Things start to get even more dismal if you are dependent on all things around you being perfect before you are sufficiently confident to make the decision! This means that you are depriving yourself from having the right to choose and thus do not have the required stamina to make any innovative decisions. As you go forward, if you continue to have the thought in your mind that certain conditions have to be right in the world before you will be confident enough to make your decision or to take action, you are never going to be confident. You see, it can’t be about the world. You are the one that has to generate the confidence that creates a space in front of you so that you can move forward!

If you’re facing a business or a personal challenge and need a fitting decision, a good first step is to relax and take time to picture new possibilities and visualize your ideal outcome. When you allow yourself the freedom to imagine something better, you’ll be surprised at the amount of confidence that comes to you. Your intuitive thoughts will be enhanced and you will be better at confidence than you first started. You have shifted your attitude from the comfort zone to the positive zone and therefore your confidence becomes an aptitude.

To further enhance your confidence, develop your intuition by getting outside the familiar to the unfamiliar. Be sure to get input and ideas from people who don’t think like you do. Read articles or books outside your field. Study the biography of classic business leaders like Walt Disney and Bill Gates. Get involved in a mastermind group. You’ll discover different perspectives that stimulate your thinking and help you come up with decisions you wouldn’t have developed otherwise.

Avoid judging or comparing yourself to others. Creative decision making takes different forms. You have the ability to take decisions and bring fresh ideas to almost anything you do, and your tactic may not look the same as someone else’s. Trust your intuition and trust the process. Plant into your subconscious the immortal words of Napoleon Hill, that "what your mind can conceive and believe it can achieve."