How to Gain Confidence at Work – 3 Top Tips

Confidence is a powerful asset to have in the workplace. People who are confident in themselves can expect to be given increased responsibility, leadership opportunities and ultimately more success.

But of course, confidence is to be distinguished from arrogance, which does not attract people or success. When you are confident, you believe in your own abilities but you do not need to look down at or mistreat others. In fact, the greater your confidence, the more you will act in a selfless, generous and engaging manner.

Here are three top tips to help you develop confidence at work.

1. Focus On Confidence

Confidence is ultimately an emotion. When you feel the emotion of confidence, it allows you to access inner resources that make you more capable and focussed. On the other hand, when you feel a lack of confidence, you will tend to hold back, not take risks and generally under-perform.

But while confidence may be an emotion, developing it is more of a skill. And skill requires practice. Any complex skill that you are now able to perform, which includes reading, writing and talking required a lot of practice. Any skills at work that you are able to perform also required practice.

Developing your confidence is no different. I'd love to be able to tell you that you just need to read one article and you'll be confident. In our urgent need to get results fast, we still delude ourselves into believing that we can get things faster than is possible. The fact is, anything you have ever achieved of value, required practice and effort. And it begins with focus.

Focus on being more confident. Set aside time every day to work on your confidence. It doesn't need to be very long. But daily effort will supercharge your efforts to be more confident.

2. Change your Thoughts to Improve Your Confidence.

As we have mentioned, confidence is an emotion. And emotions are caused by thoughts. Before you can feel sad, you have to have thought a sad thought. Before you can feel happy, you must have had a thought that was happy too. In the same manner, your thoughts can drastically transform your confidence levels, if you take care to think only confident thoughts.

So what thoughts do you have on a regular basis? Monitor your "self-talk". That is, listen to things that you say to yourself each day. If it's a lot of "I'm no good at this" and "I can't do this" then of course, you will not feel confident.

If you can change your habitual thoughts, you can transform your confidence.

3. Develop your skills.

Confidence without competence is not a great look. The more competent you are at work, the more confident you will feel. Most people take a very vague and unhelpful approach to improving their skills. If the company pays for them to go on a course, they will do it. But in the 21st century, you can't afford to leave your improvement in the hands of others. Especially in hard economic times, the opportunities for learning may not be as forthcoming.

So you need to take control. It's not that hard. Just set aside some time each day to develop your skills. Make it a ritual. It might be reading trade publications. It might be reading a book related to your field. The best time to do is first thing in the morning. That way, nothing else will get in its way.

And something that really helps is to find another person or a group who share your desire for improvement. You will be able to motivate each other, discuss things you have learnt and generally help each other to maintain focus. All you need to do is improve a little bit each day, and pretty soon, you will notice a huge difference.

The more capable you become, the more confident you will feel. It's like a self-reinforcing cycle. As you increase your confidence, you will feel more compelled to improve yourself.

Putting It All Together

When you feel confident at work, you will enjoy it more, perform better and ultimately be more successful. Take steps to focus on developing your confidence, change your thoughts and invest time in getting better at what you do.

Confidence can be improved with the smallest of investments in time and effort. Don't leave it to chance.