9 ways ultra-successful people increase their confidence
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Whether you're a small business owner or the COO of Facebook, self-doubt can creep up and hold you back.
It's even become a full-blown syndrome dubbed Impostor Syndrome; and it can make the best of us wonder if our fantastic abilities and contributions are real or if we've been faking it the whole time.
Learning how to evaporate that self-doubt will allow you to keep having your best traits shine, and boost your success and leadership in the process.
Here's how some incredibly successful people overcame their feelings of self-doubt, and you can too:
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Keep it about the work
Even President Barack Obama admits to battling moments of deep uncertainty in the course of his career.
In a candid interview with Humans of New York, President Obama talked about how he tries to get out of his own way and focuses on the important work at hand in order to cope with self-doubt, and you can too:
"If you're worrying about yourself — if you're thinking: 'Am I succeeding? Am I in the right position? Am I being appreciated?' — then you're going to end up feeling frustrated and stuck. But if you can keep it about the work, you'll always have a path. There's always something to be done."
Trust your own voice
Ursula Burns, the first African-American female CEO of a Fortune 500 company, found that staying true to her own individual vision and voice is her way of tackling self-doubt when she felt out of place:
"I realized I was more convincing to myself and to the people who were listening when I actually said what I thought, versus what I thought people wanted to hear me say."
If you present your best ideas and provide value instead of fitting into a mold, you can feel confident that you aren't fooling anyone and that you do deserve every bit of success that comes your way.
Bye-bye, comfort zone
Leadership expert Brian Tracy once wrote, "You can only grow if you are willing to feel awkward and uncomfortable when you're trying something new."
He's right — think about the first time you rode a bike, it was scary right? But now biking is probably a breeze. The same goes for anything in life — once you embrace that self-doubt as a feeling of progress that will go away eventually, you can take baby steps out of your comfort zone to tackle it.
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