How’s your mojo?
Do you need to regain your confidence? It’s funny how, when you are younger, you presume that older people really have their act together. You might have considered them stuck in their ways or old-fashioned, but I’ll bet it never occurred to you that they may be lacking confidence. Certainly I doubt you considered that when you were over 50 you’d be having crises of confidence. Getting older is full of surprises, isn’t it!
Losing confidence is normal when you are experiencing an unhappy time at work. You may feel undermined by the people around you, or feel critical of your own level of achievement. Whatever the cause, it is important that you try to regain your confidence before you begin any sort of career transition. Confidence can mean the difference between you making that transition easily or struggling.
How do you build your confidence? Here are five critical steps:
Fake it until you regain your confidence
Recognize the behaviours that indicate your lack of confidence. Change these behaviours and you will change the way people perceive you.
Understand why you have lost your confidence
Identify the areas of your life in which your self-confidence is lacking.
Face the challenges with courage and wisdom
Career change is not a blind leap of fate, but rather a conscious decision with a calculated risk.
Learn and grow
Develop an attitude of learning from everything and growing into a mature person, an individual oozing with confidence and who can take on any challenges with gusto.
Feel empowered as you regain your confidence
Allow yourself to consider all styles of work, even those that you have not done before. Whatever your decision, you will know that you made your choice having considered all options.
Over the next few blog posts we will consider each of these steps individually, commencing with the first.
Fake it till you make it
With the help of those closest to you try to identify the things you do which indicate your lack of confidence. It’s funny how you can consciously change your behavior and act in a way that suggests you are much more confident that you feel, and people will take that new behaviour on face value.
Pretend you feel confident! Walk like a confident person, speak like a confident person, smile with confidence. Not only can this change the way other people perceive you, but it can also have a big impact on making you actually feel more confident. But that is easier said than done when you are trembling inside!
What’s your next step? A career renovation?
Or planning a future you will love?
