Being confident is essential when making a career change. Your experience of success, happiness and fulfillment is directly connected to what you believe about yourself and your self-esteem. When you believe in yourself 100%, other people do as well. The reverse is true...when you doubt yourself, others often lose faith in you. Also, the snowball effect comes into play. The more you feel confident in yourself the more successful you are which makes you feel more confident. Confidence breeds success which breeds more confidence which breeds more success!
5 Simple Tips for Cultivating Confidence:
1. Act as if you are confident
Career changers often believe that if all the pieces were in place they would feel confident about pursuing their dream job..."when I pay off my car loan...when I know for sure that this is the right move for me...when my children finish college and are secure on their own...I'll feel confident about working on my dreams." The problem with this is that confidence does not automatically come from having everything just right. Confidence is a core belief you have--it's how you see yourself no matter what the circumstances are.
How do you act confident when you don't feel it in the first place? Act as if. If you were someone who was already confident, what might you do differently? Ok, now go do that very thing! Act as if you were confident and you will start to see that you had it in you all along.
2. Do your best work
No matter how much you may dislike your current work, make the decision to do your best. How you do your work sends messages to everyone--your boss, your coworkers, and most importantly yourself--about who you are as a person and what you are capable of. When you do a job well, you feel great about yourself which builds your self-esteem.
3. Stay out of other peoples' heads and stop mind reading
We often sabotage ourselves before others have a chance to. Many of my clients approach their career change from a place of fear and poor self-esteem because they assume they know what other people are thinking about them. They get into others' heads and make poor decisions to not pursue great opportunities. The reality is that it is YOU doubting yourself and you're simply putting the blame on someone else. So instead of focusing on what everyone else is thinking, choose to think positively about yourself.
4. Underpromise and overdeliver
Set expectations appropriately so that you can go through this career change with much more ease and grace. People often overpromise what is possible for them to do because they think their own limits are not ok. This ends up becoming a habit. The truth is, your original estimates were unreasonable and you were only setting yourself up to fail in the first place. Instead, double your estimates for how long it will take you to complete tasks and you'll find yourself feeling great about the progress you're making. You may even give yourself a chance to complete more than you expected...a surefire way to build your confidence!
5. Set clear goals and take regular, consistent action
Confident career changers decide what they want to accomplish. They don't wait for others to tell them what to do. Confident people make things happen. They don't wait for things to happen to them. Decide what you'd like to accomplish over the next 90 days and then determine what needs to done to make it so. Write out these steps and take action each day to get you one step closer. Daily or weekly consistent action means you are experiencing successes on a regular basis which will only create momentum to keep you going.
Don't waste your time waiting for confidence to magically appear. Start actively building it and impress yourself with all that you make happen!
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Annemarie Segaric is a respected career change coach, motivational speaker, and the author of the pocket booklet, 107 Tips for Changing Your Career While Still Paying the Bills. "Tip #47 Learn to trust your decisions in the face of conflict or disagreement. Someone will always disagree with your career choice. This is simply an indication that your decision wouldn't suit them, NOT and indication that it wouldn't suit you!" Want the other 106 tips? Visit www.segaric.com/products.shtml.
Copyright 2006 Segaric Coaching, Inc. All rights reserved.
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