Developing Self-Confidence Through Personal Committment

I look forward to speaking with all of you about trust next Tuesday, November 21st from 2-4pm (ET), when I will be live on Gather as November's Ask The Author.

Self Trust is all about credibility. It's about developing the integrity, intent, capabilities, and results that make you believable, both to yourself and to others. And it all boils down to two simple questions: 1) Do I trust myself? and 2) Am I someone others can trust?

With regard to having trust in self, it often begins with the little things. I remember one extremely busy time in my life where for about a five-month period I was staying up until 2:00 or 3:00 A.M. every night to finish a project. I'd wake up to my alarm clock in the morning (which I had set quite early so I could exercise) only to reach over, turn it off, and go back to sleep. Since I was getting so little sleep at the time, I'd justify what I was doing by telling myself that I needed the sleep more than the exercise.

After I had done this for a time, I started thinking, Why am I setting this alarm so early? I know I'm not going to get up to exercise when it goes off. Why am I even doing this?

Not only had this repeated behavior weakened my self-confidence, it had become a self-fulfilling prophecy. When I set the alarm, I didn't believe I was going to get up; instead, I believed I was going to rationalize why I shouldn't. Setting the alarm had become a joke.

Finally, I decided to change my approach. I determined that instead of using the ringing alarm each morning as a decision point, I would make a decision the night before and set my alarm when I really intended to get up. From that time forward, if I set it early, I would get up and follow through on my commitment to exercise, regardless of how little sleep I'd had. But sometimes I would set it to go off later because I genuinely felt I needed the sleep. Whatever decision I made when I set the alarm, I wanted my commitment to be clear and to act with integrity. Otherwise, I would continue to lose trust in my ability to do what I had made a personal commitment to do. While this may seem like a somewhat trivial example, it turned out to be very meaningful to me in terms of building self trust.

Research shows that many of us don't follow through on the goals we set or don't keep the promises and commitments we make to ourselves. For example, while almost half of Americans set New Year's resolutions, research shows that only 8 percent actually keep them. What happens when we do this time after time? What's the net result of repeated failure to make and keep commitments to ourselves? It hacks away at our self-confidence. Not only do we lose trust in our ability to make and keep commitments, we fail to project the personal strength of character that inspires trust. We may try to borrow strength from position or association. But it's not real. It's not ours…and people know it. And whether we realize it or not, that impacts the bottom line.

Though we all know it intuitively, research also validates that a person's self-confidence affects his or her performance. This is one reason why Jack Welch of GE always felt so strongly that "building self-confidence in others is a huge part of leadership.

The lack of self trust also undermines our ability to trust others. In the words of Cardinal de Retz, "A man who doesn't trust himself can never really trust anyone else."

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An excerpt from my book, The Speed of Trust. Copyright (C) 2006 by CoveyLink, LLC.  Reprinted by permission of Free Press, a divison of Simon and Schuster, Inc.  To read my previous post, "Credibility Through A Courtroom Lens," click here.

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