With the way today’s economy and job structure is, the option to build wealth simply by working an ordinary 9-5 job just doesn’t exist anymore. You have to be doing something else, or doing something in addition at a minimum if you want to actually have a shot at building real wealth.
Of course, stacking something else on top of a full-time job just means that you don’t have any time left to actually have a life to live. This, along with the upheaval that the coronavirus caused for the job market, means that a lot of people have turned to entrepreneurial endeavors in order to make a living. But becoming an entrepreneur isn’t easy, and the road to success is certainly rough. Your confidence in your abilities will be critical to getting you through the hard times that are sure to come. So what can you do to build that confidence?
Take on a Business Coach
It’s tough to navigate the world of entrepreneurship on your own, especially if you’re still relatively new to it. There are a ton of pitfalls you could easily fall into, making it easy to question your abilities. Taking on a business coach can be a huge help in navigating your way through obstacles and avoiding unnecessary ones. If you find a good business coach, you’ll have an excellent opportunity to learn and to grow.
Identify Your Strengths
If you’re going to work on having more confidence in your abilities, it definitely helps to identify what your strengths are in the first place. Admittedly, this can be tough, especially on days when you feel more discouraged than anything else. A great way to start is by paying attention and learning more about yourself. What are you most passionate about, or most productive doing? What kind of personality do you have? If needed, taking a couple of quizzes might help.
Develop a Growth Mindset
Challenges and setbacks are a normal part of being an entrepreneur. If you approach them with a growth mindset, you’ll be in a much better position to deal with them. A growth mindset is the perspective that your abilities are not set in stone, but instead can grow and improve. A huge part of the entrepreneurial journey is the growth that you experience along the way. Just look at how far you’ve come already as proof of your growth, then look forward to all the potential growth you may experience in the future.
Dress Confidently
Sometimes all you need to feel a little more confident in your abilities is to feel more confident in yourself personally. There are a few different things you can do to achieve this, one of which is to dress confidently. How you dress can say a lot about you to other people, making it an excellent way to showcase your personal brand as an entrepreneur. If you want to exude confidence, you need to choose clothing that helps you feel confident. A new suit or a modest dress can instill confidence in any entrepreneur. Make sure it’s doing as much for you as you can by choosing clothes that fit you properly or even having them tailored to fit you perfectly. When you’re dressed in a way that makes you feel confident, you’ll hold yourself with more confidence.
Become Familiar with Failure
There are few things in life that can teach you as much as failure can. The faster you fail, the faster you learn. The faster you learn, the faster you can find success. That isn’t to say that experiencing failure is going to feel good, because it usually doesn’t. However, one of the most valuable abilities you can have is the ability to work around and overcome failures. As you experience more failures, you learn that you are capable of overcoming them. Becoming more confident in yourself becomes a natural byproduct of the experience.
Start Networking
For many people considering or just beginning a startup, you can feel pretty alone. Business advice has become more and more accessible online, but a great way to receive advice tailored just for you is through networking. People in your industry can help you to identify strategies for increasing profit or overcoming an obstacle. The more you connect with other entrepreneurs, the better you can learn from their mistakes and best practices. That will inspire a lot of confidence in your ability to succeed moving forward!
Ask For Feedback
Sometimes it’s hard to be objective about your own abilities and what you’re doing well. If you need help identifying your strengths and weaknesses, you can always ask for feedback. Ask other people directly what they think your strengths are. If you’ve been in business long enough to get some reviews, looking at your reviews can also give you some perspective on what the strengths of your business are. From there, you may be able to extrapolate what some of your personal strengths are, and have more confidence in them.
Practice
In order to really develop your abilities and maximize their potential you must utilize them. Remember, practice makes permanent, not perfect. The more you practice something, the more ingrained it will become until it becomes second nature to you. Because practice makes permanent, it’s important to make sure you practice using your abilities the way you want to use them consistently. That means practicing with a purpose. Have a goal in mind for what you want to achieve with your abilities. Understand how any given ability will help you achieve your goal and how to use it to that end. As you finetune and hone your abilities, and as they become more ingrained in you, you’ll find that you have more confidence in them and yourself.
Building confidence in yourself and your abilities as an entrepreneur can go a long way towards helping you develop the grit you need to stick it out. Remember, if you want to convince partners, investors, and even consumers to be confident in you, your business, and your products, you have to be confident in all of that first yourself.
Need help to get you started? Receive one-on-one coaching with Framework 4 Freedom and gain the confidence you need to succeed!