Training Your Confidence Muscle
Confidence is a muscle, and like any muscle, you need to exercise it so that it doesn’t shrink and waste away. The problem is that unlike your biceps or glutes, which tend to stay in the same place, your confidence muscle can be harder to find. So how do you develop your biceps or firm up your glutes? By doing exercises designed to work that muscle over a period of time until you see the results you were looking for.
It’s just the same with confidence. Suppose you’re the kind of person that doesn’t take many risks, the kind of person who goes through each day doing what needs to be done and doing it well but not really stretching yourself. You might talk yourself out of doing something because it’s too scary or because you think, “I’m not good enough,” “That’s not who I am,” or “I don’t really want it that bad anyway.” If you say these things, you are going to shrink your confidence muscle. The fewer risks you take, the less confident you need to be, and so the less confident you’ll actually become over time.
Confidence doesn’t fill us, and then we step out…we step out first, and then confidence begins to fill us. So if you’re waiting for confidence on the front end, you’ll be waiting a long time. Confidence is something we develop as we go, not when we are waiting.
To work your confidence muscle, you need to be prepared to take risks – big or small. You need to be willing to stretch yourself in an unfamiliar direction, to try something new, or try something in a slightly different way. You need to open yourself up to the possibilities around you and push yourself to increase what you know, what you do, and who you are. The more open you are to risk, opportunity, and possibility, the more confident you need to be, and so the more confidence you’ll develop. That’s your confidence muscle – the question is, what are you going to do to exercise it?
Challenge:
This week I want you to take some bigger risks and start to train your confidence muscle. Remember, the more you train it, the bigger it will get. So determine what you’re going to do and start doing it.
