You can’t put “confident” on a resume but make no mistake: it is a skill and one you should cultivate. Being comfortable in your own skin and assured enough to communicate with others is a crucial “soft skill” that can make or break your professional ambitions. It isn’t fair but the fact of the matter is that you’re more likely to advance in your field if you possess a confident demeanor than if you don’t. You can have too much confidence and still go far; if you don’t have enough, you may not feel secure enough to push yourself to take big risks at work, to go for that new position, to propose a bold new project that can turn things around.
Faith in yourself can yield dividends professionally and personally. While it can be hard to build up your confidence, the good news is that it is doable. Self-assurance is like a muscle: with the right amount of practice and focus, you can build it up.
Start Small
Improving your confidence is a long game. Think of your progress in incremental terms. Take a close look at yourself and see if you can identify the areas where you lack confidence. Is it in how you communicate? How do you feel about yourself physically? Are you worried you seem unqualified or ill-prepared? What’s the “loose shoelace” of your being that you keep tripping over? Understanding where you feel vulnerable will help you set a plan of action that can help you improve over time.
If you’re not sure how you come across to others, talk to the people close to you. Ask your friends and family what your “tells” are. What are behaviors and patterns of speech you use that indicate you’re ill at ease? What kind of situations have they noticed you in where you seem insecure? This can be a hard conversation to have so be sure you do it with someone you trust who won’t deliver a body blow on your ego.
Sometimes all it takes to boost your confidence is to wear nice clothes you feel comfortable in or to stop apologizing for everything you do. Celebrate your small victories as you progress: the meeting where you nailed a presentation, perhaps, or a lunch where you talked to someone new and left a good impression.
Express Yourself With Body Language
How you carry yourself and your facial expressions speak volumes about how you feel while you’re at work. Your body language is one of the most important tools in your confidence repair kit. Doing something as simple as focusing on improving your posture can yield a boost in confidence that compounds over time. When you slouch, you’re compressing the space in your lungs, which reduces how much oxygen gets to your brain. A straight spine is an unobstructed highway for oxygen to circulate to your brain and down through the rest of your body, which helps boost your cognition and makes you feel more alert and energetic.
Eye contact can be difficult for many people to sustain but being secure enough to check in with your coworkers with eye contact can be a powerful confidence booster. The key is to be sensitive to social cues; when someone breaks eye contact, don’t try to maintain it. Another way to feel more comfortable around people is to mirror their body language. As social animals, humans tend to unconsciously mirror each other. This Chameleon Effect can be a way to build a quick rapport with people, but like eye contact, a little goes a long way. Too much mimicry can create an uncanny effect; we’re not trying to do the Marx Brothers mirror gag here. It’s simple things: smile when they smile, tilt your head at the same angle they do.
Cut Out the Qualifiers
One of the most common ways we can signal our lack of confidence or unease to people is to use too many qualifiers in our speech and writing. Qualifiers are a kind of linguistic hedge-betting where we throw in a “maybe we could” or “I don’t know, what if we” or “I’m not really sure this is correct but” instead of getting directly to the point. People often do this as a way of appearing less bossy or forceful, but it comes across as insecure and waffling. Qualifiers make it sound like you’re not sure you should even be saying what you’re saying.
The next time you find yourself about to use this kind of “maybe/I don’t know/what if” type of speech, skip over it and go straight to the thing you were going to say. You don’t need to build an on-ramp to your point.
On a related note: making an effort to cut out “filler” words like “like” and “uh” in your speech can have a similar effect. Filler can sometimes make us sound like we’re inarticulate or stalling to finish a thought, so eschewing these zero-calorie words whenever we can is a good idea.
Get Moving
If you’re doing a job that’s very sedentary, that inactivity could lead to more stress, anxiety, and depression, all of which can do a number on your self-esteem. Taking quick breaks throughout the day to get up and move around isn’t just good for your physical health; it’s an opportunity to touch base with co-workers if you’re working on-site. If you’re working from home, taking a quick walk to stretch your legs can offer a moment to hit the group chat.
“If you are working remotely and you need to talk with a colleague, why not schedule a ‘walk and talk’ meeting and walk during your meeting,” said Gina Pinch, Rio Salado Faculty Chair for Business, Management, and Public Administration.
Slow Down
The actor Michael Caine in his book Acting In Film observed that the speed in which we talk can reflect our confidence level.
“The basic rule of human nature is that powerful people speak slowly and subservient people quickly, because if they don’t speak fast nobody will listen to them,” Caine wrote.
Caine observed that people who talk very fast often show their insecurity because they’re afraid if they talk too slow, they’ll lose the attention of their audience; a confident person takes their time because they know they have your attention. When you’re at work, pay attention to the pace of your speech. Are you rushing to finish speaking, or are you taking the scenic route?
If you’re a fast talker, you can use your physicality to slow down. Focus on your posture; it’s easy to talk fast when you’re slouching. Using hand gestures will also pump the brakes a bit because it requires you to think about what you’re doing. That split focus that comes from coordinating your movements eases off the gas pedal a bit. Enunciate your words more clearly and stretch out those vowels. Make eye contact when you need to be grounded in the moment; sometimes people can “go blank” and forget what they’re about to say when they make sustained eye contact in the middle of a conversation, so it’s best to time these “slow down” eye contact moments when you want to pause and catch your breath.
Stop Comparing Yourself to Others
Theodore Roosevelt once said “comparison is the thief of joy.” Few things can kill your sense of self-worth more than comparing yourself to others. Everyone has different strengths and weaknesses. While a sense of competitiveness can be healthy at work, a little bit goes a long way. If you find yourself wilting at meetings because “everyone else” is better at public speaking or funnier or more creative, remind yourself that many of those people who are “better” than you feel just as intimidated and uneasy in their own way. The vast majority of us are trying to “fake it til we make it;” some of us are just better at hiding it. There’s a very good chance that you work with someone who looks at YOU and wishes they could do something as well as you can.
It’s also important to remember that we don’t all start at zero. Some people have had years of experience to participate in activities and/or cultures that have honed their social skills and elevated their self-esteem. Kicking yourself for being a “bad” public speaker when half of your team polished their skills at Toastmasters is as silly as a non-athlete beating themselves up for not acing a sport on their first try. Be honest and comfortable with your capabilities; that’s the first step toward building them up.
Article by Austin Brietta
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