🚀 Your ultimate self-confidence toolkit 🚀
How I describe self-confidence
“I can chase any goal I am willing to put the effort in.
I know my strengths and my shortcomings and I am willing to put the required effort and consistency to get there.
There will be some bumps on the road but I will learn from them and move on …
and I will always keep my eyes open for other paths that might open in my way”
💪 Discover your strengths
We all have things we are good at by default.
If you always feel behind and overwhelmed by the amount of things you need to learn and improve constantly, reiterating on your strengths can make a huge difference.
You can easily do it by taking this test: 16personalities (FREE)
Here a couple more tests that can help with getting clarity on your strengths and weaknesses:
Find out your work style (FREE)
9 Ways We Self Sabotage (FREE)
The Rebel Test (FREE)
Strengths (FREE)
CliftonStrengths 34 (PAID)
🎯 Discover your weakness
The previous tests also bring up your weakness in different contexts.
Acknowledging your weakness and how they affect you and your work in different contexts will allow you to make peace with them and reduce the chance of acting defensive when people bring it up.
Once you own your weakness, no one can hold it against you!
Take Responsibility for your Success:
Instead of attributing your career growth to luck, take responsibility for it.
Reframe “It just happened to me” towards thinking about what you did to make this happen:
➡ What are your strengths and how have they contributed to your growth?
➡ What decisions along the way got you to where you are?
➡ What attitude helped you grow?
📜 Keep a Brag List
Being constantly focused on improvement and always looking to the next step / level, we tend to forget how we got here and the skills we developed along the way.
Get a paper and a pen (or online note) and name it “My brag list”
Save 5 min at the end of each week for reflection
Add 1 thing you are proud of at the end of every week (can be finishing a project, learning something new, overcoming a challenge, solving a problem, ...)
PS: this will be also an invaluable resource for your next Performance Review 😉
🫙 🍭 🍬Visualise your accomplishments
My favourite way is by creating a jar of your accomplishments.
Here's how:
Get a jar on your desk (preferably see-through)
Get post-its (preferably multiple colours)
Every time you accomplish something that you are proud of (no matter how big or small) write it on a post-it and put it in the jar
Review the post-its when you are feeling down 🙂
🥳 Celebrate
Create a small ritual for you to celebrate your accomplishments for the week.
For me is having a good ☕ all by myself at my favourite coffee shop while reading a thriller book at the end of each week.
What is yours going to be? 😊
👍 Ask for positive feedback
Usually feedback focuses on things to improve.
But you can use it in boosting your self confidence by simply:
Ask 3 people you have worked with recently: “What is one thing I should continue doing?”
😠 Practice self care
You cannot believe in yourself when you're tired!
So practise excellent self-care: enough sleep, relax time, exercise.
😞 Address the things that bring you down daily
There are things that bring your confidence down and it’s not the big things.
It’s the repeated smallest actions that have the biggest impact on our confidence:
▶️ Behaviour: Saying sorry to much ( even when it’s not your fault )
Approach: Go one day without saying sorry
▶️ Behaviour: Saying YES to everything they throw at you
Approach: Say one NO (or ask for some time to think about it even if you will say YES in the end)
▶️ Behaviour: Using words like “I a not sure”, “I think”, “I might be wrong” too often
Approach: Replace them with: “Based on my experience …”, “My proposal is …”
▶️ Behaviour: someone you work with daily is misspelling your name in every single email (speaking from experience 😅)
Approach: correct them
▶️ Behaviour: hiding a mistake
Approach: addmit it and deal with it
▶️ Behaviour: Comparing yourself with where others are
Approach: Compare yourself with where you started and track YOUR progress
🫂 Create your support network
People that you can complain to and that can cheer you up: friends, family, mentors, coaches.
🫂 Mentor someone
First, it will force you to talk about your experience and your learnings along the way - things we tend to forget about as we are mainly focused on what we are missing and not on how far we’ve come.
Second, there is an immediate feeling of confidence kick when you are seeing the person in front of you being really curious and interested in you sharing your experience and learnings with them.
Get a mentor
Expressing your fears and worries out loud to someone else will help broaden your perspective. Getting out of your head will make the problem look smaller.
Also, hearing someone’s else's perspective on things and seeing that others have struggled with the same thing, will give that reassurance that it’s ok to struggle sometimes.
🙏 Practice gratitude
Here is a quick task for you today: make a list of the many things in your life that you appreciate.
▶️ Prepare your Elevator Pitch
The way you introduce yourself and tell your story will have a huge impact on how you see yourself (and people around).
The Elevator Pitch it’s a brief, 30 – 50 seconds pitch (or speech) that gets attention and makes the other person genuinely interested in you.
Work on it once and you can use it always: event networking, in an interview, when joining a new team, …
Here is the process:
Write down the answer to these 3 questions:
Who Are You And What Do You Do?
TIP: Always repeat your name! - just to make sure people get it right
What is your story? How did you get into tech and why?
You can use a timeline or an enumeration of your roles/experience
What do you want?
Adapt this to the context
Read it out loud and time it
More than 30 seconds? => Check for redundant information / Anything you don’t need?
Less than 30 seconds? => Go back to the questions?
Around 30 seconds? => go to the next step
Practice
🎯 Focus on finishing things
FINISH 1 thing instead of STARTING 3!
Steps:
Pick one task
Clear screen: tabs, apps not related to this task
Put phone away
Finish the task
Celebrate you’ve done it! (I don’t mean a party, maybe just a break)
Pick another task and repeat steps
🚀 3 quick ways to boost your self confidence
Before an important conversation, a presentation or an interview.
1️⃣ Stand in Super human position 🦹♀️
close your eyes
imagine yourself powerful, confident
What would you say? do?
how would you act
stay there for 5 minutes
2️⃣ Listen to your favourite boost confidence song 🎶
You can find one in my Confidence kick playlist 🎶
3️⃣ Wear your favourite shirt 👕
⭐ EXTRA: Help you future self
Write a letter to your future self on a random date mentioning an acomplishment you are proud of (and maybe throw in some supporting words 🙂)
Once you realise you only need yourself to boost your self confidence, there is nothing that can stop you 😊