How to be Confident II
Risks & Failure
Success and failure BOTH build confidence.
Think about it - when you succeed at something, for the brief moment before you convince yourself it was really no big deal anyway, you feel good. You got more objective evidence that you can actually do the thing.
When you fail - when you try something and it doesn’t work out, it can sting. It can be embarrassing. But if you frame it the right way and are able to extract the lesson from that failure - you can go on to try again, equipped with all the new knowledge and skills you have from your failure.
Most of the people you think of as success stories were probably failures ten times first.
So, what DOESN’T build confidence?
Not trying.
When we don’t try we keep ourselves trapped in a Schrödinger's box of failing and succeeding, paralyzed by fear, and we deprive ourselves of the pride of our accomplishments AND the lessons we could have learned from our failure.
When we don’t try, we might not lose, but we definitely won’t win.
So let’s say you try and you fail. Yes, it’s inevitable, if you try a lot of things, sometimes you’re going to fail.
Often times we look at this single failure as if it defines us, or defines this moment in time.
Instead, try looking at that single failure as one item in your portfolio. If you were an investor and you invested in five things and one of them was a flop, but the other four did quite good, you’d consider that a raving success!
We make a lot of bets in our life. People who win big tend to be people who bet big. If you are betting often it is perfectly reasonable that some of those bets will be losses and some will be gains.
And the idea is that, over time, our portfolio of projects, the places where we invest our energy, will eventually TREND UPWARDS.
There will still be failure! But we can come to see it as a stepping stone, one step of many towards our goal.
This is called resilience.
This passage is an excerpt from my keynote talk, How to Be Confident. Looking for confidence? Bring me to your group or schedule one on one coaching at zjhadley.com/book
