How to find and grow your confidence
Business professionals today struggle with any number of challenges. Time and again we hear from professionals struggling with their mindset and getting the trash out of their own heads. Confidence plays an absolutely central role to our mindset and if you are struggling with challenges related to your head-space then learning how to find and grow your confidence is a great process to work through! Developing confidence leads to all sorts of benefits beyond addressing the specific challenge you are facing. It can help improve our health, our relationships, our happiness, sense of self-worth and performance. It can reduce our anxiety, fear, FOMO and the impact of rejection. Self-confidence is the spark that starts the engine, without confidence there is no action. Our favorite way to think of confidence is the line in the sand between where we are and risk. We are all aware that we need to take action and action and change lead us to risk…and reward! What stops us from taking action? Confidence. Confidence is either the fence that prevents us from taking action or it’s the gate that opens and allows us to cross to a new universe of opportunities. This is why confidence is so important to us! Finding our confidence sounds simple and easy. Like most things in life, just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s easy for us to do. Commonly, we get in our own way with our confidence. Whether you’re brand new to something and trying to fake it until you make it or you’re a vet that got splashed with a hefty dose of imposter syndrome, confidence is not a constant. In fact, our confidence can and will change in an instant. Think of it almost like a light switch in a room. In an instant, the switch can flip and we can go from bright to pitch black. This is what makes it so important to be able to find our confidence. If we think of confidence like a light switch in a room, then we can also consider that even when the light switches off, our confidence is still there. In fact, if we’re comfortable in that room, we have a pretty good sense of where that confidence is. We can use our instinct and our concrete knowledge to map out the room…ok here’s the desk, I know the chair is over here, the other door is over there, oh, here’s our buffet…ok, got it, this is where my confidence sits! How do we find our confidence? We go back to our fundamentals, our most concrete knowledge. Drawing ourselves back to square one and retracing our steps does an amazing thing. It creates perspective on our progress. It allows us to remember a starting point and connect the dots between that starting point and where we are today. When we begin to connect the dots and visualize our progress we remember our confidence. That room that was pitch black with the lights off, now has a dimmer switch. The more dots we connect, the brighter the light gets in the room and the easier it is to grab a hold of our confidence. You may already have some illumination (pun intended) on growing your confidence. Progress develops confidence. Knowledge, mastery and experience grows our confidence. Feeling confident right now? Hit reset in your mind and treat today as if you’re at the start line all over again. What progress can you start making right now to grow and develop even greater confidence? Put an action plan in place to continue pushing your progress and watch your confidence flourish. Interested in hearing what great confidence sounds like? You can listen in to our most recent podcast with Tyler Foley, here, as the inspiration for our conversation about confidence. If you’re trying to find or grow your confidence, we can help. We offer one , two hecks of a value proposition with our 2-1 coaching. We bring business and behavioral expertise to help you evolve to your greatest potential. You can learn more about our coaching here! Trying to get the benefits from coaching but can’t stroke the check? That’s ok, let’s put our ego’s aside. We offer scholarships to deserving candidates and you may be one! You can apply for a scholarship for our services right here. If you just want to get a better feel for us, we get that too! Join us in our private Facebook community, The Entrepreneur Mastery Lab and meet like minded professionals and engage with us directly. You can request access to this free community, right here!
Finding and developing context in your conversations AND Asking the right questions
Finding and developing context in your conversations is at the heart of the biggest riddle anyone in sales can face….what are the right questions to ask? Asking good questions is an art form. Speak to any master salesperson and in today’s world, it’s not about slick talk, it’s about meaningful questions. Ask someone a meaningful question that gets them thinking and you may just open their eyes to a problem they didn’t know exist, or at the very least, key in on the true issue at hand and the real problem that needs to be solved. In Humble Inquiry, Edgar and Peter Schein attempt to provide us with a guide to asking good questions. As someone in sales that has always wanted to know what the ‘right’ questions were, this was an incredibly helpful book. After all, how many books out there really train you on how to ask good questions? It’s generally not the most popular topic people are talking about. It may end up being one of the most important books to read as a business owner, however. In a day and age where sales has evolved from being an offensive game to one of collaboration and partnership, asking good questions is the ultimate consultant move. To be clear, this isn’t to say I loved the book, that would be a lie. It felt and read a little too clinical and technical for my taste. Still, there were some tremendous insights in the book that are worth sharing, especially around context. Context is brought up in the book from many perspectives, and, rightly so! Here are the primary areas of context that are especially helpful to a service-based professional or business owner. 1. Why am I asking this? It’s easy to ask questions. We’ve been doing that since we were kids. Asking the right questions that will elicit an informative response from our clients and prospects is an art form. The first step in gaining expertise in the art of question asking is to ask yourself first! Yup, that’s it, right there. The very first question to ask is internally, to yourself. Why am I asking this? If your answer is internal and not external (about you and not about them) you need to pause and re-think whether it’s the best question to ask. 2. Why are they asking me this? What’s really behind their question. Is it what they are asking? Often times the questions we are asked to respond to are not the questions that will address an issue at hand. Technical questions are a great example of this. Most of the time the technical information being asked for is easily accessible, who doesn’t have google, after all? Answering here will still help address something directly, you just need to consider what’s the driving force behind the question and is that really a technical issue or is it something wholly different and greater that needs to be answered. In short, the Schein brothers ask you to ask ‘why?’ In a world where it’s very easy to speak fast and barely listen, it’s time to step back and consider the context of why we are asking a question and why a question is being asked of us. Why? To help you get better at what you do! Serving others and guiding them to make great decisions! If you’re looking for more insights and help with some of your challenges, be sure to check out our podcast! Once a month we offer a podcast where we answer questions directly from members of the Entrepreneur Mastery Lab. You can check out the podcast here! If you aren’t a member of the lab yet and want to join, it’s free, and designed with you at the center of it. You can request access here. Many of the people we work with find us through referrals and our content. If you’d like to contact us directly you can reach out to us via our website at our contact page. Others, want help but don’t feel like they can afford it. Don’t let that stop you…we offer full scholarships to our courses and coaching to deserving and diverse candidates. If you’re on the fence, take a few minutes and tell us about yourself on our scholarship page!