We all know that having confidence in your abilities at work is important. Your confidence enables you to volunteer for new assignments that can lead to advancement. It affects your willingness to decide that a project is completed. Confidence is also reflected in the way that you talk about yourself, your work, and your predictions about whether you will succeed at new tasks. That communication ultimately affects whether other people accept your ideas and choose to engage you as a partner.
But how does one just become more confident?
When you look at the people you engage with often, you can identify those who exude confidence and those who don’t. If you feel like you have a hard time expressing confidence in yourself, there are a few things you can do to make yourself more confident in the long-run.
Know your strengths and improve them
When you lack confidence, it may be that you have not really calibrated your strengths. There are several things you can do to both understand your strengths and to shore up areas that hold back your confidence.
Talk to your supervisor and find out what they think you do best. It can be helpful to hear from others about what they think you do well. You can add to this inventory by taking an assessment of your strengths.
The advantage of having this external census of your strengths is that it gives you something to build from. You can work to notice the situations in which those strengths have helped you to do something difficult at work. You can also look for professional training opportunities to improve on those strengths.
Eventually, you may also want to take professional training classes to address some of the weaknesses that may hold you back from advancing at work. When you’re struggling with confidence, though, shoring up your strengths is an important start.
Catalog your wins
Part of what can drive a lack of confidence is that you may feel less effective than your colleagues at getting work done. Motivationally, the threats and problems at work loom larger for you than successes. So, you may not remember all of the ways you have helped people or pushed projects forward, but you may be plagued by thoughts of missteps or projects that did not go as well as you hoped.
Keep a list of your wins. It’s valuable to have a document you keep on your computer where you make a bulleted list of contributions you have made to projects. When you offer an idea that is incorporated into a project, write it down. When a colleague compliments you for your contribution, write it down. When you solve a problem for a client, write it down.
Every once in a while, you can look over that document and notice all of the ways that you have provided a benefit to the team, clients, or customers. Remember, that without you, these things would not have happened. That should help you to feel more confident in what you bring to the organization.
Let others (even AI) speak for you
I was chatting with my colleague Keri Stephens the other day about applications of generative AI models for students. She relayed a fantastic example that is relevant here. A student was trying to write a brief autobiography that highlighted her strengths and was having trouble doing it. She took the paragraph she wrote, as well as her résumé, and entered it into a Large Language Model and then asked the model to rewrite the biography to sound more confident.
The resulting paragraph was much more confidently and directly stated. While she still had to edit the paragraph for clarity and accuracy, it was described in much more direct terms than she would have used to describe herself.
Even if you’re not applying for anything that requires you to write a paragraph about yourself, you might still take a list of your accomplishments and have a generative AI model write a paragraph describing you. (If you’re reluctant to use AI for this task, you could also ask a colleague to write a description.) When you see the result, it may help you to see yourself the way others see you.
The idea is that many people have a hard time saying nice things about themselves. Some of it is self-perception and some is modesty. But, if you internalize the idea that you do not deserve to have nice things said about you, you may find that reflected in your self-confidence. Instead, read this paragraph that you did not write about yourself and recognize that this is an accurate description of who you are. Let this serve as a reminder of the many strengths you have that make you an excellent colleague.
