5 Tips to Improve Workplace 
Self-Confidence

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Being confident at work improves your chances of getting a promotion and being respected by your colleagues. Some people are naturally confident, but for most people, this is something that they have to work on. Even if your confidence is low, you can change this by taking the right advice. Confidence is like a skyscraper. You lay the foundation and then you build upon this over time to become more confident gradually. As long as you are working on it, you will find that you feel more in control at work.

Why Are You Lacking Confidence?

Confidence is countered by self-doubt and something happened in your life to make self-doubt trump your confidence. You have to identify this event and confront it head on. For some people, they had a hard time in high school or others may have had a majorly embarrassing thing happen. Think back on your life and work to find out exactly when you started to lose your confidence. Once you do, think about it and think about why it made you so full of self-doubt. This is your foundation and once you can confront what stole your confidence, you can start to build it back up.

Accept Your Problems

It is hard to build confidence when you feel like you are not good enough to do your job. However, no one is perfect and everyone has problems that are out of their control. You need to accept these and push them out of your mind. Once you accept them and deny their control over you, you will find that you feel a lot better about yourself. It removes the weight from your shoulders and clears space in your head to work on things that will actually improve your job performance so that you are naturally more confident and productive.

Talk to Trusted Coworkers

Knowing how your coworkers really view your contributions to the job is a way to start building your confidence. In most cases, they see you as far more competent and productive than you view yourself. Once you learn how valuable you are to the job, you will automatically start feeling better about what you do. This will increase your productivity and will make you even better at your job. Just make sure that you are talking to coworkers that you trust and those who have worked with you for a long period of time.

Toot Your Own Horn

If you have awards from work or any promotions, write these down. If you have skills that most others at the office do not have, write these down. The point here is to examine your accomplishments and be proud of yourself for them. Now, never list things that are not true because you will strengthen self-doubt with false self-praise. Make sure that everything that you list is completely honest so that you only benefit from this exercise. Once you create an honest list, you can review this every day to feel better about your work life.

Work Harder at Work

Nothing makes you feel more confident than working toward goals and meeting them per your schedule. Start by making some goals that are reasonable and more attainable. For example, get your Friday reports completed before lunch each Friday instead at the end of the day. This is an attainable goal because it only reduces your time to complete the reports by a few hours.

Start with two goals and accomplish these before you start making new ones. It is important that you only make goals that you can meet because not meeting your goals can actually do damage to your workplace confidence. Your goals can be anything that improves your productivity at work, so consider your job and the various tasks that you need to accomplish each week. Choose your goals based on these so that they relate completely to your job and your expected work output.

It is critical that you lay the foundation first or else you will not have anything to build off of. Confidence is something that everyone can have as long as they go about building it the right way. It is important to mention that you will not build your confidence over the course of a weekend. You can start in this small timeframe, but ultimately, it takes a few months to really tackle the things that you need to accomplish to regain control and feel more confident in all aspects of your work. 

- Rosemary Kitchen

Resources

Edberg, H. (2015). How to Build Self-Confidence: 6 Essential and Timeless Tips. Retrieved on February 20, 2015 from http://www.positivityblog.com/index.php/2009/02/20/how-to-build-self-confidence/