When You Lose Confidence At Work...

What do you do if you've lost confidence in yourself at work? 

This is a common human experience that everyone can relate to where somehow whatever confidence you had you just…lost it.

You lost your mojo. 

You don't feel confident in yourself. 

You don't believe in yourself. 

And what's worse is you still might need to show up to work and perform. 

Maybe you're in leadership. Maybe you have to deal with clients or customers, or other team members, or give a presentation…and you're not feeling it. 

Then you have to try to find the resources to at least present yourself as confident, even if inside you're feeling nervous or riddled with self-doubt or anxiety. 

But if there isn’t an immediate outward demand like a presentation, it can be all too easy to avoid, procrastinate and generally hide as much as possible at work to avoid risk and discomfort. Of course you know that trajectory isn't going to end well…

The good news is you don't have to stay here. 

In fact, you can regain your confidence and come back more confident than ever before. 

First things first. Can you note—was there a triggering event? 

Now, there may not be. It may have just been that you've been under stress for a long time and trying to push through has finally taken it’s toll on you. But quite often, there actually is some triggering event.

Maybe it's a failure. 

Maybe you don't get the sale. 

Maybe you had a position and you were taken off a project or you got negative feedback from an employer, a boss, or a colleague. 

You got challenged. 

You made a mistake. 

You failed at something. 

Despite the triggering event, all that follows it is NOT new. 

All the self-doubt, all the anxiety, all the low confidence, all the insecurity, it was always there.

Like a tiger hiding in the bushes, it was just waiting for its moment to pounce. It simply uses that event, that failure, that mistake, that public reprimand, that humiliation, that moment, and it leaps out of the bushes, ferocious with inner criticism, attempting to beat you back down into the smallest, most limited version of you. 

This set of voices I call the safety police. 

Your safety police does everything in its power to keep you small and safe in a downsized life where you feel like you have control.

In order to get to where you are in your career, however, you’ve had to challenge that safety police. Haven't you done things and taken risks and put yourself out there and made progress? 

But that safety police doesn't just walk away silently, into that good night. It's waiting in the shadows (in the bushes, remember). So when you had that failure or setback at work and it came out in full force. It saw its opportunity to strike and push you back down. 

How far does it want to push you? It wants to push you perhaps even out of a job, or at the very least into the smallest version of you where you just stay silent, fly under the radar, and don’t draw any attention to yourself.

The safety police’s motto is: no attention is good attention.

Great, there’s the safety police at it again. So, what do you do about it? 

The key is to see it as the familiar tune it is and remember: I have a choice right now.

I can listen to this familiar tune and agree with it, or I can challenge it and defy it. 

To reclaim your confidence at work, you must make the choice to consistently defy that voice of doubt. 

You may have been listening to it for weeks, or months, or years… But there eventually comes a moment in a day, perhaps right now as you're reading this, where you stand up, roll your shoulders back, and reclaim your inner authority. 

NO, enough of this. 

It doesn't matter if other people are judging me.  

It doesn't matter if someone else criticizes me. 

I am the captain of my ship. I'm going to decide how this thing goes. I get to steer this.

Because every experience, whether it’s a setback at work or anywhere else in life, is not bad or terrible. It’s neutral.

You might say— No, it was bad. I got fired, okay? And they told me it was because I wasn't good enough. 

Is that truly a “bad” experience? Well, it depends, doesn't it? 

What if that experience teaches you something and you get so motivated to do more than ever before to learn and grow? What if you got let go because you were good at the technical side of your job, but you didn't want to play politics at work, and you hated the social side of things? And as a result of that challenge you finally decided to take charge of your social confidence, which will end up benefiting your life in hundreds of new and delightful ways. 

If you’re in that place of readiness to take action to transform your career confidence, you’ll love Career Acceleration inside of Confidence University. 

I’ve seen this happen so many times in my life and in those of clients. The very worst thing occurring is exactly what kicked you in the pants to finally make the changes you’d been avoiding for years.

So is the firing, the shame, the setback, the negative experience that kicked off all this doubt inherently bad? Well, YOU GET TO DECIDE THAT, and how you decide determines the course of your life. 

Is it the end of the game, or is it the first quarter? You get to choose that.  

Imagine if you were watching your favorite team and in the first half of the game, when the other team scores on them, they simply walk off the field...Who cares? We lost. It's over. It sucks. 

Is that what you want to see from your team? Would you be in the stands, agreeing with their decision to throw in the towel early—Yeah, quit! We're terrible. It's the worst. 

You want to see something else. You want to be inspired. 

And YOU, my friend, can be that inspiration to you and others. It requires you to step up, challenge doubt, and reclaim your authority now. 

Once you've done that, what do you do? Well, then you come back stronger. 

You say— I'm going to learn something. I'm going to grow. I'm going to speak up again. I'm going to develop whatever is missing in myself to be able to take on that level of the project. I am unstoppable. 

Because that is a direct counter to the voice of doubt. When you embody that, you start to experience the extraordinary.  

Until we speak again, may we have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awesome.