4 Ways to Build Confidence

Get honest: Confidence is about alignment between your intentions and your impact.

Does your face say one thing and your heart another?

Be Curious. Confidence is being flexible and curious.

Admitting what you don't know and asking questions.

Act courageously. Confidence is about being courageously embracing your authentic self.

You can't have courage without vulnerability.

Be committed. Commitment breeds confidence. Stepping into an interview or onto a stage with a sense of prepared wonder.

What are you committing to?

The most common misperception about confidence is that it’s something you have or you don't.

It's a posture. A way of standing, gesturing, speaking.

The logic goes, if we can master the act of confidence, we will be confident, the logic goes.

But that’s only skin-deep.

Most of us see right through that.

If you stand like super-hero, you will begin to feel like one.

But that's backwards.

True confidence is not an act. While gestures can help build the feeling, confidence ultimately comes from the inside out.

It's not a costume, a gesture or a stance.

Everyone has it.

It is our birthright.

It lives in your own body and heart.

The self-improvement work is not about acting with confidence.

It's about being confident.

So how can you connect to it?

Especially when you need it most, like interviews or public speaking.

The real key to confidence is embracing and acknowledging all of it -- self-doubt, nervousness, apprehension, fear of failure.

What's beneath the nervousness, the fear?

What's the story you're telling yourself?

Why is the passion not in your voice? (maybe you're not actually passionate about it!)

Take a look at the saboteur voices, like these:

Imposter: "If they only knew what's really going on..."

Hyper-Achiever: "I can't stumble or make a mistake, or I'm a failure."

Hyper-Rational: "If I don't know the answer, I'm unworthy."

Instead of abolishing these voices, however, or trying to beat them into silence (which only makes saboteurs get louder), try looking at them this way:

• We develop saboteurs originally to keep us safe. Saboteurs get louder and craftier when we are on the brink of transition, transformation or trying something new.

• Saboteurs treat all change as danger.

• Thank them and ask them to stand aside. (my. coach suggested I put them in daycare)

• The goal is not to abolish our saboteurs but to not let them run the show.

Confidence exists, not despite our insecurities, but right along with them.

Confidence is rooted in self-acceptance.

Next time your saboteurs get really raucous and threaten to tear down any shred of confidence, connect to your passion and your values.

What is it you really care about? What is it you really want to convey?

And ask your saboteurs to wait outside or in a corner of the room.

It is not their turn. It is yours.