Exercise for Boosting Your Confidence

I taught myself my confidence is not just based on my achievements, on my strengths. I try to include into my confidence, not just my strengths and achievements, but also my weaknesses. But of course, when you go through tough situations, for instance, something doesn’t work out, a client refuses to work with you, whatever, or you don’t get new clients, you don’t have money. All of these bad situations. Sometimes you lose it. You totally lose it. I also think that’s part of the game. It’s a roller coaster. Now founding my own business is like a roller coaster and I try to keep myself stable in this. What I try to maintain my confidence, also to maintain my vision when it’s really bad? I sit for at least half an hour and I breathe deeply to connect back to myself, to the best part of myself. I feel what’s wrong. I feel nice sadness, my desperation, whatever I accepted it and I try to connect to the other parts of myself, to the hope, to my vision, to my joy, to my spirits. So that’s a very practical thing I do. I tune into my practice, of course I practiced breathing exercises or meditation, this is practice when I was in good shape and when I felt good. And now it’s my tool to sustain myself in difficult situations. And of course, there’s something else. Also, when you’re going this path of being self-employed to having your own project, you can’t really do it alone. You need friends, you need support, you need some people. You have an intimate relationship to who can clearly acknowledge you, who support you and encourage you when it’s going really bad. And I know this very well. They are there. You can call them in the night at three o’clock to talk to them and they will listen to you. They will support you. In tough situations that it’s really necessary to have a support system, friends, maybe even a mentor and a coach. Also in the beginning, when I founded the business, I had a business mentor that helped a lot. I wouldn’t have done it alone, not at all.

You need to get really intimate with the voices in your head and then you need to go past them. So I think it’s really about, well, first of all, we need to understand what confidence is. Confidence is the thing that makes you act. So if you lack confidence, you won’t do certain things. We don’t do certain things because of [the] voices in our head. So they may say, you can’t do this and you’re not good enough. And then a lot of people, they advocate positive thinking and telling yourself the opposite. But usually, in this case, this doesn’t work because if you’re just telling yourself you are good enough, it’s not working because you kind of know that you’re fooling yourself. Right? So here is what you do. You take a piece of paper and then you draw a line in the middle of that paper. And then on the left-hand side, you write down everything that your voices say: “no, I’m not good enough”, “I’m not prepared”. Whatever, write it all down. And then on the right-hand side, your job is to collect evidence that it’s not true. So to disprove your voice. And, Yeah, I have an example. I did a workshop at a big tech conference in Amsterdam and it was with 150 people and my voice was screaming, you are not prepared for this. And because of that voice, I was really spinning so much that I also just couldn’t sit down and do the preparation. So it was really keeping me from acting. So then I did this exercise on the left, I wrote: “I’m not prepared”. And then on the right, I was like, okay, I have the slides. I have done this workshop several times in different formats. I know the content by heart and I’ve run a full-blown negotiation program. So once I had it really black on white, it was so clear that it was not true. And what happened is I wasn’t just more confident. I was actually really, really excited and couldn’t wait to deliver the workshop.