bythemethod.com blog

One of the strange things about performance is that more skills are not always the best way to improve it. The best way to improve your performance, and hence your chances of success, is to have confidence in yourself.

It seems to me that we are constantly being told that we should improve our skills. We will obviously be much better at our jobs if only we had greater skills.

Let me just add right at the beginning that I believe that learning is a very important part of life. If I haven’t written about learning yet (can’t remember if I have on this blog) then I soon will. I am committed to life long learning and I have a folder full of certificates to prove it.

But learning is not the best way to improve your competence.

The strange thing is that if you want to be better at something the best way you can get better is to believe that you are.

The better you feel about yourself the better you become at doing a job.

One of the things that comes with experience is confidence in doing a job and as you get more confident your ability to do the job increases. It’s not just about the acquired skills it is also about how you feel using those skills.

A lot of people aquire the basic skills that are necessary to do a job quite quickly but its only as they get confident in their abilities that they discover they can do what they do very well.

So how can you feel more confident about your skills?

Well you could practice and hope that over time you will gain in confidence but this is a slow route and the route nearly everyone takes.

The best way I know is to believe that you already are confident. You need to affirm in your own mind that you are confident in what you are doing.

Here is a simple method for affirmations:

Make your affirmations:

Personal: “Iam always excellent at doing xyz!” This is about you.

Present: “I am alwaysexcellent at xyz!” It is not in the future, it is right now. Make it sound like you already possess it.

Positive: “I am always excellent at xyz!” Make it positive and not the absence of negative e.g. I am not I will try to be or I will avoid etc..

Potent: “I am always excellent at xyz!” Use words that mean something to you.

Put your affirmation on a card and read it out 10 times a day. As you do so, imagine what you would feel, what you would see, what you would hear if it were true.