A short YouTube talk by Brian Tracy explaining that self-confidence is central to success and is built like a skill—through developing self-esteem, self-respect, and self-efficacy by practicing and improving important abilities. Tracy illustrates with his early sales experience: learning a proven sales process increased his competence, income, and lasting confidence. The piece encourages deliberate daily skill-building to raise confidence.
The most important quality for success in our busy society, especially in business or in interacting with other people, is the quality of self confidence. Self confidence is the sum total result of your self esteem, your self respect, your sense of personal value, and a whole lot of things that have happened to you throughout your life. Self confidence is like physical fitness. You need to build your self confidence by engaging in certain behaviors that make you feel more and more confident about who you are and what you're doing. So you start with what we call your inner self. How do people develop high levels of self confidence? Well, we found that the flip side of self confidence is called self efficacy. That means self that you are good or you feel that you are good at what you do. One of the fastest ways to build self confidence is to think through clearly who you are and what you want to think about the skills that you will need to build a wonderful life and career, and then to work every day on becoming better and better at something that is important to you. What happens is as you feel better and better you in these skill areas, people will compliment you and say, you know, you're very good at that, or you did a good job at that. Or they'll stand back and be amazed. And as they admire you for your improving skills, your self confidence in your ability to do that thing goes up and up. Give you an example. When I started off in selling, I didn't get any training at all. I was just told to go out and knock on doors and make sales. And I did. I wasn't afraid to make sales or to make calls, but I didn't have any skills and I never made any sales. Sometimes I would start at 7 or 8 in the morning when people came to work and I would work all day and then I would go and knock on apartment doors and houses right up until 9, even 10 o' clock at night. Sometimes I would work 14 hours and never make a sale. Now my self confidence was at an all time low until somebody came along and said, you know, there's a logical proven process for making sales, starting with prospecting property, building rapport, identifying needs and so on. And if you follow the process, you'll make sales. So I began to follow a process and I began to make sales. Within a year my income had gone up dramatically. But my self confidence was so high I started to recruit and train other people. I started to build sales organizations for the rest of my life. I had this incredible confidence that I can learn whatever I need to learn to achieve whatever goal I can set for myself and so can you. Self confidence is the result of your becoming progressively better at something that is important to you and as you work on yourself, your self confidence will go up automatically. If you like this video, please leave a comment below. And don't forget to subscribe to get new videos like this in the future.
