The 3 things that create confidence

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Hello, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and leadership coach. Happy Wednesday, everyone. I wanted to talk this evening about this little thing called confidence. It's not a little thing. It's a huge thing. It is a thing that we hold. We hold off on our biggest dreams waiting for the confidence to arrive. And here's the thing about confidence, is that you actually have to create it. Confidence doesn't just happen naturally. You have to actually act, actively, create it in yourself, in your life. Confidence and courage are go hand in hand. Oftentimes, courage comes first. Being brave, not being a weenie comes first. If you want to feel confident in something, you have to embrace the fact that you are a fucking weenie and just do it anyway. And so I wanted to talk a little bit about confidence, because there in the personal development space, you know, it's so easy to say, oh, just go have confidence. I've been in a lot of scenarios where that's the advice that was given to someone who's really struggling to do something that was outside of their comfort zone. And. Hi, Asher, Welcome. Great to see you. And it's just not helpful advice. I kind of joke that if I were to ever start a confidence store, I would just sell Spanx, because you can't sell confidence, but you can sell underwear that will, like, control everything. Keep your tummy tucked, okay? Like, that's as close to confidence that we can buy. Okay, Now I want to go into today a few things that you can do to create confidence for yourself. Now, there are three things on my list. They are simple, they are not easy. Okay? There is a difference. There's a difference. So simple, simple and. And complex are two things in one category. And easy and hard are two things. Another category. We oftentimes conflate the things and. Hello, Gabriel. Welcome. We oftentimes conflate the things that are simple for. Oh, well, this should be easy for me. This should be easy for me. No, no. Just because it's simple doesn't mean it's easy. Meditating is a really hard thing to do consistently. Okay. I've had spout or spurts in my life of being a devout meditator. You know, two times a day, 20 minutes each, and then I fall off the wagon because it's really hard to stick to it. But there's nothing more simple. You just sit there and you don't do anything. You Know, it's simple, but it's not easy. Okay? So I'm going to give you some three things that you can do to build confidence in yourself and hopefully in your business and being able to start your business. And I want you to take it in and recognize that what I'm saying is simple. It's not easy. Okay? Deal? Okay, great. So number one in creating confidence in yourself is recognizing that you're going to be afraid. And you're going to have to do it anyway with that fear about a few dozen times before it feels good. Okay? That's just how it works. I want to tell a story. So when I was growing up, I kind of stutter when I'm reading out loud. Okay. That's kind of why I've learned how to ad lib. Stutter so well is that. And I. I think it's. Well, I don't know. You can have a different opinion here. But this is one of the reasons I've learned to ad lib. Because I have a really hard time when I'm reading something because I read faster than I can actually say it. And so I end up tripping over my words and stuttering. And so in school, I think I developed this fear of speaking publicly because in school, like the public speaking that you start off with is reading out loud to the class. And so I went through middle school, high school, absolutely terrified of having to speak publicly. The only time I spoke publicly without it being an absolute disaster. Yes, Asher, be bold. Without it being an absolute disaster was in high school. My best friend's dad died and I spoke at his funeral. That was the only time that I got up and spoke without any trouble. And I think it just because he mattered so much to me and she mattered so much to me. And it was such a heartbroken, breaking event. Anyway, so my whole, like, college was miserable speaking publicly. There was one event in college where a professor Voluntold me not volunteered. Voluntold did not take no for an answer. To read a letter from an author at a literary luncheon with about 300 people there because she wasn't going to be able to make it. And he thought, oh, great, let's have a student read it because that'll mean so much more. And I was so bad. I was so bad that people came up to me after I finished and apologized to me for how bad I was. Okay? That is how bad I was. I had borrowed books from this professor. Thank God I wasn't in any of his classes. Literally at 2 o' clock in the morning, I left them on his doorstep of his house because I knew where I lived. We were neighbors. Not creepy. Not like in a creepy way. Like, I just. We were neighbors. I knew where he lived. I left them on his doorstep at 2:00 in the morning. I never spoke to him again. I was so embarrassed, so mortified. Fast forward to my, my, my professional life. I had to speak publicly and in a few scenarios, and it was really hard for me. And so I decided to just bite the bullet and I joined Toastmasters and I showed up to every single thing. And every time there was a speech that I could volunteer to do, I did it. And I went to like speaking training. I literally paid for training to be a better public speaker. I'm getting, I'm getting vermped as I'm talking about this. Like, talking about having, having speaking speech problems always makes it come up anyway. And I'm better now. I'm better now. I'm still afraid. When I get up on stage in front of like 100 people, I'm still afraid. It still freaks me out. But I can, I can do it. At least I can lean into the tools that I have. Okay, now what this took, what this took was me realizing that I had to go and do it. Afraid. I had to go and do it. Afraid. Because if I waited for confidence to come, it was never going to come. Okay, Gary Naco, lol. Just go out in the stadium and sing your heart out. Not that easy. Easy to say. Facing your fears is courageous. Yes, exactly. Exactly. It's easy to say for someone who's done it and is comfortable doing it. That's really bad. Yeah, it was really bad. Rachel, I think you're responding to my speaking thing. Anyway, so I realized I had to go out and just do it. Afraid. And the, the dark underbelly, if you will, of going out and doing it afraid is. You also have to be ready for it to go terribly, terribly wrong. But here's what I want to remind you, is that you showing up, being afraid, doing it anyway, and having it go wrong. The worst that can happen is that someone just thinks you look silly. You. You're going to be embarrassed, you know, someone. You might, you know, say the wrong thing and upset someone, whatever, you can always clean that up. You know, as humans, I'm a firm believer that there's very few things we can recover from that we can't make right after getting it wrong. You know, really murdering someone. If you unalive someone, then there's no way to undo that. You know, there's no way to make it right with that person because they're no longer here, okay? So don't do that. But, you know, if you accidentally say the wrong thing to a client or you post something stupid on social media, you can 100% always go out and fix it and make it right and correct it and own it, okay? You have that power. And actually admitting your mistake makes you fall far more human in the eyes of your audience and it makes you far more approachable. Okay? So you have to do it afraid before you're ready, before the confidence is there. And you have to be ready to it up and you're gonna it up. It's gonna like, it's gonna go wrong, guaranteed. Okay? The first few clients that you take, there's gonna be something that happens that you screw up with them and you're gonna make it right. You're gonna fix it showing up on social media, you're gonna post something that's really dumb and it's gonna be fine. In the greater scheme of things, no one's gonna stand up at your funeral and be like, oh my God, oh my God, Gary. He once posted this thing on social media. How embarrassing. Like, we're all just gonna remember him for this embarrassing post. No, fuck that. No, no, we're not gonna, that's not gonna be the lucky. The legacy is gonna be all the other good things that you did, okay? This one little thing is gonna, it's gonna be forgotten. If it's not forgotten, it's gonna be laughed about, okay? You're always going to be able to make mistakes, right? Okay? So that's number one is you have to do it afraid. You have to be ready for it to go wrong and know that you can clean it up. Okay? Now number two, we jump over this step all the time. It's. It's crazy to me how often we're just like, yeah, just go, be confident. You got this. You know, Would you ever say that to like your little kid when they're learning to ride a bike, like they're, they're trying to learn to ride a two wheel bike, you know, where you have to balance and you have to pedal and you have steer and like there's a lot going on. Then there's braking action that has to happen at some point. Would you ever just hand them a bike and be like, yeah, just go, be confident. No, that's a. They're going to be too afraid to do it. You know, unless you have like a real Rebel who like, you know, is not afraid of getting hurt. I was not that kid. They're probably going to get hurt if they do try it and it's actually going to kill their confidence even more because they're going to go, they're going to try it, they're going to think, oh well, this should be easy. My parents have told me just to have confidence and that'll just carry me and then they're going to go skin their knee and they're going to think, oh my God, there's something wrong with me. Like there's something wrong with me that I didn't inherently know how to ride this bicycle. Okay. Likewise, if someone doesn't know how to cook, does not know how to boil an egg, doesn't know how to make pasta. And I'm not talking like from scratch pasta, I'm talking pasta that's dried from a box. Okay? You telling them like giving them a bunch of ingredients and sending them into the kitchen, just saying, just be confident. What are you going to eat that night? I think you're going to be ordering in because they're going to get into the kitchen and completely fall apart because they're not going to understand the instructions, they're not going to understand what timing is important, they're not going to know anything, they're not going to know what utensils are called. You know, it's going to be a disaster. So the key, the second key to having confidence is you have to learn how. You have to learn how. This is a big part of what I do with my clients is it's insane to me how many talented, intelligent, trained professionals there are, trained in their area of specialty, by the way, expect themselves to naturally, inherently know how to run a business. Like, I don't know about you, but that was not in my schooling at any point. And even my clients who've gone through MBAs, they say that, you know, the MBA didn't really teach them how to start a business from scratch. You know, especially a service based business. It's probably not even worth the time of an mba, an MBA program to teach that stuff. And yet they start businesses and they flounder. They don't, they don't know how to run sales calls. And so they flounder and they think, oh my God, there must be something worth wrong with me. People must not like me. My offer might suck, this might suck, I suck. They, you know, flounder with their marketing as well. You know, they're posting and they're sharing a lot and they're inviting people to book a call or whatever, and it just doesn't go well. And they think, oh, my God, it's me. Everyone hates me. This isn't working. You know, or maybe their offer, they've designed this offer and it's really special, but like, they don't know how to design an offer that people actually want to buy. And so. Oh, hi. Tom Whalen from Richmond, Virginia. Welcome. So you have to learn how. If you don't and you're not expected to inherently know this stuff. I don't know about you, but it's not like I walked into algebra 2 in high school and was like, I got this. I just know it up here. It just came with. It came with all this. No, like, starting a business is the same thing. I got trained in sales, okay? I got trained in marketing. I also did a ton of self training in marketing. You. You do not have this already baked in you. If you do, then that's amazing. You must be a superhero, like on par with Superman. But don't expect yourself to do this inherently, okay? To be confident in running your business and getting it up and running and starting it and getting your first few clients and then scaling, you literally have to learn how that goes, okay? It is a skill set on top of the skill set of the service that you provide, and it is critical for you to learn it. Otherwise, what you're going to do is the same thing with that kid with the bike is they're going to think, oh, my God, well, I should know this and I'm failing at it, so I must just suck. You know, it's going to kill your confidence even more. You're welcome. Tom. Hi. So you have to learn how, okay? Because confidence follows doing, and you can't do unless you know how to do it. Okay? So that's one. I'm sorry, that's two. Now number three. Okay? You have to do your research. And for the sake of the niche that I have is you have to do your market research, okay? Now if you don't do your research and it doesn't matter what you're doing, so if you don't have. If you don't have confidence in something and you're going out, you're trying to do it, you really have to go and do some research to see, like, well, what's the percentage of success and what's the rate of failure, you know, so you can set your expectations correctly. You want to research what worked well for other people and what didn't work well, for other people. Okay, thank you. Now, in your business, when you're starting a business, you need to do market research. And this is a big part of both my byob, build your own business group program and my one on one client work, okay? Because here's the thing. You are an expert in the service that you provide, okay? That means that you have expert language that you use to do that work, okay? So say you're a lawyer. You spent years, you know, studying law, studying for the bar, writing papers, writing, doing all this stuff, okay? You speak legalese. Your clients do not. They did not go to law school. They did not study for the bar. If they did, they would not need you. Okay? You speaking legalese to them is not helpful. They're. They're not going to know what you're talking about. You have to do your market research to find out how they talk about their problems. When you do that, you can literally take all the language that they've used to describe their frustrations, their fears, their deepest desires, what outcomes they want, how they describe themselves, so on and so forth, and you can literally use that in all your marketing. You can also look at that and be like, oh, my God, my offer doesn't cover half of this. I have to tweak and change my offer so it encompasses everything that they're struggling with, okay? It's one of the best ways to have true, solid confidence in what you're offering your people. Because if you're just going out because you think this thing is kind of nice and you just want to go out and shop it around and see if it's okay, like, if they don't understand what it is, they're gonna say no. If it doesn't solve the problems as they see them, they're gonna say no. And you're gonna be left over here just scratching your head, being like, oh, my God, like, they hate me. They don't like me. Like, you know, something isn't right here and the thing isn't right. But the thing is not. Has nothing to do with you. It just has to do with what you've put together. It has to do with your marketing, it has to do with your offer, it has to do with your sales. So if you want to have confidence in your business, if to you want. If you want to have confidence in your offer, you have to talk to the people who will potentially buy your offer, okay? If you bypass this step, that is one of the surest ways for you to kill your own confidence before you've even Started. And I don't want that for you. I don't want that for anyone. So I'm just gonna summarize for those of you who popped in, popped out, come back. So number one is you have to be afraid and do it anyway. Be ready to fuck it up and be ready to mess, to clean it up. Not mess it up, clean it up, you're gonna mess up. So being afraid, doing it anyway, and being ready to screw it up and clean it up. Next you gotta learn how to, how do you do this thing? How do you ride a bike? How do you cook? How do you start a business? You have to learn. It's a skill set. It's not baked in naturally. Okay. Like a natural thing that we all know how to do is breathe and fall asleep. You know, it's not like that. It's a little more complex. And finally, you have to do your market research or just your research if you're not starting a business, okay? That is one of the surest way for you to be able to measure your success in a really, in a really efficient way and know how you're doing. Gary outward mindset to understand your client and customers. We're all into sales because we all have customers. Exactly. Yep. Yeah. You're an engineer on a team in a tech company. You have ideas. You have ideas and you want to sell them to your manager, you want to sell them to your team. You want to convince people on your team that your ideas are worth taking action on. You know, all these things help that you have to understand what your co workers concerns are, what your manager's concerns are, and what the concerns of the, of the end client are going to be before you sell anything to them, before you convince them that this idea is worth having. Yeah. So, and the number one thing is if someone tells you to just be confident, you need to move on to someone else. Hands down, you have to move on to someone else. Because a proper mentor, a proper coach, a proper strategist, a proper consultant is going to know the things that will actually help you build confidence and make this thing real. Someone who doesn't know all those steps is going to fall back on. Oh, just be confident. And that's not the kind of competency that you need. Okay. Also, I have mentioned, you know, all of this is stuff that I cover in my group program, byob, which is build your own business. If you're curious about that, what I want you to do is I want you to shoot me a dm. Likewise, everything that's in BYOB is available to me. My one on one clients who get to work with me one on one and have direct access to me pretty much whenever they want, except for when I'm sleeping. And if you're curious about that again, DM me. We'll have a very honest conversation, see where you're at in your business if it's a fit for both of us. And if it is, then we can talk about what they look like. Anyway, I hope this is useful. Thank you for joining in, Gary and Tom and Rachel and Asher and Gabriel and I think I got everyone. Anyway, I hope you found this useful. Happy Wednesday and have a great night. I hope to be going live tomorrow and Friday as well, so tune in for that. Katie Out I'm so awkward when I end these things. Oh God.