The 3^rd Principle of Self-Confidence says that being truly confident doesn’t mean that you can’t not be confident.

What all those double negatives mean is that being confident doesn’t preclude you from being scared.  Being truly confident means that it’s just fine for you to go beyond, to take another step into the unknown and scare the pants of yourself.

Being more confident means that you may just experience more fear.

There are times when being confident means you’ll be shaking in your boots.  There will be times when that voice in your head tells you to turn back, and there will be times when you wonder if you’re up to it at all.

That might sound strange, especially considering that I’m a confidence coach and I keep banging on about how real confidence can transform your life in all kinds of ways, and you might be thinking, “Hang on just a second buster, the very reason  I want to be more confident is so I’m not so scared all the time.”

I understand that, I do, but here’s the thing.  Confidence and fear aren’t mutually exclusive states – they can exist in the same person at the same time.  Here are a couple of quick definitions to explain –

Confidence: Being able to choose your behaviour with implicit trust in that behaviour, and knowing that you can deal with whatever happens.

Fear: Anticipation that you’ll lose out materially or emotionally by the outcome of a course of action.

You experience fear when you’re about to go out of your comfort zone, and it’s a voice that tells you all the things that can go wrong (whether real or imagined) and every way you can screw up or look stupid.

So if you’re engaging with the things that really matter to you, the things that demand you push yourself and take yourself beyond the confines of where you are and what you know right now, you’d better expect to have some fear along for the ride.

If you interpret being scared as not being confident, you’re wrong.

Fear is part of a being on a journey that matters.

Of course, there’s a zero to slim chance of you embarking on that journey in the first place without a sense of self-confidence and without a sense of what matters to you.

So here’s the exciting bit.

When you have true confidence that voice of fear doesn’t matter.  You’ll hear it, sure, but your trust in your ability to make choices and to deal with whatever happens vastly outweighs it.

The voice of fear is still there, but that voice isn’t you.

Being confident means that you still hear that voice of fear and understand it, but it also means you know full well that you’re more powerful and resourceful than it could ever be.

Being confident gives you an inexhaustible supply of self-trust.

I think the trick here is to find ways to remember and connect with that confidence, especially when the voice of fear seems to be jumping up and down and yelling at you.  The knack that truly confident people have is being able to connect with what they’ve got when the voice of fear threatens to overwhelm (and coincidentally, that’s just what my coaching method does).

Confidence and fear often go hand in hand, and can even complement one another.  I always say that the best way to know if you’re onto something special is to ask yourself this question – “Am I scared AND excited?”

If you’re both scared and excited it means that not only are you pushing yourself, but you’re moving into a world that truly matters to you.

And how darn-tootin- jump-up-and-down-call-all-your-friends-with-a-cherry-on-top great does that sound?

Believe it or not, public speaking scares the crap out of me. My pulse quickens, my breath shortens and my palms get sweaty. But it hasn’t stopped me doing a whole bunch of it in my work over the years, and I’m working on doing a whole load more of it in 2009.

Fear is a part of life, that’s ‘Fact about Life’ number 14. I think number 15 is something about getting lots of fibre in your diet, but that’s not important right now. What is important is to recognise that fear is there when your life takes you to a place you haven’t been before, a place where something’s on the line. That’s what fear is, fear that something you already have or something you stand to have might be taken away or damaged. A few examples…

Fear of failure: you fear that the success you’ve already achieved or stand to achieve will be stripped away, leaving you with nothing.

Fear of intimacy: you fear being hurt as a result of making yourself vulnerable or that you’ll lose the control you have over your life (emotions, desires, goals, body, etc.)

Fear of success: you fear that the status-quo and control you’ve achieved will be shattered by any impending success, or fear that you won’t be able to live up to the success and lose your dream.

Fear of being judged: you fear that other people will judge you negatively and that that judgement will take something away from you.

Fear of heights: you fear falling down. Well, duh.

Things get really scary when whatever’s on the line is something important to you – a goal, a target, a wish, a dream, a way of life, a balance or a belief. It’s not too scary if all you stand to lose is ham sandwich, but when something that matters to you is at stake it’s a different kettle of fish entirely.

Fear is an important feedback mechanism because it tells you that something important is happening. It tells you that you’re stretching yourself in a new direction and pushing yourself into a fresh part of your life. It tells you that something special’s required.

It’s easy to stall for time, but how you face those fears determines what happens next and what kind of experience you have. I’ve seen that there are 3 different approaches to moving forwards confidently in the face of fear:

2. A burst of courage.
   One way forward in those times when you feel scared from your head to your tippy-toes is to summon a burst of courage that’ll see you through.

   This is like physically priming yourself for whatever happens next – you take a moment to ready yourself, sucking it in, making a choice to go for it, telling yourself “This is as scary as it gets, get ready for it, here we go” and you get that burst of courage that takes you forwards.

   This is a physiological response to the fear, and you’ll feel it in your body – a sense of energy, vigour or power that can propel you forwards. Frequently people use this for physical or environmental challenges like jumping out of a plane, giving a big speech or running the rapids.

3. Learned confidence.
   Your confidence works just like a muscle (that’s the 2nd Principle of Self-Confidence), the principle being that the more open you are to risk, possibility and opportunity you are the more confident you need to be, and so the more confident you become.

   Of course, the more open you are to risk, possibility and opportunity the more scope there is for fear to play a role in your life.

   That’s why this kind of confidence is a deliberate choice based on what you know without doubt- “I know I can do this“. When you look at the facts of how capable you are, what you’ve achieved and where you’re already confident it presents a solid case for why you’ll be just fine going forwards with the challenge you’re facing.

   It might be scary, but you’ve done big and scary things before that worked out just fine.

   Learned confidence is recognising that you’re more than a match for the challenge in front of you based on the facts, and it allows you to move forwards with a conscious sense of confidence.

4. True confidence.
   This way of responding to fear is my favourite. This is about having the feeling way down in your bones that you’re more than the sum of your parts.

   Reacting to fear with true confidence is about connecting with a vibrant and powerful sense of who you are and what’s important to you, and is even about connecting with your place in the world and your limitless possibility in it.
   

   Moving forwards with true confidence is what it is to be free.

   Think about it. If you’re not constrained by fear or doubt then you’re free to experience your life fully; you’re free to create a rich experience and you’re free to be you.

   When you move forwards with true confidence, fear loses its power completely – it’s simply another part of the experience of being you and how you live your life.

   Everyone can have that. You can too.

I remember breakfast time one morning, some 7 or 8 years ago. I was standing in front of an open cupboard in my kitchen, my eyes flicking between a box of Frosties and a box of Cornflakes, trying to decide which to have for breakfast. I stood there for 5 minutes, until – utterly frustrated – I slammed the cupboard door shut and went without breakfast altogether.

I’ve learned to make decisions quicker and easier now and it’s something that I’ll often work with clients to improve. Here are my 5 ways to make confident decisions. Oh, I decided on cranberry granola this morning, by the way.

2. Test them against your values.
   Your values are the building blocks, cornerstones and foundations for who you are, and can be things in yourself, others or out there in the world that are most important to you. Know your values and you get the chance to express them, and when you do that all it means is that you’re expressing who you really are, way down inside. It feels pretty amazing.

   So how do your values fit into decision making? Simple. When you’re faced with a tricky decision you can line up your different choices and ask “Which one of these most honours my values?” The decision that’s most in line with your values will be the best decision for you (even if it’s not the simplest or most practical), because it fits with who you are and what’s most important to you. Told you it was simple.

3. Be like Columbo.
   When I was growing up I used to love rainy Sunday afternoons watching Columbo, and loved the bit at the end where he’d sidle up to the Bad Guy, say “Just one more thing” and then proceed to blow apart the bad guys alibi. Genius. What Columbo had in spades, other than a penchant for cubans and raincoats, was a great trust in his intuition. In every episode, from the very moment he first meets the bad guy, he knows ‘whodunnit’ – and more importantly, he trusts it.

   What does your intuition tell you is the ‘right’ decision for you. Forget about all the “What if’s” and the details – what does your gut tell you? Learn to listen to your intuition, it knows what it’s talking about.

4. It just doesn’t matter.
   My decision between Frostie’s and Cornflakes wasn’t a biggie. Whichever I chose, there were never going to be any huge consequences and the ripples from that decision wouldn’t have been felt much further than the end of my spoon. The point is, sometimes it just doesn’t matter which way you go.

   It’s not just tiny, silly little breakfast-related decisions either – with bigger decisions it’s easy to get wrapped up in second guessing yourself, going round in circles and over-complicating things, when – if you get right down to it – it just doesn’t matter.

   Going round in circles is only going to make you dizzy, so stop it. Ask yourself this question – if your future happiness wasn’t dependent on your decision (and it isn’t, by the way), which way would you go?

5. Have enough information.
   By all means look at the facts before you make a complex decision. By all means weigh up the pro’s and con’s so that you can get an understanding of the ‘science’ behind a decision, but be careful. There’s a big difference between knowing enough to make a choice, and knowing everything to make choice.

   When you feel that happening, stop yourself, get a change of environment and ask yourself “What do I really need to know to be able to make this decision?”

6. Doubt vs The Gremlin.
   Everyone has a part of themselves that doesn’t like change, a part that uses every trick in the book to avoid making decisions so that you can stay exactly where you are. I call it the Gremlin, and it’s a part of you that would rather avoid making decisions altogether rather than run the risk of making a bad one or screwing up.

   This is a world away from having doubts. Doubts are valid concerns about a possible course of action, or reasonable concerns about what might be in store. Your doubts are there to help you prepare for change and prepare for what could happen.

   Knowing the difference between your doubts and your Gremlin helps you clarify what’s real and what’s imagined, what’s relevant and what isn’t relevant.

I use these myself – different strategies for different decisions at different times – and I always find something that works.

Let me know how you get on with them.

I was a little abrupt with a client the other day.

Every question I asked, and every point I made was met with an elaborate exposition that eventually made me interrupt in no uncertain fashion with “Stop talking. Stop. Talking.” Shocked, my client stopped talking.

It was our 3rd session, and what was abundantly clear to me was that she was determined to keep talking and talking and talking, but with absolutely no intention of doing anything. I explained this to her, and then cut the session 30 minutes short, “I’m going to stop the session here for today. You know exactly what you need to do, so get to it and let me know what happens.”

Maybe a little blunt, but I had a serious point to make to her.

Talking about something is a brilliant way to not get around to doing it. It’s actually really nice thinking – the more you talk about something the more it sounds like you’re getting ready to do it, and the more you convince yourself that you’re getting ready for it.

It’s a great stalling tactic. For as long as you’re thinking about it and talking about it, you’re not actually doing it. You’re buying yourself time, and when you give yourself extra time it increases the time you have available to second guess yourself.

The more time you spend talking about doing something the more room you give for your doubts and fears to grow. The more time you spend talking about doing something the more time you have to come up with reasons to let yourself off the hook and not do it.

It’s one of many delaying tactics that your Gremlin uses to avoid doing things that might be risky. Keep doing that and your confidence will be in tatters.

If, like my client, you find yourself doing the same thing, you need to stop talking and just go and do something.

The effect’s of the Writer’s Strike are rippling out pretty wide now. The Autumn pilot season will be full of reality shows, Autumn 2009 in the cinema is likely to be pretty quiet, and people in the industry are losing their jobs as a result.

Did the members of the Writer’s Guild know all of this would happen?

Some of it, sure they did. But the rest is probably an unpleasant surprise. The point is that life is pretty damn complicated these days. A butterfly flaps its wings in China and the next thing you know your workload doubles and your boiler packs up (I’m currently boiling kettles to wash).

Those complications didn’t stop the Writers Guild from making a difficult choice and sticking to their guns, and it’s that web of complications that makes it pretty hard for you to see to step up and tackle tricky choices with confidence.

Vicky’s a client who landed a senior post in a law firm in London, and while we were working together she came to a session saying that she had to fire someone (check out Guy Kawasaki’s excellent post on the art of firing someone if you’re in the same boat). Now, this is never going to be a pleasant thing to have to do, but it’s a reality of the business world that people are fired every day and someone has to do the firing. People just like you and me have to face the reality that one day it could be us giving the poor schmo the bad news.

She was pretty much paralysed by having to do it, and came to the session telling me that this guy had a young family and was projecting forwards about all the terrible things that might happen to him and his family when she says those two fateful words “You’re fired.”

Vicky was not only taking responsibility for the act of firing him, but for everything that followed

That was her mistake, and once she’d finished letting me know about all the terrible things that might happen to the guy, I simply said to her, “What makes you think that what happens to him is your responsibility?”

There’s a massive difference between thinking your decisions through and considering every variable of a decision. Do that and you’ll find yourself on a one way trip to I’m-paralysed-by-indecision-ville. Keep doing that and your self-confidence will hit a new low.

With Vicky, we took a good look at what was stopping her from taking action, and pretty soon she saw that she was:

1. Conjuring up fictitious scenarios that painted a black picture.
2. Taking personal responsibility for each outcome, real and imagined.
3. Making herself feel smaller than the task, forgetting entirely about her ability to get great results.

The bottom line is that life will always have difficult choices. Some of your choices may well have a negative impact on other people.

There, I said it. Get used to it.

While it’s generally a good idea to consider the impact of your choices or to minimise the negative effects of them, those considerations don’t need to affect the choice itself.

PS: By the way, Vicky reported back to me that the guy she fired was looking for another job in a different field anyway, and that she’d done him a favour because he was feeling guilty about not putting his all in.

I read an interesting article on Ryan Paugh’s blog Employee Evolution all about fear and how to manage it..

I agree with pretty much everything Ryan says, but want to make 2 really important distinctions.

1. I have a bone to pick with Marie Curie, specifically this quotation of hers – “Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.” How wonderfully simplistic and how far off the mark can one world-famous scientist be?

   There are things in life to be feared, and to think otherwise means you really need to take off those rose-coloured glasses or get out from under the duvet you’ve been hiding under.

   I’m sure it’s not just me, but I’d be scared witless if someone mugged me in the street. I’d pee myself with fear if robbers burst in through my window in the middle of the night. Fear is a part of life, but that doesn’t mean that it has to limit what you do and how you do it. I still walk down the street and I haven’t boarded up my bedroom window.

   As for the “understanding” that Marie Curie alluded to, can you imagine how annoying and dull it would be to try and understand everything in your life? I don’t pretend to understand everything, and there are many things in my life that have question marks over them. Why did I let Liz Bennett go in preference for hanging out with my friends when I was a teenager? Why didn’t I spot how toxic my job in e-Business was before the real damage was done? Why didn’t the BBC schedule Seinfeld in a better slot?

   All good questions on the face of it, but understanding the reasons why some things happen is just pointless. You could spend your whole life trying to understand something, which is why some people spend a lifetime in therapy – because there will always be more ‘stuff’ to dig up and try to understand.

   You don’t need to understand things, you just need to acknowledge them. Real acceptance is the key, and that takes courage and an implicit trust in who you are. You need to trust that you’re okay and that you’ll be just fine, then you can reach a point of acceptance. And yes, that’s real confidence…

   Gail Caissy has it right in Ryan’s article: “Many of the changes in our lives, our society and environment are beyond our control. When change comes into our lives and there is nothing we can do about it, we have to accept it and learn to live with it.” Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous Serenity Prayer sums it up nicely, and Marcus Aurelius had something pretty cool to say about it too.

2. “Fear is a product of your imagination.” says Ryan, but I have to disagree. Fear and doubt aren’t simply a product of your imagination and they can be incredibly useful, as long as you know how to use them and don’t allow your Gremlin to use them for its own ends. I’ll explain.
   
   Your Gremlin is that part of you that will use every dirty trick it knows to keep you away from challenge, risk and opportunity, for the simple reason that where you are right now is a known quantity and that’s where your Gremlin feels safest. Your Gremlin will say things that are deliberately intended to undermine your confidence and ability, so that you keep away from what might be risky or hold yourself back from doing something that might not work out or make you look silly.

   This can manifest in your career, but it often manifests more in your social or romantic life, because that’s where you’re not entirely in control.

   If you let it, your Gremlin will use your fears and doubts to extrapolate conclusions about the risk or challenge you’re facing and use them as evidence to keep you away from change. “Don’t do that,” it’ll say to you, “just look at what could happen.” Worse still, your Gremlin will take over your thinking and make your fears real. You’ll stumble, your mind will fix on every small mistake and you’ll forget just how capable you are. “Look, see what I told you? You’re not up to this and probably never will be.”

   Remember that your fears and doubts are perfectly valid in themselves; it’s only when your Gremlin gets hold of them that they can turn into something imaginary and limiting.

   That’s why you need to teach yourself how to spot the intention behind what you tell yourself and train yourself to interrupt your Gremlin when you start to hear it. As Dr Don Greene, Performance Coach and author of says, “Silence the sabotaging voice and tap into the talent and training your brain is ready to unleash. It’s a matter of getting control of your stress response so that it’s not involuntary.”

   Remember – statements that are specifically designed to hold you back are coming from your Gremlin. Statements that are designed to make you think about what you’re doing, make you ask the right questions, find the best answers and make you ready for what happens next are coming from your doubts. There’s a world of difference between the two.

“I hope you can help me with something Steve. I hate my job. I really do. I want to quit because I hate where I work and I dread Monday mornings, especially now the Holiday’s are over.

The people are fine for the most part, and some of the people I work with have become friends, but I hate the way I have to work and don’t get what my boss is doing at all. What if quitting is the wrong thing to do? I’m scared that if I leave it might be jumping from the frying pan into the fire. Should I stick with it?”

– Nicole B. in LA

Oh Nicole, Nicole, Nicole. Hate’s a strong word, and you’ve it used with relish. It’s abundantly clear that you’re either in the wrong job or the wrong company, and here’s the thing – you don’t owe them anything. That might sound heartless or mercenary, but it’s true. When you went to work for them you signed a contract, which means that you sell them your time, your skills and your experience in exchange for a salary and benefits. When you look at the cold, hard facts it’s a business exchange – you have something that’s of value to them and they’re paying you for it.

That means that if the deal isn’t working out for you in the way you’d like it to you’re well within your rights to change things and move on. You ask me if it’s the wrong thing to do and if you should stick it out in your organisation. What’s the impact of you doing that? What would it be like to spend another 6 months or a year there? Zoom forwards to the end of the the year and see how you’d feel if you stuck around.

It’s natural to be scared about quitting work, especially if you don’t have anything else lined up just yet. That doesn’t need to hold you back from looking at your options and seeing what else is out there, and I guarantee you there are jobs out there with your name on them. I think you’d probably agree that the piece of you that’s scared or is thinking that you might as well stick it out is the small, scared, hide your head under the covers part. It’s the part of you that’s happy to settle and wants to aim low so you don’t get disappointed or run the risk of screwing up. That’s okay, we all have that. The trick is to be aware of it and manage it so that it doesn’t hold you back and end up damaging your sense of who you are.

So what about the better part of you? What about the part of you who’s massively capable and knows that you can get more of the good stuff? What would that part of you do here?

A big question here is is about the kind of experience you want to have in your work. Sure, you could stick it out and things may change, but it seems like you know full well what your experience of your workplace is. So what kind of experience do you want in your work and your career?

It sounds to me like you’re selling yourself short Nicole. Strike a balance between putting energy into doing your job well enough and looking at your options, and good luck for whatever happens next.

Stay tuned. Lots more articles coming up describing key strategies that will help you if you’re in a similar place to Nicole…