Confidence…The Root of Success

So your a brilliant professional, who graduated from Harvard with straight A’s, but with no job, no girlfriend and with no idea how to get ahead in life. If this is you, then you already know that you are lacking one of the most important factors in Personal Branding, CONFIDENCE. Confidence will actually make or break an individuals self-esteem, ability to communicate and succeed in life at the same time. Even with the strongest education imaginable, confidence is built on experience and supported by your network. Basically, in order to gain confidence, you must be broken down and fail in some form or another. This failure is hard impact on your confidence, but it allows you to rebuild and become stronger than before, thus improving your confidence. Just like other areas in life, confidence is all psychological, so it can be controlled to some extent.

Your confidence level is important in the following situations:

  • Professional Networking and the ability to walk up to someone you have never met before and start talking.
  • Presenting a topic to your audience, either at an event, for your job or for a school project.
  • Socially, with members of the opposite sex, who are attracted to those with high confidence levels
  • Your manager, who judges your brand based on confidence.

So you ask “what can I do to build confidence in myself”? Start by discovering who you are (your Personal Brand), which will allow you to understand what you need to do in order to gain this confidence you seek. Once discovered, it is all about repetition, through telling yourself that you are unique and “you have nothing to lose.” Saying this will help you be more outgoing, which translates into confidence.

A lot of people that are trying to succeed in business don’t realize that they can get great advice from business brokers that have been around the block a few times.

Picture of Dan Schawbel

Dan Schawbel

Dan Schawbel is the Managing Partner of Millennial Branding, a Gen Y research and consulting firm. He is the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Promote Yourself: The New Rules For Career Success (St. Martin’s Press) and the #1 international bestselling book, Me 2.0: 4 Steps to Building Your Future (Kaplan Publishing), which combined have been translated into 15 languages.

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