Insights

How can you be more confident in business?

I’m about to enter the Dragons’ Den. My mouth is dry like sandpaper, my hands are clammy, my pulse is racing and my heart is thumping. I’m unsure whether to be more afraid of Peter Jones, Deborah Meaden or Duncan Bannatyne. 4 months in the planning. I’m standing in front of the Dragons and I’m about to speak the most important words of my business life – I’ve practiced the words hundreds of times before. My mind goes blank. A wave of panic ripples through me. The Dragons stare at me in disbelief with a mixture of pity, frustration and impatience. I’ve screwed up and on TV!

I wake up – it’s just a dream. Have you worried about a coming event? Have you lacked confidence in yourself? Worrying achieves nothing, except to create more worry.

How much is that lack of confidence costing you in your business?

For many businesses fear or lack of confidence holds them back from achieving what they are really capable of. Call it lack of confidence or call it fear. Either way clients can smell it.

What is confidence? It’s a hard one to pin down. It’s a sense of certainty in ourselves, an outcome or in others. For many of us confidence is fragile. Yet confidence in business is vital and that’s affected by your state of mind. “Are you in a right state or in the right state?”

So how can we become more confident in business?

You have to step up and be brave. Ask yourself, “What would you do if you knew you could not fail?” That nagging sense or fear of failure holds us back from striving for our dreams and ambitions – ultimately from achieving our potential.

There are some key principles to help you be more confident. Here are 9 tips to develop your confidence and reduce the impact of fear on your business.

1. Spread your customer base – no customer bigger than 15%. If you do have a client bigger than this then have watertight contracts with long notice periods. This will reduce your feeling of dependence on this major client.
2. Focus on your long term goals. Don’t let short term goals compromise your long term goals. Monitor your progress towards those long term goals. Don’t let short term obstacles dampen your journey to success. Celebrate moving towards those goals.
3. Confidence is contagious. And so is a lack of it. Your confidence will spread to your team.
4. ‘Make hay while the sun shines’ but build up your war-chest for that rainy day that will come. Build your reserves. These reserves give you confidence and avoid a sense of ‘hand to mouth’ desperation.
5. Expect to lose 15-20% of your customers each year. Do not simply assume that today’s customers will be tomorrow’s customers. Build the pipeline. Learn from those lost customers – don’t accept their embarrassed platitudes. Push them for the real reasons. Bill Gates said “your unhappiest customers are your greatest source of learning”.
6. Calculate the cost of your fear. What’s the cost of tolerating an unprofitable customer or not increasing your prices? What’s the impact on your bottom line of your lack of confidence?
7. Understand what your customers really value about your work and understand your real impact on their business. This builds your self-belief and confidence.
8. Step out of your comfort zone – carefully. If you are going to take a risk then think through the implications. “Take calculated risks. That is quite different from being rash” George S Patton.
9. Model excellence. Look at business colleagues who exhibit the level of confidence you admire most. How can you model their behaviours and approach? What’s the difference that makes a difference? Then practice.

If you were your own coach, what advice would you give yourself?