Failure as Fuel: The Confidence Myth

We've been taught that confidence is key, to fake it until you make it. It has come up more times than I can count - in companies, teams and in one on one sessions - "I just want to feel (more) confident" or "I want to .... but I am not confident enough". It has become so clear to me how many of us are affected by confidence, or more importantly, how we are affected by the fact that we don't view ourselves as not confident enough. I am writing this today because I believe we need to turn this around. Instead of looking for confidence or waiting to feel confident I believe we need to start looking at how we can turn failure into fuel. To explore how we can become the type of person who is not scared of failure because we understand that failure fuels our growth and enables us to become more than we are.

What is confidence? Confidence is defined, within the context of a career or business, as a belief in one's own abilities, skills, and judgment to tackle challenges and contribute effectively. We seem to have this need to feel confident in something before we will do the thing, we want to be confident as a CEO before we step in to the role, we want to be confident that our business will succeed before we start. We want to know we will achieve the result before we set the goal. I am here to say though, that I am seeing how often this can actually hold us back. The reality is that taking on a new role, starting a new business, deciding to tackle a new sport or goal is by definition new and something we have never done before. This means that we won't be confident and we certainly won't feel confident because we have never done it before. We might think we can do it but often we don't have absolute certainty that we will do it. So we find ourselves saying 'I don't feel confident', we find ourselves slowing down and waiting to feel confident but instead we just end up holding ourselves back.

Now, don't get me wrong I am not saying that self-belief is not important, in fact self-belief is critical to being able to handle failure and to enable a growth mindset which is what I am talking about here. But absolute confidence, the certainty that we will be able to get something completely right or make no mistakes, is not useful. What if, instead of confidence we focused on grit and resilience? On determination and perseverance. What if we thought of this next step as an opportunity to build resilience and grit. This means that when we step into something new we have to acknowledge (and often admit to ourselves) that we are going to probably make some mistakes, but that we have the tenacity to keep going and to overcome those mistakes rather than thinking that those mistakes will be our undoing. Mistakes are often a gift, it is a cliche but it is a cliche for a reason - we learn more from our failures than our successes. The truth is, if we wait to have complete confident when we are taking on a new challenge, we will never take the step but if we acknowledge that yes we are stepping into something new, yes we will probably make mistakes, but every mistake we make is a chance to grow, to learn and to improve. Then we will end up in a better place than we are, with new and improved skills and more importantly an increased capacity for perseverance.

Here are just a few journal prompts to work through this yourself:

• What step am I scared of taking?

• Where do I feel I need more confidence?

• How can I find opportunities to grow my resilience and grit in this area?

• How well do I handle failure?

• How can I improve my ability to handle failure?

• What else can I do to improve my resilience?

Reflect and journal on these and then take action on what you discover. You will find that your ability to take big leaps and do new things improves drastically when you focus on your resilence.

Expecting to feel complete confidence holds us back. But if you change your thinking and choose your focus to be on becoming a more resilient person then when you are faced with an opportunity that scares you, you will have the skills you need to reframe it to look for all the opportunities for growth and how, even if you fail, you can use that as fuel for your growth and improvement.