In this third part of our, How to Build Confidence Series, we define 12 of the powerful benefits of increasing self-confidence. These benefits extend deeper and wider than most people realize. Increasing your self-confidence will benefit you professionally if you are a leader, manager, sales rep, individual contributor. It will benefit you personally by helping you lead your family and it even helps you feel and others to perceive you as sexier. Yes, confidence is sexy!
Here are the 12 benefits of greater self-confidence:
- Being your best under stress. Athletes, musicians and actors will attest to the importance of a high level of confidence. When you’re confident, you perform up to your potential and you want to perform your best when it counts the most, when under pressure.
- Influencing others. Self-confident people often influence others more readily. This helps when selling an idea or product or negotiating at work or home.
- Having leadership and executive presence. Self-confidence plays a big part in leadership and executive presence. You create such presence by how you think, act (including how you carry your body) and use your voice.
- Exuding a more positive attitude. When you feel confident about yourself, you believe you have an important and meaningful place in the world, giving you a positive attitude.
- Feeling valued. When you’re confident, you know what you excel at and that you have value.
- Rising to the top. Looking for a promotion? The more confidence you have, the more likely you are to be promoted.
To learn the, “12 Techniques to Build Self-Confidence” please go here.
- Being sexier. Did you know that confidence is sexy? I wrote an article about it, which I published on my website and on YourTango.com. It’s one of my most popular articles, and it cracks me up that Google ranks me as number one for the keyword “confidence is sexy.”
- Reducing negative thoughts. Greater self-confidence allows you to experience freedom from self-doubt and negative thoughts about yourself.
- Experiencing more fearlessness and less anxiety. Greater confidence makes you more willing to take smart risks and more able to move outside your comfort zone.
- Having greater freedom from social anxiety. Becoming more comfortable being yourself reduces concern about what others might think of you. How liberating!
- Gaining energy and motivation to take action. Confidence gives you positive energy to take action to achieve your personal and professional goals and dreams. The more highly motivated and energized you are, the more likely you are to take immediate action.
- Being happier. Confident people tend to be happier and more satisfied with their lives than people who lack self-confidence.
The bottom line: Self-confident people are generally more successful.
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Each of the 12 benefits above helps you achieve goals faster and easier, which means you enjoy more success in life. Conversely, lack of confidence means more fear, anxiety and stress, usually resulting in less success.
Join speaker agent Kim Tracy and me in a discussion on the 12 benefits of developing greater self-confidence. You may either watch the video, or read the text below, which was edited to enhance readability.
[vc_video link=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbepKUFDlSo”]
Kim: Hi I’m Kim Tracy with the Maxwell James Speaker Agency. So excited to be here with Dr. TC North out of Colorado. How are you doing today?
TC: I’m doing great Kim.
Kim: So we are going to be talking about one of our favorite topics. It is the 12 benefits of increasing yourself confidence. And I’m going to guess that you’re going to share some benefits that I’m not aware of.
TC: Thank you Kim. This is one of my favorite topics and so yes, the extent that confidence affects us really surprises people. I’m going to cover these quickly today and in future interviews, if you want, we’ll drive into some depth on any one of them. Does that work?
Kim: Absolutely, one-hundred percent. Go for it.
TC: I’m going to look at my notes, as you asked me earlier, “Don’t you remember all the 12 benefits?”. Yes! But I don’t necessarily remember all the benefits as I’m saying them.
Kim: He’s only 25 years old, you guys!
TC: [Laughing] With a 64-year-old memory! Number one is being your best under stress and this is really important. I’ve worked with people who are amazing and best in the world at what they do. What people really want confidence for is to have it when it counts. So I want to start with probably the most important benefit of confidence which is, increasing your confidence allows you to be your best when you’re under stress, when it counts the most Kim.
The second benefit of greater self-confidence is when you’re more confident you’re better able to influence others. In conversations, in a family situation or in a business situation, when you’re on stage as a presenter, when you are confident, people are willing to listen to you, they believe what you say. They give you more credibility, you are perceived with more “cred” with confidence.
The third benefit is having leadership presence, or executive presence. And presence is that vibration that people feel when you show up. It’s like, who is this person and what is this person? Do I like them? Do I trust them? Are they confident? Are they scared? People actually trust people who are more confident than they trust somebody who has a lot of anxiety or nervousness.
Kim: Perfect. Keep going.
TC: The fourth benefit is exuding a more positive attitude. People always want to be around people who are more positive than negative. And I just saw a piece of research saying that positive people actually live longer than negative people!
Kim: Oh! Good to know!
TC: When you’re being confident, people feel more valued in their interaction with you then when you’re feeling scared because it’s easier to connect when you’re confident. So people actually feel more valued. People who are confident tend to rise to the top! And so if it’s important to you to be very successful at whatever you’re doing by being more confident you’re more likely to get to where you want to go.
The seventh benefit of greater confidence is – this is funny, I wrote an article … and Kim this is the most popular article I’ve written on my website and I’ve published it a bunch of places. I originally wrote it for a website called YourTango.com which has a lot of sex and relationship stuff, but I was one of their experts – not on sex – on high performance (no I’m not speaking about performance in the bedroom). You can read that article here.
Kim: Oh my gosh, this is a PG podcast!
TC: I wasn’t writing as an expert on relationships, I was the journal’s expert on mastering fear and developing confidence.
Kim: Oh my!
TC: Actually it’s the most read article on my website which is really funny and the whole concept is that confidence is sexy! So when you increase your confidence you actually are more sexy to the opposite gender, or whatever gender you’re trying to attract.
Kim: Guys, keep your head and mind out of the gutter. We’re going on to number eight. [Laughing]
TC: Having more confidence reduces your negative thoughts, keeps you – as we talked about – more positive, by reducing your negative thoughts, it’s easier to be more positive and express your confidence.
The 9th benefit of enhancing your self-confidence is you experience more fearlessness and you experience less anxiety. That’s really important to most people I’ve worked with. They want to reduce their fears, they want to reduce their anxiety and they really want to have a sense of more fearlessness as long as it’s a rational level of fearlessness not a reckless level. Does that all work for you Kim?
Kim: It does!
TC: The tenth benefit of self-confidence is to have greater freedom from social anxiety. Social anxiety is the fear being with others and the fear of expressing yourself, the fear of being in crowds. I’m introverted and when you’re introverted and confident it’s easier to be in crowds even if it’s not your most natural place to be.
Benefit eleven is, more self-confidence increases your energy and motivation. It’s easier to take action when you’re confident than when you’re scared, pretty obvious.
And the last one, the twelfth benefit of increasing your self-confidence I really like! It is … confidence adds to your happiness, adds to your joy. If you think of the opposite as being anxious and nervous and fearful there’s no happiness in those states of being. So confident people are literally happier people.
Kim: So how do you summarize the benefits of being more self confident.
TC: I think the summary is that confident people are able to attain more of what’s important to them in life and they’re able to live a more satisfying life. Whether it’s being successful at work, or successful as a parent, or successful at whatever they do. Just feeling good about yourself. It’s just a happier more joyous life.
Kim: So give the audience a tip on how to build their self-confidence.
TC: So I want to share a tip that comes from a 16-year-old girl who is a stellar athlete that I’m working with. I just was excited to work with her because she’s a great kid. And at the end of a session recently she said one of the things that she had learned about confidence, this didn’t come from me, it actually came from her dad which I thought was really wise advice. Her dad said, “Just focus on one small thing at a time and get better at that one thing.” So she applies that into each practice. In her mind she’s only working on one thing in every practice and one thing in every competition and that’s a way to build confidence.
Kim: That is fantastic. If you would like to bring TC North in for one of his amazing keynotes or workshops please contact me, Kim Tracey through MaxwellJames.net. Thank you so much.
TC: You’re welcome Kim!
Please contact me if you’d like to discuss personal work with me to build your confidence and presence, you many email me here.
