Training The skill of self confidence in a Startup Context

Training the skill of self confidence: I am delighted to write about this post on training self belief in a startup. We talk a lot about internal factors to influence success. One among these thoughts is the skill of self confidence.I like this talk not because it romanticizes confidence and makes it easy. It is simple and truthful to understand that circumstances make us stretch. One of the skills which help us get to our goals is the skill of self belief.

We can say a hundred things, but if we don’t believe in ourselves, all the talent, training and learning is absolutely useless. Without much further ado, I would now like to present below the lovely talk from Ivan Joseph.

I don’t need to repeat the stuff highlighted in this video, but would like to talk about the key takeaways from this talk. You might recall that we talked about building self confidence in detail in this article – here

Why is it hard to have Self Confidence as an entrepreneur

Most of my experiences have been tailored towards small companies and startups. Naturally in this stream, I tend to meet people who are absolutely sure of their approach and the solution they want to provide to end customers.

Although most founders appear fairly confident in their presentations, I often notice how hard it is to sustain this skill of self confidence on a consistent basis.

I will take a little bit of inspiration from a lovely quote on confidence:

The natural causes of self doubt in a startup are:

• We don’t know how our idea will be received or validated by end customers
• Investors do ask some hard questions about markets, customers, most of which we don’t have an immediate answer for
• The network of entrepreneurs shows such great ideas and we don’t know how to match our idea w.r.t to theirs.

I can go on to name lots more reasons as to why it is hard to retain confidence in such scenarios.

How to be Training the Skill of Self Confidence

The reason I chose to write about the ted talk is its emphasis on self confidence as a skill. None of us are really born with all the skills needed. We learn the necessary skills with time – sometimes consciously and a lot of times through experiences. Not everything is a conscious choice, but something that happens through a process.

Naturally when we start something afresh/new, it is hard to be supremely confident about it. This is particularly true if your idea is shot down by a few people in the name of ‘Investors’, ‘Mentors’ or any other labels your network presents. But yes, they do offer a certain threat and fairly right level of questions for your startup idea.

How to Build Self Belief as a founder?

So, what can we do to keep this skill of self confidence in a constant check? How do we ensure we are on top of this?

1. Preparation: This sounds awfully simple. But the more I prepared, the easier it got. I am not going to tell a lie and say that people were kinder. It still hurt like hell, but possibly with the number of repetitions, I started caring less about it.
2. Values: It is important to know why we are doing the things we do. Yes, money is an answer, but it is almost always a secondary one. Startups are about the vision, mission and plans. We just need to be completely convinced about the idea and approach to make it work.
3. External Motivation: This might sound silly, but most times, I could find that the network I am with influences my thought processes. So, I had to consciously choose the positive people who actually believe in boosting the idea further. It doesn’t mean that we want to sit with people who blindly believe in us, but with the ones who nudge us in a positive, constructive direction.
4. A pinch of salt: No one ever takes the journey you do. Everything we listen, hear is an opinion. None of these influences the reality out there to a bullish extent. We need to temper the feedback as it comes in. Obviously a startup cannot have all answers right at the start. It is about figuring it out in the process.
5. Being Honest: Lets try and be honest with ourselves. This doesn’t mean us being excruciatingly hard. We are talking about the skill of self confidence. We have to nurture and build it by accepting our limitations and working on where we want to go.

To encapsulate the above, I found a nice image on Pixabay which touches upon the factors we talked about there:

Everything I have talked above sounds very basic, but is extremely true. If we are not consciously pushing ourselves in the right direction, it is very easy to attract self pity. The startup world is certainly cruel.

It doesn’t provide a lot of options for failure. It does ask for a huge amount of self confidence and belief. If we are not training the skill of self confidence, then we certainly are exposing ourselves to a wide vulnerability.