Increase Confidence in Your Skills and Abilities
If you have confidence in your skills and abilities, you will be more motivated and ambitious to take challenging assignments at work. The level of confidence you have in your skills will determine how anxious and fearful you will be when taking work-related actions.
You will perform better and become more productive if you are confident that you have the right skills and abilities for your work. Here are some things you can do to boost your confidence in your skills and abilities.
Undertake professional development training
Training will boost your knowledge and equip you with the right skills to carry out your work. Identify the areas where you have a skills deficit and seek training in those areas. You can also learn new skills so that you can undertake more assignments at work or work better at what you do.
Challenge yourself
Do not accept assignments that are only within your comfort zone. Be open to accept even those that will challenge you and require you to learn new ways of doing things or new skills. As long as the assignment is not technical, accept it and use it as a learning experience.
Be honest about your skills and abilities
Avoid overstating your skills and abilities to look like you are more competent than you are. If you do this, you may be assigned tasks that are beyond your ability. If you fail to deliver the desired results, your supervisor may lose confidence in you and become hesitant to give you challenging assignments. Be truthful about your level of skills, and request for opportunities to better them.
Identify and emulate role models
Whatever you are involved in there will always be someone better at it than you. Identify such people, observe how they do it, and try to copy or improve it. If you let them know they are your role models, they may offer to nurture you to get better at your skills and abilities.
Set your professional development and training goals
Have a vision of the skills and abilities you want to acquire and set a plan of how and when you will get them. You can acquire skills and abilities through formal training or through informal training where you learn them on the job.
Accepting assignments that involve using the skills that you do not have, and working with people who use these skills is one way of acquiring them. As you set your goals, have in mind what you want to achieve in the short-term and the long-term.
Identify and focus on your strong areas
It may be easier to improve on your strengths than working on your weaknesses. Identify your strengths and work towards shining in them so that they can help you mask your weaknesses.
Be assertive
As you work on improving your confidence in your skills and abilities, do fall into the trap of self-sabotage by talking negatively about yourself. Also, even when others voice their negative thoughts about your skills and abilities, remain positive and let them know you know your strengths and are working on improving on them. Do not let them bring you down and make you feel worthless.
Work on your appearance
You may have to improve your appearance to look more professional. Your appearance may touch on your wardrobe as well as how you present your work to your bosses. When you adopt a professional look, you will feel more confident and you will also be taken more seriously by your colleagues.
Learn from your mistakes
As you work to better yourself, you will make mistakes along the way. Learn from those mistakes so that you avoid repeating the same mistakes. You may get into a collision path with your bosses and colleagues if the same mistakes keep resurfacing in your work.
Besides, learning from your mistakes helps you to reduce errors, boosting your confidence in your skills and abilities.