Why You Need More Than Confidence If You Want To Be Truly Successful

Confidence is the assuredness you have in your abilities to perform a task successfully. Confidence helps you win competitions, master new skills or become a company big shot. Confidence is a great ability to develop or to have but it is one dimensional and not too versatile. Confidence can lead to comfort once a skill has been mastered. It’s certainly got most people to where they need to be and what they want to achieve but confidence has a close relative that most people have not met. This relative is the other dimension of confidence that many people overlook because they are comfortable with their level of confidence, but they are mistaken because the highly successful people use this component to add a dimension to their confidence. Competence just doesn’t sound that sexy or powerful as confidence but competence can separate two equally confident people.

Competence is the ability to be able to adjust or handle the unknown unlike the comfort confidently in performing routine task that you have mastered. Let’s just say that you think you are a great driver with all your years of driving experience you travel by car to your routine destinations and you know how to handle the roads well and are very confident navigating to the point of where it is completely automatic so you are totally confident as a driver on this route. One night however you are driving home at night as a deer runs out in front of you and the situation throws you for a loop almost colliding with the animal or swerving off the road to avoid it. This is where competence comes in, meaning that you have to be able react to a unknown situation and be able to be handle a curve ball at any time. The point is just being a good driver is not enough, you need to be competent to operate outside the box for your confidence when a known situation changes. I was once involved as a trainer for consumer outdoor power products training retail sales personnel around the country. There were four trainers that were responsible for a specific product line but were initially trained to teach on all power products. The trainees would rotate to each area and trainer for their education and then move onto the next. I was assigned lawnmowers line and got so good that I could do it blindfolded and was really comfortable and confident and it became second nature. Although one day I was asked to take over and teach another product line and was thrown for a loop because I was not versed with other power products as was suggested that I learned early on the result being that I was not truly competent to take over teach that product line. Form that particular instance I learned a lesson of great importance and that was to be able to step out of a comfort zone even though I mastered one area well and to not be afraid to learn a new skill for overall growth.

I’m sure that you get the picture by now and have probably can think of or have had experiences where you had an opportunity to advance your skills but did not because you were confident but not competent. So as you can see there is good reason to be able to not only being confident in your actions, but also being able to be competent in handling impromptu situations to be truly successful