And if you don’t have that feeling, I have good news: Self-confidence is something you can develop.

And even better news: with a few tricks you can use to ‘turn it on’ when you need it. 

1. Turn on confidence with posture

Your posture is a powerful way to change your inner state because there’s a feedback loop between your body and your mind. Our non-verbal communication influences us. Social Psychologist Amy Cuddy has researched the benefits of “power poses”, like the wonder woman pose (hands on hips, feet spread wide) and the victory pose (fists pumped in the air in a V).

She found that standing in a power pose for just 2 minutes led to a 20% increase in testosterone (‘confidence hormone’) and a 25% decrease in cortisol (stress hormone). That’s an incredible difference.

I use power poses before competing in Karate tournaments. They help give me a confidence boost and have helped me become a National Champion.

It’s super helpful to use a power pose any time you’re doing something that is a bit outside your comfort zone and gives yourself that little boost in self-confidence. Even small adjustments to posture can boost your confidence. For example, when you slouch, you compress the space for your lungs, reducing their capacity, so sitting up straight can help your brain function better and lead to more confidence.

2. Look how far you’ve come!

My second tip is to reflect on what you have already achieved in your direct sales business and personal life. You can leverage your past wins to fuel future success by revisiting your success stories.

By focusing on how far you’ve already come, you can build an upward spiral of confidence instead of focusing on how far you still have to go.

Reading your list is a quick way of feeling more confident before doing something difficult, but you can also use this tip to build skills quickly.

Build Skills by Looking at Your Achievements

When I first started recording video content a few years ago, I would write down each achievement along the way, like remembering to look at the camera or getting through a video without saying “Uhm”. This helped boost my confidence, and it helped me improve quickly.

I could have done the opposite. I could have focused on all things I wanted to improve and dwelled on mistakes. But that would have eaten away at my confidence, made me feel bad, and generally turned the experience into something frustrating. That would have hindered my progress!

This leads to my third tip!

3. What are you telling yourself?

It’s essential to become aware of your self-talk. Sometimes our inner critic can be more harmful than helpful, and our self-talk can become very negative.

Negative self-talk is an inner dialogue you have with yourself and your abilities, and it can dramatically impact your confidence.

The first step to change your negative self-talk to more positive is to notice it and rephrase it to something more helpful.

“I find adding the word “yet” to the end of a negative statement is powerful. So when I find something difficult, instead of leaving the thought in my head of “I can’t do this”, I change it to “I can’t do this yet.”

This was very helpful when I recovered from a series of strokes three years ago. Instead of thinking “I can’t even walk 100 meters”, I’d think, “I can’t walk 100 meters yet“, and instead of feeling hopeless from the first statement, I felt determined to keep going. The ‘yet’ implied that I would get there eventually. 

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