Your lack of confidence is affecting your career and work life by sabotaging the action-taking that could make you a raging success.

Tired of feeling not-good-enough? Waiting for the confidence, clarity, and courage to make that next move in your career?

Then get ready to be stuck, again.

You can’t wait to feel clear, confident, or courageous enough. You will only feel those things by taking the action, moving through the fears, and taking those next steps. The confidence builds as a result of the action-taking. You have to learn how to move with those feelings of lack inside of you.

How a Lack of Confidence Affects Your Work Life

A lack of confidence reflects a lack of ability to take action with the feeling of fear inside you. This will result in big problems like:

• Feeling stuck
• Procrastination
• Being paralyzed by inner critic thoughts
• Lack of motivation
• Disappointing social relationships
• Fatigue

As soon as you’re stuck again, fear wins. And you’re sitting in that pit of unworthiness or perfectionism wondering how to get out. This is a mindset game.

Start paying attention to habitual thoughts, recognize their limitations, and then with that awareness, choose to take action through and with them and their accompanying feelings. You can’t afford to stay stuck anymore. It’s killing your career!

How a Lack of Confidence Affects Your Career

When you’re trying to build a successful career and find yourself sitting around feeling bad about yourself, comparing yourself to others, or stuck in imposter syndrome or perfectionism, your career takes a swift backseat, and those fears start to negatively impact your progress. You may start to notice that you are:

• Not meeting deadlines or goals
• Not creating that big vision
• Not able to come up with creative ideas
• Always feeling like you’re behind
• Feeling offended by constructive criticism

Mastering your mindset to align with the vision and then creating goals that get you there will require you to look confidence square in the eye and take charge. Your career depends on your ability to heal an old wound (low self-esteem) inside of you that keeps you small, quiet, and second-guessing your abilities. The practice of developing confidence includes building your self-esteem, changing your thought patterns, and then taking aligned action based on your goals and vision.

The Connection of Low Self-Esteem to Lack of Confidence

There are so many reasons many of us battle with low self-esteem, which can lead to a lack of confidence. From a moment in childhood to a moment with a boss that left us feeling less-than, the pattern of thoughts is the wake we’re left drowning in. We default to our faults and weaknesses most times because those have the heaviest emotional baggage and triggers.

But what if we could change those patterns and train the brain to focus on our strengths and positive attributes? The intentional awareness and re-focus of our thoughts to the good stuff is how we start building self-esteem and confidence.

It’s important to realize that your lack of self-esteem and self-confidence could be costing you money as well. ( https://www.nbcnews.com/better/business/how-negotiate-higher-salary-according-professional-poker-player-ncna784501 ) If you’re not staying in the game, standing up for yourself, and asking for what you want or need, your income level will suffer. Being able to negotiate things like a promotion or a salary increase require you to practice understanding the needs of your boss and the company, and speaking up about how you can meet those needs. It requires you to believe in yourself, and then take action for what you want.

You’ll start by changing your thought patterns. And then you’ll finish by taking action with those more-positive and aligned thoughts.

How to Change Your Thought Patterns

Being able to take action through your limiting beliefs and fears requires a new level of thought awareness. This is the foundation of being able to feel that lack of confidence and do it anyway. If you want to change your response to life, including those moments at work, you’ll have to change the way you think about almost everything.

Understand; the way you think about almost everything is based on old, outdated, unhelpful beliefs you were taught by someone else. The first step is awareness. Some tools that will help you build and master that awareness include meditation, breathwork, and journaling. You can’t change what you don’t know is there. You’ll have to uncover exactly what those thoughts and beliefs are first. Then you’ll be able to deal with them more effectively.

“You can’t clean the house if you don’t first see the dirt.” Louise Hay

The other very important thing here is to understand what your goals are. The big vision, goals and desires are important because if you don’t know what you want, you won’t be able to create the strategy to get there, confident or not. The action-taking will end up feeling like throwing spaghetti at the wall to see if some sticks.

Take a few moments to think about and write down what your dreams, goals, desires, and big vision are for your life and work. The practice of thought awareness, fear-busting, and action-taking will serve you so much more when you’re aligned with those positive, purposeful thoughts; vibrations of energy that create your future.

Speaking of energy, it’s best to learn a little bit about the powerful topic of neuroplasticity, so you understand just what you’re doing with this practice. Rewiring the brain is not only possible, it’s a game-changer in terms of building confidence.

Rewire Your Brain for Success

If you hadn’t noticed, neuroplasticity ( https://www.gaia.com/article/joe-dispenzas-rewired-using-neuroplasticity-to-heal-the-body ) is a hot topic, and there’s a reason for that. The tools we have at our disposal to help rewire old thought patterns, including old, conditioned, limiting beliefs from childhood, are plentiful and more well-understood. We can re-train our brains to think better and rewire them for success. This process is highly effective and will help you build the confidence you’re craving. And like anything worth doing, it will take your consistent practice to master.

To rewire the brain, you’ll have to adopt a new habit of thinking, believing, and then speaking and acting in a way that’s different than your old you. Being that new you, including speaking up and voicing your opinions will be part of it. Speaking your new, aligned thoughts out loud is one of the most effective action-taking tools for confidence building there is. And sometimes it’s also the most difficult due to old triggers and conditioned beliefs about the consequences.

Speaking Up to Build Confidence

One of the practices you’ll have to adopt (the most effective action-taking strategy to build confidence) is speaking up. You were born, so you’re worthy. Your voice, message, opinion, and ideas matter. If you’re waiting for the confidence to speak up at work, with your colleagues, your boss, your friends, family, whatever, you’ll be waiting forever. This is going to take some practice. You’ll have to get used to feeling the fear and speaking up with that feeling in your body. You may have to speak while your body shakes at first. It does get better as you go.

The more you speak, in the name of your own big vision, goals, and desires, the closer you’ll get (and faster you’ll get there) to being the raging success you’re dreaming of. The mistakes and failures along the way are only stepping stones. Have the confidence to fail more and better. Reframe those mistakes and failures so that the new, more helpful, healthy, limitless beliefs drive the bus and take you on the journey to where you want to be. Recognize that the thing inside of you reacting, is the old you, and reacting from very old, conditioned thoughts.

The words you speak are affirmations. They matter and are powerful tools to create what you want to happen. You might ask yourself what kinds of words you’re speaking, to yourself in your mind, and out loud to others. It’s these thoughts, beliefs, words, and ideas that will shape your future success.

Confidence As a practice

“You’re worthy because you think you’re worthy.” Dr. Wayne Dyer

Everything mentioned above is a practice, a way of being in your everyday moments that is who you are. Who are you today? With the awareness, you get a choice. You are what you think, say, and be in the world. A lack of confidence is only a matter of shifting what you choose to think, feel, and say. If you take responsibility for these things, you will experience the freedom of being able to create the raging success you dream about in any area of your life.

Knowing these things and how they can affect your career and your work-life, what steps are you going to take to minimise these negative effects?