Where Does Your Confidence Come From?

In many ways leadership is about fulfilling your own potential and getting others to follow along with your ideas, now you can’t fulfill your potential unless you have confidence in your own abilities and that’s what I’m going to be speaking about here. Women are somehow holding themselves back, not necessarily because of the environment, not necessarily because of their genetics, but because of things they can control that affect their own confidence. If you don’t believe in your abilities; that is confidence – how can you expect other people to believe in your abilities? And if you aren’t confident, don’t act confidently, don’t speak confidently other people aren’t going to follow along with you.

My confidence doesn’t come from my genes. My confidence is clearly not genetic, I did a genetic test during the course of this book. I actually came up with the short end of stick when it came to confidence genes. So the confidence that I have, I’ve built. That’s what’s critical for women to realize that our confidence really is in our DNA, it’s what we’re born with. There really are people out there who are just born more confident than other people. For the vast majority of us confidence is a choice. It’s what we do during the course of our lives – it comes from doing hard things, taking on challenges, risking and failing going outside our comfort zones and every time you do something like that you build a little bit of confidence. I am a pretty confident woman even though my genetics wouldn’t say so and it’s because I’ve built my own confidence.