By Savannah Grace Mathews
Having confidence in a professional setting is never easy. Many of us undergraduates strive to develop ourselves professionally before we graduate and enter the professional world. A few ways that students can practice being confident in a professional setting include, working on internships, joining clubs, and staying involved. These are all professional settings where we can practice displaying our confidence.
The importance of confidence
Having confidence in our work shows that we take our tasks seriously and that we know the quality of our work is good. Confidence is important because it helps to build trust at school and in the workplace. When we display confidence in our work and our abilities, our peers and superiors understand that we are ready and qualified for the tasks at hand. This creates meaningful horizontal relationships with our peers and vertical relationships with our superiors, supporting our growing confidence and encouraging us to take on new challenges.
How to build confidence
The best way to build confidence is to step outside your comfort zone and take on challenges because success helps us learn and grow as professionals. This is because stepping outside of your comfort zone either shows that you are capable of succeeding or that failure is acceptable if you are able to come back and keep going. Having confidence will help you to take on challenges in your career. This does not mean, however, that taking on challenges is a solo game and that asking for help will hinder your ability to gain confidence. As professionals, we need to be secure in our abilities so that we are comfortable enough to ask others for help. In the end, we are all striving to succeed, and your peers and superiors are more than willing to help you.
The most crucial, but also most difficult, part of building confidence is learning to accept and own up to your failures. In the professional world, we are bound to make mistakes, but we should be able to recover from them. This includes taking responsibility for your mistake, fixing the issue at hand, and most importantly learning from the situation. Building confidence is never easy but it is an essential process we need in order to grow as professionals.
Having too much confidence
While it is fundamental for a professional to carry themselves with confidence, having too much can be very harmful. When we have too much confidence, our ego gets too large and we will be unable to listen to critiques or new ideas. Our professional relationships may suffer, and we need to keep our confidence in check. In order to prevent this from happening, we must keep ourselves grounded by listening to others and keeping an open mind.
Confidence in our individual lives
There is no simple method to having confidence in the professional world, but having confidence in your daily life helps. Having confidence in our relationships, our hobbies, and our choices gives us a secure sense of self, which then bleeds over into our professional confidence. We must keep this in mind as we navigate through college and prepare ourselves for the professional world. Practice makes perfect, so implementing confidence wherever you can in your daily life will help your confidence grow.
Confidence is a large part of what makes many professionals successful because it is the reason our work is taken seriously and we are considered for exciting opportunities. We must take on challenges and step outside of our comfort zone as we get ready to leave college. Making mistakes, learning, and listening to critiques can all make us feel like failures, but these situations are crucial to building our confidence. Failure and success alike will help us become secure within ourselves and become confident people and professionals.
Happy Valley Comm 