What’s the importance of confidence? If you believe that “confidence breeds success,” feeling confident seems absolutely necessary to succeed, a prerequisite. Transposing those words, we could easily believe that “success breeds confidence.” After all, we value success and when someone achieves it, we expect them to feel confident. In fact, we assume others who succeed have confidence even as we experience self-doubt and insecurities despite our own achievements.
When do you feel most confident and most successful?
Cliché statements meant to inspire don’t capture which comes first, confidence or success. I would argue, as have others, that if you want to enjoy having both, you must first prepare and afterwards know how to attribute your success and your failures.
“One important key to success is self-confidence. An important key to self-confidence is preparation.” – Arthur Ashe
The recommendation to prepare appears obvious, but deserves more attention. While mentoring a recent beauty school graduate, we discussed how to launch her career in the beauty industry as a salon owner, something I would rarely recommend to a new licensee. In describing her feelings, she’d repeatedly express her “lack of confidence.” After listening to her concerns and answering her questions, it struck me that she didn’t lack confidence at all; she’s a very competent professional and respected leader in another industry. What she really lacked was preparation, not surprising given her limited experience in the beauty industry.
“Success depends upon previous preparation, and without such preparation there is sure to be failure.” – Confucius
Understanding what needs to be done and recognizing when you’ve done enough to more likely succeed than fail depend on your actions, not your feelings. The work that goes into planning, organizing and executing the launch of a business takes time, effort and research. Although her preparations had begun, she hadn’t made enough progress and decisions to move ahead. Her apprehension, both meanings – anxiety and understanding – apply in this case and made sense. She knew objectively that she wasn’t ready, and that manifested in her negative feelings.
“Confidence is preparation. Everything else is beyond your control.” – Richard Kline
When you achieve success, how do you explain it? Do you credit yourself, or not? Conversely, when you fail, do you blame yourself, or not? In social psychology, attribution theory proposes that individuals attribute their own behavior (or the behavior of others) according to two different dimensions, locus of causality and stability. Each dimension has two categories: locus of causality can be either internal (dispositional) or external (situational); and stability can be either stable (permanent/uncontrollable) or unstable (temporary/controllable).
“Luck is where opportunity meets preparation.” – Seneca
Consider the implications of assigning the following explanations:
Intelligence (internal/stable)
Effort (internal/unstable)
Luck (external/unstable)
Task Difficulty (external/stable)
What deserves the credit or blame? Someone who succeeds may credit themselves (intelligence or effort), or claim to benefit from good luck or an easy task. Someone who fails may blame themselves (intelligence or effort), or avoid responsibility by blaming bad luck or task difficulty.
An earlier version was published by Beauty Cast Network.