In my experience entrepreneurs fall into one of two types. Either they are excellent (perhaps too good) at building their own self belief and confidence – or they are weak in this area – full of self doubts and expectations of disaster. \u00a0 Some communities are full of people with generally good levels of self belief and confidence. In others the opposite is the norm.\u00a0 In these communities the ability to build relationships with clients that enable them to improve their confidence and self belief is key.<\/p>\n
Many enterprise professionals act as if confidence and self belief are the same thing – interchangeable words and concepts – but to me there are important differences.\u00a0 Confidence is a temporary thing, transient, malleable in the short term.<\/p>\n
Self belief is a more fixed (but still developable) underlying trait or characteristic that may have been grooved for many years.\u00a0 It is our levels of self belief that dicate whether setbacks are seen as part of a consistent pattern of failure (low self belief; generally low confidence) or as just a temporary setback.<\/p>\n
Most entrepreneurs will experience a loss of confidence, but their generally high levels of self belief allow them to see this as just a temporary setback, a blip, a one off.\u00a0 Not something to dwell on or let define their expectations of the future or their own self image.<\/p>\n
Generally it is not too hard to identify people with low self belief.\u00a0 Their language is full of self doubt and negativity.\u00a0 “I doubt that this will work”, “I have got this idea – but I don’t think it is very good”.<\/p>\n
It is much harder to know what to do about it.\u00a0 There are no quick fixes.<\/p>\n
My first observation would be that most enterprise professionals have very little opportunity to do much work in this area because they do not have the time to build really powerful helping relationships with clients.\u00a0 The support that they offer is more transactional <\/strong><\/em>(think ‘inform, diagnose and broker’) than transformational <\/strong><\/em>(think ‘insight, develop and coach’).\u00a0 Their focus is on developing the business plan not the entrepreneur.<\/p>\n For those that do form more transformational relationships then working with both self belief (in the long term) and confidence (in the short term) are central to their effectiveness.\u00a0 So what sorts of things do they do?<\/p>\n I know many enterprise professionals choose to ignore this part of their role.\u00a0 They see it as being counselling or psychology rather than enterprise development.\u00a0 They prefer to focus on the ‘hard’ issues of business planning and finance. In doing so many of\u00a0 them compound issues of self belief and confidence as they have little or no belief in the clients ability to succeed or little conception of their role in helping to develop an enterprising psychology in their clients.<\/p>\n\n