Because he’s the biggest, fastest, prettiest, hardest working animal in the jungle? No! So why is he the king and on top? Because he’s the most confident! What I have discovered is that this truth in the jungle is also true in the financial, business, and cultural jungles in which we live.

I love leadership, and I love history, and one of my favorite people to read about is Harry Truman, who becomes a greater president in the eyes of many the longer he is gone. During his bid for the presidency in 1948, no one gave him a shot to win against challenger Thomas Dewey. During the campaign, Truman asked a man in the crowd how he intended to vote. “Mr. Truman,” the man said, “I wouldn’t vote for you if yours were the only name on the ballot.” Truman turned to an aide and said, “Put him down as doubtful.”[1]

Confidence is one of your most valuable assets, and more is always better. Confidence breeds successful leaders. Confident leaders possess more:

• Happiness! More Money!
• Creative Ideas! More Solutions to Problems!
• Success! More Power!
• Relationships! More Fun!

There are nearly seven billion people in the world. Young and old. Rich and poor. They come from different walks of life. They come from different nationalities, cultures, and languages. But they all have one need in common—CONFIDENCE. They need the confidence that can empower them to live life at its fullest.

Leadership Coaching Key:

Successful people do habitually what unsuccessful people occasionally.

Everybody wants to have more confidence, more success, more money, and more fun. Right? It is not really “super hard” to obtain these things. If you buy into the myth that gaining more confidence is hard, you will not even try to obtain it. Obtaining more confidence, success, money, and fun is not a matter of working harder, it is a matter of creating the right success habits. What becomes a habit will become easy in time.

The success of your future is hidden in your daily habits. You do not determine your future; you determine your daily habits. Your daily habits ultimately determine your future.

What Is a Habit?

A habit is an unconscious behavior requiring no effort. A habit is something that you do every day that becomes easy. You don’t even have to think about it—it’s something you do automatically. Let me illustrate. You have developed a daily habit of brushing your teeth. This daily habit has produced a mouth full of healthy, sparkling white teeth. Your daily habit of brushing your teeth produced the future condition of the health of your teeth. Some people have not developed this daily habit. Therefore, they will most likely lose most of their teeth before they die.

The outcome of every bad habit usually does not show up until later in life. You can trace every failure in your life to a bad habit that you permitted to occur daily in your past—in your mind, actions, home, or life. You see, your daily habits determine the quality of your lifestyle for the future.

Every Olympic champion knows the results of good daily habits. Good daily habits not only sharpen a champion’s mind and body but they also produce a great side effect—confidence. The Olympic champion knows what his or her body will do when it is called upon to perform. The motivational speaker knows that they are communicating effectively when they approach the podium. They have confidence in what they can do because of their daily habits.

Leadership Coaching Key:

Confident people have confidence-producing habits.

Successful people have successful habits. Confident people have developed confident habits. Successful people do daily what unsuccessful people do occasionally. Developing new habits will take some time. Some people say that it takes a minimum of twenty-one days to create a new habit. For the next twenty-one days, I want you to work on projecting an “I am confident” attitude. The person who has developed good daily habits is confident that good things will happen to them instead of bad.

What Confidence Cannot Do for You

1. Your confidence cannot make up for a lack of competence. Some people confuse competence, which is a function of skill, with confidence, which is a function of attitude and beliefs.
2. Your confidence cannot make up for a lack of experience.

My confidence comes from my age and experience. It is natural as a young person to lack self-confidence, but as we grow older, we realize that we may not care so much about how others view us and that we should be willing to trust our own judgment day-to-day. Experience in performing our jobs clearly increases our confidence level.

—Sandra Day O’Connor, U.S. Supreme Court Justice

Confidence Coaching Solution:

Long-term experience births confidence.

3. Your confidence cannot change the facts. If you are six feet eight inches tall, no matter how badly you may want to be a professional horse jockey or how confident you are, if you can’t even ride a horse beyond a gallop and your stature is too large to be a successful jockey, this is the wrong career choice for you. Now if you change your mind and have a talent and desire to be an NBA guard—that career choice is a real possibility.

If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude. Don’t complain.

—Maya Angelou

4. “Your confidence cannot replace personal development. A time comes when you need to stop waiting for the man you want to become and start being the man you want to be.”—Bruce Springsteen
5. Your Confidence will not stay on High automatically.