Everyone talks about confidence an awful lot. Confidence really is just your degree of certainty about an outcome or about how you’ll behave or feel in a given situation – it’s your degree of certainty.

It’s useful to look at confidence on the following four levels:

1. What You Know You Can’t Do

It’s possible that you might not set a big enough goal because you may have too many doubts. You might think you’ll never get there, or you don’t want the disappointment if it doesn’t work out. But if you don’t set a big enough goal, it won’t be attractive enough to pursue. Setting a big enough goal is covered later.

So, the bottom level is “What you know you can’t do.” Essentially, 99% of the things you say you can’t do are the things you won’t do. You could do them, but you won’t, and you won’t do them usually because of some fear, some limiting belief or some imagined consequence. These can be valid reasons to you at the moment; I’m not looking to dismiss your fear. The important point to grasp is usually it isn’t that you can’t do things it is that you won’t do them because of …

2. What You Think Might Go Wrong

What you think might happen is the next level. This is an interesting one because with this one, you’ve got to be careful. People think about their goals and hope for success. However, they go through their daily life expecting failure, they expect the other person not to be interested when they go to a meeting, they expect it not to go that well, and expectations have a huge bearing on how things actually turn out.

3. When You Expect a Good Outcome

This next level is the first of two that I call the “manifesting” levels. When you expect a good outcome – your expectation is so important. This is the point at which you grow. Let’s say two people go into the same sales presentation or meeting; one has an expectation of it going well, the other has an expectation of it going badly. They could say exactly the same things, but the chances are that the optimistic one will get the deal. If you’ve got an expectation that things will go well, you’re going to be enthusiastic, and that enthusiasm is contagious. If you’re enthusiastic, other people will get enthusiastic and wonder what it’s all about. Genuine enthusiasm can’t be faked, and that’s why you’ve got to be passionate about what you’re doing, you’ve got to believe in what you’re doing if you want to maximize it. You’ve got to believe in it because otherwise there’s always going to be something holding you back.

Often, when I ask successful sales people about their strategies for selling they will say to me, “I’m actually no good at selling, but I just love this product.”

When you really love something and you’re passionate about it, that enthusiasm is contagious, and that’s why expectation is important. Even if they say “No”, one of your main thoughts is likely to be, “I can’t believe they couldn’t see the good in it, what is the matter with them?” Or “They obviously don’t care enough about their business or lives, otherwise they’d have gone with this!”

A lot of people in a situation where a sale doesn’t happen would say, “What’s the matter with me? Why didn’t they like me? Why didn’t they like what I was selling? I’ve obviously done it wrong, there’s no point me being in this game.” But if you’ve got the expectation of a good outcome and that enthusiasm because you’re passionate about what you do, it changes everything. If you don’t totally believe in or have the enthusiasm for what you do, you’ve got to ask yourself why, find out why, and go and get those things resolved. Get those things worked out, because they are holding you back.

4. What You Know You Can Do

At the very top level – this is where you have the most confidence, because you know what you can do.

Summary

Level 3 is the powerful level because this is where you’re growing in your level of success. Although you don’t know 100% that it’s going to go well, you’ve got an expectation of a good outcome, not a guarantee. So Level 3 is the power level because this is where you’re growing. If you’re not at this level, you’re going to risk stopping at level 4, constantly doing what you already know you can do, which is the same thing, same results. Growth comes with a level of the unknown, dropping back a level or more on the confidence tree, gaining new skills and moving each new skill up into what you know you can do raises your level of success and your options for the future.