2024 Confidence Super Power

The #1 topic I received from my coaching clients and audiences in 2023 involved a simple yet complex topic: Confidence. Confidence walking into a room of strangers and turning them into friends, walking into a room of friends and turning them into clients... taking a stage for the first time, making small-talk for 3 hours at a ball game, starting a new business, taking on a new industry... the list is limitless. No matter how confident we are in some situations, there's always another setting, group, or circumstance that has us retreating into our shells.

Marketers the world over lick their lips at the prospect of selling you a new beauty product or health supplement that will give you confidence you never knew existed. Just ask these two guys (side note: nothing more awkward than when this Nugenix commercial comes on TV and Frank Thomas says "and guys... she'll like it to" and winks at the screen while my kids and I are just trying to watch the Sixers game.)

So aside from testosterone boosting pills and "age-defying" serums, how do we boost our confidence in 2024? Here's the super power I implore everyone to adopt, but I must warn you, with great power comes great responsibility.

The Confidence Super Power

Be your own #1 fan. As simple as it is to write, it's far more difficult to implement. I tell people all the time, I love myself. They laugh. I repeat.

"No, really. I absolutely love myself. I think I'm amazing. I'm an all-around great man. I am a caring, committed, and loyal husband and father. I work hard. I treat everyone I meet with respect as a matter of course - I don't have criteria for who I will and won't respect at first interaction. It's everyone, all the time. I genuinely enjoy life and love people. No one loves me more than me."

By the time I'm finished saying that, whomever I'm talking to has the same thought you probably have right now - wow, he sounds like kind of a sociopath. But bear with me.

It's this absolute faith and love for myself that allows me to be so kind to myself. While I think I'm great, I still screw-up... a lot! Here's where I see the first divergence in my "self-love" super power and others I work with. When I screw-up, I forgive myself almost immediately. I don't dwell on it and stew on it for weeks. I don't feel like a loser. I don't cry and wallow. I learn a lesson, vow to myself I'll improve my reaction, decision, word-choice... whatever my flaw was (usually word choice )... and I MOVE ON. I learn my lesson and I MOVE ON immediately.

[I know I still sound like a sociopath. I promise, I'm going somewhere with this.]

I've coached and mentored many professionals in 2023, and every one of them had issue with this "fuhgeddaboudit" mentality. Weeks after an L, they're still talking about it. Talking about how dumb they still feel, how angry they are with themselves, and how much it hurts. They wholesale write-off relationships or opportunities because of one rough interaction. They call themselves names that I haven't heard them call their greatest enemies. Why?

You made a mistake. Everyone makes them. We're all fallible creatures roaming around trying to thrive in a crazy world. Why would your response to your own shortcomings be harsher than your response to the shortcomings of people who don't live in your skin, think with your mind, stare back at you in the mirror every morning. Stop it.

Be kind to yourself. That's your super power for 2024 - learn your lesson, tell yourself you'll honestly try to do better next time, and forgive yourself. Immediately! The confidence you display to others is capped only by the love you have for yourself.

As with all super powers... with great power comes great responsibility. For this love-yourself confidence super power to be properly deployed and not devolve into sociopathic territory, we must respect the 2 major responsibilities of this super power:

Responsibility 1: Analyze, Analyze, Analyze

The secret to moving-on from your blunders and transgressions is to first know when you've made them. I analyze everything. From a simple order at a coffee shop (that I somehow fumbled over for 2 minutes and walked away from the GenZ baristas feeling like I was 100 years old), to the board meeting that I prepared for weeks. Some people shy away from analyzing their interactions in fear of what that collective data would do to their confidence, but in my experience, it's this repetitive self-analysis coupled with the "learn and move-on immediately" approach that creates a perfect confidence-boosting balance.

As a part of your constant interaction analysis, you'll want to ask yourself 2 questions:

1. What can I do to make that situation better next time?

Is it preparing your coffee order in your mind before walking up to the counter? Is it saying "hey, great to see you" when you meet someone new at a party, rather than "nice to meet you"... in case you've met them before? Is it making sure you keep a hand free next time you enter the elevator, so you can hold the door for your boss rather than lock eyes with her while the doors shut in her face?

Be honest with yourself about where you've fallen short, and put a quick action in-place to improve for next time. Got it? OK cool. Your job is done. MOVE ON.

2. Does this screw-up require amends?

Keyword: require. Determining which wrongs to right will be a tailored approach for each of us, and unfortunately, it's a comfort level we'll all need to manage for ourselves. But in your interaction analysis, you'll want to focus on if apologies, compensation, or "let me make this right" action steps should be taken. More often, an honest and authentic "I'm so sorry about that" will suffice, while other times you'll need think creatively about how to fix the situation. Lastly, sometimes there's nothing you can do to fix it. You just have to live with the consequences of your mistake.

Caveat: For purposes of this article, I'm referring only to mistakes with minimal consequences. If you've truly hurt someone, I'm not encouraging you to "move on" right away. Obviously, I'd encourage you to rectify that situation however long it takes.

Responsibility 2: Be quick to forgive others

I'm probably invoking some of my Catholic upbringing with this one, but forgiveness is another important responsibility to properly deploy your confidence super power. If you are so quick to forgive yourself under the pretense that you're a good person whose fallibility is a law of nature... why wouldn't that same principle apply to everyone else?

With the amount of people I meet on a weekly basis, you can bet a mortgage payment that at least one of these people will say something to me that they'll later regret. Recently, I met a guy who jokingly alluded to my (lack of) height as a reason why my son shouldn't pursue basketball as a profession. Now, I'm under no delusions as to the amount of people in this world who truly wish harm to others, or in less extreme cases, seek to put others down in an attempt to lift themselves up. I have plenty of strategies for dealing with these people.

In this case, we were all joking about how serious youth sports have become. The gentleman who said this was the same height as me, and we had created a ribbing vibe within the conversation circle. So for all of those reasons, I quickly concluded that he was just trying to joke around and didn't mean anything by it. I could see in his face afterward, however, that he maybe wished his joke filter picked that one up before delivering it to his vocal cords.

People say and do dumb things all the time, just like me. And just like me, I forgive you and I've moved on. I know you're all trying to do better, as am I.

So, here's my promise - if you let me quickly forgive myself and move on, know that I too have already forgiven you and moved on.

Afterall, it's the second responsibility of my confidence super power.

I truly love all of you and can't thank you enough for continuing to engage with my newsletter. I hope these articles are as inspiring for you to read as they are cathartic for me to write.

As we head into 2024, I hope this Confidence Super Power gives you a framework for boosting your confidence in the new year

About the Author

Sean is the author of That Was Awkward: 7 Secrets of an Awkward Networker and the founder of Awkward Networker, a professional development website focused on encouraging and mentoring networkers by providing his tips and techniques to avoid the natural awkwardness of networking. Sean created Awkward Networker as a platform to teach others the fast track to networking and professional success.