Confidence is built - not born

Confidence isn’t what separates top sales performers — the willingness to act before you feel ready is.

While most sellers wait for certainty, elite professionals step into discomfort, lead bigger conversations, and grow into the role faster than their peers. In this episode, we unpack how real confidence is built — not through motivation, but through deliberate, repeated action.

You’ll learn how to expand your professional identity, operate with greater authority, and take control of higher-stakes opportunities even when self-doubt is present. We break down practical ways to strengthen executive presence, challenge buyer assumptions without damaging trust, run more decisive meetings, and replace perfectionism with conviction.

At the centre is a simple truth:

Confidence is earned through evidence — and evidence only comes from action.

If you want to sell larger deals, accelerate your career, and position yourself among the top performers in your field, this episode will show you how.

Follow the show for practical insights designed for sales professionals who intend to outperform, not participate.

Welcome to the podcast!

Chapters

• 0:00 Confidence Comes After Action
• 2:06 Comfort Zones And Career Stalls
• 4:06 Current Self Vs Future Professional Self
• 6:36 Practical Stretch Moves In Sales
• 9:36 Four Immediate Confidence Builders
• 17:06 Borrowing Belief And Using Frameworks

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:07

Most people believe that confidence comes before success, but what top salespeople learn very quickly is that in fact the opposite is true. So confidence is built through behavior, and it's long before you feel ready. So if you wait to feel confident before stepping forward in sales, you're basically waiting far too long. Now, what we're going to look at in this podcast is how you build confidence. Confidence is not something you're necessarily born with, probably most of us aren't, but it is a skill you can work on, like any other skill. So confidence isn't a personality trait, it's the result of taking action. It's about feeling fear, feeling discomfort, and then stepping through. And in fact, when we're starting to feel uncomfortable, that's a sign that we're getting close to the edge of our comfort zone. And if you listen to last week's podcast, I was talking about how sales careers stall. And one of the reasons that they stall is that we start feeling confident and we don't push ourselves anymore. And the reason for pushing out of your comfort zone is that once you start to push out, once you start to feel a bit of discomfort, you push through, you do something different, you ignore that fear and just carry on. Basically, your comfort zone gets much bigger. And this is how we build that confidence. This is how we become confident in pretty much any sales situation. And I know from my own experience, I started off like most people going into sales without very much confidence at all. I could imagine all sorts of questions I could be asked that I wouldn't know the answer to, and all sorts of ways I could mess up a meeting. So the important thing is to keep coming back and feeling that fear but carrying on. So what we're going to do in this podcast is to look at perhaps where you're at what right now, if you are feeling a lack of confidence about your sales abilities, and we're going to look at what you can do to learn to be confident essentially. So confidence is really present at the beginning of a career leap, it shows up after you survive what you once thought you couldn't handle. And this is really important because the more we challenge ourselves, the more we realise we can handle. And basically, how you see yourself drives your behavior much more than your emotions. So, in other words, if you're feeling fear, that's fine. But how do you see yourself in that situation? So, one of the questions that let's say lower-performing salespeople will tend to ask is, Do I feel ready? To which the answer is possibly no. Whereas top salespeople will ask the question, who do I need to become? And I hope you recognize the difference in that because that's a huge psychological shift. It's basically asking who they need to be to step up to that next level, and then we basically start becoming that person. So what I mean by that is that for every one of us selling and doing pretty much anything else, this is a much broader situation than just sales, but it's very pertinent to sales. We basically have two identities. We have our current self, who we are today, and that would be where our comfort zone is, and then we have our future professional self, in other words, the salesperson we want to be, maybe somebody we admire in sales who's very confident, very assured, can pretty much handle anything. And that can be our future professional self, aspiring to meet that level of competence. So where careers stall, which is what I spoke about last time, is where this the salesperson protects their current identity. In other words, they stay as they are, and that then immediately limits what you're able and capable of handling. As you move your career forward, you expand your current self and you be get closer and closer to that future professional self. So, what are examples of this? So, this isn't just a theoretical podcast. The idea of this is to give you um suggestions at least that you can look to implement. So, one thing would be to speak to executives, so people at a much more senior level than you are currently dealing with. This might be C-suite people, CEOs, COs, etc. It could involve challenging a buyer, it may be somebody who's demanding a discount or something else that isn't acceptable, and stepping up. Some salespeople I know will tend to fold as soon as something like that comes up because they're driven by a fear of losing the deal. So, again, this is all down to mindset and how you approach things. Another way of stepping up is to own the room. It's it's well known that was the old story goes that if you're at a funeral, most people would prefer to be in the casket than actually giving the um the speech. And stepping through that fear can also be very powerful. So own the room, step up, particularly if you're not somebody who likes public speaking. And leading a deal is another good one. So, as salespeople, we are leaders, and as we get more senior in our sales role, let's say, and this is certainly a part of expanding as a salesperson, our lead those leadership skills become stronger. We become much more of a leader in bringing the sale in. So these are just examples of how you can just try something different, and the sign that you are doing something beneficial is that you feel that discomfort, you feel that fear, you feel you're on the edge of your comfort zone and you're about to push through. So most hesitation that you feel is actually friction against the identity, it's fear of looking silly or somehow losing some status, or whatever you've attached to your identity, your ego. So your career expands the moment your self-image does. So the moment you start stretching forward, that's when your career will go with it. And this is where you begin to get noticed, you feel more confident, your your ability to close deals grows as well. So let's look at four things that you can do straight away. The first one is to act before you get, let's call it emotional position, uh permission. In other words, average salespeople will wait until the discomfort has um disappeared, whereas top salespeople will move while they're still feeling that discomfort. So they'll feel it but push through anyway. So what happens is you begin to learn that it's survivable if you push through, if you take action, if you do something that you're feeling either hesitant about or reluctant to do, pushing through that and doing it does recalibrate your nervous system. And a way of thinking about this is that confidence is often just familiarity in disguise. So, in other words, we feel confident when we're in situations that we're familiar with and we know that we can handle, and that's the vital part. So, how do you know you can handle it? It's kind of like swimming. We can all read a book about swimming, but can we swim? Certainly not. Uh, for many of us, there are challenges when we learn to swim, but we push through and eventually we learn to swim. And it's exactly the same in your professional career taking these steps. Now, the second thing you can do is to borrow belief. So the thing to remember here, particularly if you're early in your sales career, is that you don't need to be full of self-belief. That's not necessary, and probably the truth is for many of us, we don't have that self-belief anyway. There's imposter syndrome, there's feeling that we're going to get found out at some point, uh, that we don't really know what we're doing, all that kind of stuff. So, what you do need is enough borrowed belief just to step forward. So, where do you get that from? Well, there are various sources that hopefully you've got um access to. So, one of them is mentors. There might be somebody, it might be a sales manager or a more senior person who's willing to work with you, give you feedback, just help you to get on the right track. It might also be a case of going out with a colleague. I did this when I very my first time in sales, I would go out with a colleague who'd been doing the same work for um a couple of years, and I was just learning what they did. But one of the things I've always done in my career is to look at people who I regard as successful and just observe what they do. Look at the way they answer the telephone, for example, or the way they are with clients. How do they interact? How do they handle difficult conversations, all that kind of thing? So hopefully you have mentors around you that you can use. You may be lucky enough to have a manager who will give you mentoring, give you coaching, or you just again observe and watch how they handle situations and try implementing those techniques yourself. Proven frameworks are really helpful. So if you've had previous training and that you've been given frameworks that you can use, then always use those. They are very good starting out because they just give you points, they give you points of reference. Uh, you know that in theory at least this should work. So if something's going wrong, look at how you're applying the framework. And finally, you want to build that into repeatable processes. So, again, this might be in your when it comes to qualifying. So, your qualifying technique, what are the questions you're using? What are the key questions to allow you to identify people who are worth spending time with? It might be in running a meeting. How do you run the meeting with a client? What's the discovery phase? And if you don't know what that is, listen to some of the earlier podcasts or even uh take my online online course. So look at structures that you can use because they will initially they'll reduce the discomfort because they'll be familiar, and they give you things to fall back on. And as you get familiar with them, you you will start using them as second nature, and your confidence will um rise. So basically, uncertainty shrinks, confidence rises. The next thing to do is redefine fear. So, what how do what do I mean by that? So, what top sellers will tend to do, what top salespeople will tend to do, it's just essentially reframe the fear, it's just to look at it in a different way. So, not to see fear as a warning necessarily, but to see it as a signal of growth. I've spoken about how when we get to the edge of our comfort zone, there's always that discomfort. Discomfort fear, call it what you like, but it's a signal to us that we're about to stretch ourselves. And again, this doesn't just apply to sales, it could be anywhere. So, a way of thinking about this is if you're in a situation and you feel fearful about it, you feel discomfort, just think to yourself there's probably career expansion on the other side of this, and that's the motivation to push through. And remember that every time you push through, you expand your comfort zone. And the really good thing about it is once you've been doing this a little while and you start to look back, you realize how far you've come, how things that today are not a big issue for you were actually a really big deal, even just a month or two ago. And this just comes down to pushing through, using a system, learning each time, refining, and then carrying on. So another way of looking about looking at this is to think of fear, is often a map pointing towards your next professional level. So while you're feeling a little bit of discomfort and a little bit of fear from time to time, that's really healthy because it's telling you that you're continually expanding. And then the fourth thing is to just not get caught up in perfection. So I know some salespeople, and they're really reluctant to go into anything until they feel they're perfect at it. But the truth is, first of all, perfection is very rare. It's definitely overrated, it kills early confidence because no one's perfect in sales. We all make mistakes. Some of us are slicker than others, and that's just through doing it a lot of times. As I've said, we build up that confidence, we get those habits, we have those uh phrases, whatever is whatever it is we're using, that give us that um sense of comfort, I guess, when we're with a client, we feel confident there. But being perfect is definitely not part of that. The other thing to remind yourselves about is that buyers definitely trust clarity and conviction far more than polish. And the other thing that any buyer will connect to is you as a person. We buy from people. We want to buy from people, we don't want to buy from a machine, usually, certainly not in face-to-face sales. So if you're completely perfect, that can actually come across as a little bit intimidating to some clients. So if you make a mistake, it doesn't matter. And I can remember you know, several that I've made, and it was all fine. I never lost the deal because of it. Um, if I made a m made a mistake, I'd own up. You know, you're just another person at the end of it, you're just another person. So don't get hung up on perfectionism because what perfectionism means in reality, in the reality of the meeting, is that you're thinking about yourself. And the big secret, I guess, when you're with a client is to be thinking about them. So make sure your focus is on them. If you find yourself or if you catch yourself thinking about whether this was perfect or anything like that, that's a sign that you're now switching your focus back on yourself, and that's where we miss things. And this is another difference between top-performing salespeople and the kind of average salesperson. So, what can we do to make sure that this confidence building becomes a cycle? So there's a very simple sequence you can follow, and basically it's just take action, first of all, particularly when you're feeling nervous, you're feeling um unsure about things, take action. Recognize that you have survived, look at the evidence, which is that you've survived, you've not lost your job, you've not blown the deal. That will build self-trust, and that again encourages you to take action again, and this time it will be larger action. So it's taking action, recognizing that you survived. There's the evidence that you've survived, and then that will build self-trust and hopefully encourage you to take bigger action. And just repeat that. This is definitely a rinse and repeat. And this is how some salespeople look naturally very confident. There's nothing natural about it. What they've done is they've built these habits to construct this confidence, the way they the way they look to people. So the important thing to remember is that confidence is engineered through evidence. So when you've taken a step, and as I've said, as you if you survive, you haven't lost the deal, you move on. That's how you start to build up your confidence. So it's really important that you don't get hung up on any of these um these issues that I've spoken about. So what's the hidden career risk here? Because last time I spoke about stalled um careers. When you apply pressure, do it intelligently, but do it now. Because the longer you delay, the harder it gets. And you know what happens when we start to put off taking a difficult decision, we the old mind chatter starts going, and we start to really build up the fears subconsciously, so it becomes harder and harder the longer you leave it. So, what avoidance will do, it compounds self-doubt. And remember that your peers and maybe your competitors who aren't letting themselves be held back, they're expanding. So, what will happen is you'll begin to fall backwards, your abilities will be less and less compared to other people. So this is about maintaining momentum in your career, which I spoke about last time. But confidence, self-confidence, and momentum in career are really interwoven because the more confident you feel, the more willing you are to take on more advanced sales, more complex sales, deal with more senior people, all the kinds of things I was talking about last time. So, what it comes down to is that most confident problems are actually exposure problems. So the important thing is to just keep exposing yourself to these risks of this expansion as often as you can. Just get a hold of it and push forward. And even if you make that a thing to do for even a short period, to take one chance in a meeting or one a day, whatever works for you, but make sure you're implementing that and you're doing it. So just to round things up, you don't become confident and then take on bigger challenges. You take on bigger challenges and confidence will form around you. It will form around the person that you're becoming. And you're likely to have a lot of gulp moments where you're not quite sure if that was a good call or not. But it's really important that you have those because that they will definitely serve you as you move your um career forward. So act like the professional that you intend to become and do it long before it feels natural. And just one parting thought I will suggest here is other things to look at is how you dress, how you stand, how you walk. Because when you're looking at the person you want to be, and maybe there's a person you can visualize right now who seems to have attained what you want to attain, just look at it, look at how they do that, how do they dress? Um, I don't know the industry you're in, so there might be standards, there might not be, but look at things like dress, definitely how they stand. Um look into power poses, that kind of thing, and and walk confidently, walk with energy. Even doing those things can just boost your energy and make you feel a little bit more confident. So you don't have to strut into somebody's office to have a meeting, but do what you can just so that your your body language is positive, it's upright and it's powerful in a subtle way. So I hope you found that useful. And um next time we're going to look at seven skills that predict sales success. So that will be on Monday, and I hope to see you then. Bye for now.