Which Do You Need More Of Confidence Or Competence?

Confidence and Competence go hand in hand.

Have you ever felt that in order for you to succeed in your life and in your business all you needed was to feel confident?

I have. And so have many of my clients.

Yet, for myself and my clients, often what we needed in addition to confidence was competence.

Confidence is definitely a skill you can learn to excel at. And so is competence.

Having confidence is a feeling or a belief that you can rely on and trust yourself or someone/something else.

Competence means having the ability to do something successfully or efficiently.

Why it’s important to have both confidence and competence.

Being a small business owner in any way, shape or form is challenging. There are lots of moving pieces and lots of things to consider.

There is a saying “you don’t know what you don’t know.” Sometimes you can have confidence doing something because you don’t know all that could go wrong with it.

And sometimes you can have competence because you know what will go wrong and can put the necessary pieces in place to successfully reach your end result.

It’s important to have both. They go hand in hand. Confidence and competence are best friends. And we need them both because in being, doing and having what we want we always have to take an action.

Getting to where we want to go.

In business and in life we are constantly doing things to get to where we want to be. Sometimes we are also not doing things (but that’s still doing an action).

When my clients come to a session telling me that they “just need to be more confident” my first question is: more confident about what?

This is where they usually say something about being a better networker or closing more sales or writing copy. They may also say being more assertive, standing up for themselves, or saying no.

Can you see that the first examples are connected to having to do something? And the second are connected to being a certain way?

Do you see that in both instances you can learn to do and be what it is that is wanted?

What about the correlation between confidence and competence. Technically, in both you need competence first and then confidence. That said, for being a better networker you can attain skills that will help you. Having those skills will lead to you “do networking” better and “be confident” because you now know what to do and will feel good about it.

And that more than likely will lead to you actually doing it rather than procrastinating.

In the being more assertive, you still need skills and once you have those, you’ll feel more confident.

I argue that while they do both go hand in hand, that it’s actually competence that is the leader because when you know how to do something, confidence follows.

Do you agree? I’d love to hear your side of this in the comments below. It’s an important topic for business owners, especially women business owners.

Want help with your own confidence and competence?

I offer a free 30 minute Design Your Success with Purpose session. I work with business owners to elevate themselves in order to excel at organizing their thoughts, to-dos and things to accomplish what they set out to do with great confidence and competence. Take a moment to schedule your free 30 minute session now. You’ll walk away with specific ways to increase your confidence and competence immediately.