A Confidence Cheat Code for Building Your Personal Brand (8 Tips)

If success depends on the confidence you bring to your personal brand, how can you show up with confidence online and in person even when you don’t feel it?

In the book, The Confidence Code by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, the journalists say: 

“Perhaps most striking of all, we found that success correlates more closely with confidence than it does with competence.”

It’s one thing to understand the importance of confidence in building your personal brand. It’s another to actually overcome the fear of showing up, whether it’s online, like LinkedIn or YouTube, or at a networking event.  

So, even when you feel the fear, how do you act anyway? These are the tiny tips I find most helpful in building a confident mindset for my personal brand:

1.Remember the 'spotlight effect’

The ‘spotlight effect’ was first coined by psychologists Thomas Gilovich, Victoria Husted Medvec and Kenneth Savitsky. It refers to the belief that you are the centre of the attention of others when you’re not.  It’s essentially an overestimation of how much others are observing and thinking about you. Overcome the spotlight effect when building your personal brand by reminding yourself you’re not at the centre of other people’s thoughts or lives.

2. The ‘halo effect’

If you’re feeling nervous putting your personal brand out there, trying something new or making a career pivot, remember the ‘halo effect’. Coined by Stanford professor, Jeffrey Pfeffer, this is a psychological phenomenon whereby if you’re talented in one domain, people will assume you have the ability to be good in another. So, while you might think you're taking a huge leap away from your norm, it probably feels more natural to others than you might realise.

3. Show up for 3 people

Ernest Hemingway famously said: 

“I believe that basically, you write for two people: yourself…Then you write for who you love whether she can read or write or not, and whether she is alive or dead.”

I would personally add a third suggestion. Show up for the people you want to serve, even if it’s just for one person who could value what you have to share, or who could use your company at that event. Show up for yourself, for a person you love, and for a person you serve. 

4. Get to the root of your limiting belief

To simplify one of my favourite concepts from Neuro-Linguistics Programming (NLP), a limiting belief is actually a limiting decision. It infers that a decision caused the limiting belief, and you have to do the internal work to understand you made that limiting decision, as most likely an event preceded the limiting belief and caused you to make that limiting decision about yourself. It could be as simple as that negative feedback someone gave you that one time, even as far back as your childhood, that made you believe you couldn’t write well, speak well, weren’t creative, or weren’t a natural leader. When you understand the root of your limiting belief, you can reframe your mindset. 

5. Reframe your limiting belief

I once heard someone say there are three types of stories: 

• The stories we tell ourselves 

• The stories we tell other people 

• The truth 

Addressing your limiting belief means rewriting your story. The best part is, you’ve probably already proven your limiting belief wrong. Find an example or more for how you’ve already overcome the limiting belief you feel you have. An instance where the truth tells a different story from the one you tell yourself or other people. Then, ask yourself why you might have been lying to yourself.

6. Beware of your secondary gain

NLP also highlights the idea of ‘secondary gain’, which refers to the unconscious benefits or payoff we have for maintaining a problematic behaviour. For example, if you say you simply aren’t a public speaker, you never have to put yourself out there or do the work involved in showing up in this context. If you say you’re terrible at tech, you don’t have to learn to make videos or start that podcast, though you know its value if you did. 

Beware of what you gain by holding on to the limiting beliefs that hold you back. And ask yourself, is it just a white lie you tell yourself so you don’t have to put in the work to show up as your most confident self?

7. Build the muscle with ‘exposure therapy’

While these little reminders can help shift your mindset, nothing happens overnight. But the idea of ‘exposure therapy’ can help. This is a form of therapy where you gradually expose yourself to the stimuli you fear, reducing the anxiety and fear it causes the more you do it. Creating confidence is like building a muscle. Like going to the gym to push your comfort zone. The more you feel the discomfort or fear, but act anyway, the stronger your confidence becomes. 

8. Put your worries into perspective

Growing up, one of my closest friends and I always loved the poignant song Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen) by Baz Luhrmann. 

One message always landed most profoundly the litany of life advice: 

“Don't worry about the future, or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you at 4 pm on some idle Tuesday.”

Do you fear showing up on social media? Attending that network event? Making a presentation? Or, leading that important meeting? As my dad used to say, “Not to worry”. It was only after he passed that I realised the wisdom in these three little words. I don’t want to trivialise how you might feel about showing up with confidence, but if you can, try to save your worry for the big things in life. Big moments put the smaller things in perspective.