Pride. There’s a good reason why it’s one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Pride can get you in a lot of trouble when it comes to virtually every aspect of your life, your career included. Pride gives you blinders and prevents you from seeing problems with your career or company. Confidence on the other hand, is what you need to succeed in business.
A couple months ago, I talked about how to promote yourself without sounding like a braggart. Along those lines, I wanted to touch on how to exude confidence without coming off as someone who is overly proud.
Have some humility. You’re not perfect and no one expects you to be. If you feel pressure to be perfect, the only person doing this is you. A prideful person can’t fail and when it does happen, their world crumbles. A person with confidence realizes that everyone has their setbacks from time to time, but they don’t define you.
Ask for help. You can’t do everything on your own and a person with confidence knows this. It’s alright to trust colleagues to provide you with the help you need in order to successfully complete a task or project. Pride prevents people from admitting that they need help. Because of this refusal to accept help, they frequently push themselves too hard and may end up failing.
Acknowledge your support. Only a proud person would refuse to acknowledge the help that they received while working. Not thanking the people who give you support is a great way to burn bridges and lose colleagues that are willing to work with you. When you have confidence, you know that your success doesn’t rest on your performance alone, but the overall success of the project. Without the help you received the project would not have been a success, so give credit where credit is due.
