The Difference Between Lacking Confidence and Lacking Competence
Confidence is a temporary emotional state you feel when you have faith in yourself. Lacking confidence makes you vulnerable to negativity, triggers fear, and undermines focus. On the other hand, competence is a matter of fact that preparation and experience has provided you with the ability to perform skills successfully. Lacking competence makes you vulnerable to mistakes, negligence, and embarrassment.
These are two very different qualities and lacking one or the other leads to very different types of vulnerabilities. So, if you had to choose between the two, which would you pick?
A cocky person would choose confidence over competence because cocky people love fake emotions. Indeed, to be cocky is to believe in yourself even when you have done nothing to earn that belief. For everyone else, competence matters more than any temporary emotional state that causes a lack in confidence. This difference is the mindset game changer I want to leave you with today.
Unquestionably, you are still able to succeed when you have competence without feeling confident, but you aren’t when you have confidence without competence. Confidence matters, but it doesn’t matter as much as competence.
From time to time, everyone has moments when they aren’t feeling confident. Moreover, when you have a moment like this you don’t have to fake it. What you must do instead is accept you aren’t feeling confident in the moment and be ok with that. Then, put all your mental energy on your competence and use this to overcome any negativity, fear, or lack of focus you’re feeling.
In other words, the environment, the pressure to win, the clock as well as other factors outside of your control can impact your level of confidence but that can’t impact your level of competence. While your confidence can change in real time, your competence will not.
Therefore, when you know your preparation validates your competence, you don’t need any other validation to be successful. Furthermore, when you aren’t feeling confident you don’t need positive thoughts you need positive action, and this positive action comes from being competent.