Trust how good you are

Here is a post from a woman with so much wisdom that I am sharing: 

“When I started my very first company I was only 23 years old.  I still felt like a little kid at the time.  I remember thinking that everyone was so much older than me and therefore they must be more knowledgeable than me.  I remember thinking that people who had a higher level of education than I did must be so much smarter than I was.  I remember looking at those people with big fancy jobs and titles thinking that they must be so much more capable than I was.  I remember how I used to constantly second guess my own instincts because I would default to the opinions of people that I figured must be better than I was. 

 Looking back I have to say that if I could tell young people something it would be this – DO NOT ever assume that age, or education, or title, position makes someone better or smarter or more capable than you are, and for heaven’s sake, trust in just how good you actually are!The reality is that there are very educated people who are just not that bright.  There are older people who are not that wise.  There are people with big fancy titles who are not that capable.  So you can’t ever judge the abilities of a person by their age, their education, or their position.  You have to judge them by their results and their integrity.  And for heaven’s sake, don’t ever hold yourself back or second guess how good you actually are because you are measuring yourself against someone that you assume should be better than you.  

Don’t discount yourself like that!  I can tell you that most of the employees I have worked with rate themselves far below how good and how capable they actually are.  So often they second guess their abilities and I just want to shake them and say “Don’t you know how truly amazing you are?”Yet, I get where they are coming from because I remember a time when I used to think that way as well.  And then one day things started to change.  I remember sitting in meetings with what the world would have thought of as “big wigs” in my early days, listening to what was going on in the room and having it suddenly hit me – “oh, my gosh, I know more about this than they do” and feeling absolutely stunned by that because here I thought I was the junior person in the room.  

The more I had those ah-hah moments in my career, the more I started to learn that I needed to stop assuming everyone was so much smarter or better than me, and with time and experience I came to realize that I needed to trust my abilities far more than I was giving myself credit for.  Once I was able to do that I was able to move much more quickly ahead in furthering my skills and talents in the business world.  The lesson I am trying to share here is to HAVE CONFIDENCE IN YOURSELF because you really are better than you know.Now for clarity sake let me be very clear that there is a huge difference in having confidence and being arrogant.  

Confidence is recognizing your own abilities and feeling good about them.  Arrogance is when you start to think that those abilities somehow make you a more valuable human being than any other human being, which will never be right because to God we all matter exactly the same, never one above another, regardless of any abilities we have or don’t have.  So confidence in yourself is a good thing. Just don’t ever let it cross over into becoming arrogant, because that is a very, very bad thing and you never want to get that way.Now back to how amazing you are.  Remember this:  You are better than you realize!  Trust in that.  My favorite quote in the world is one I remind myself of daily:

“Don’t limit yourself to the picture in your mind, because God might intend your picture to be a masterpiece.”  -Amy Rees Anderson

What an incredible way to have confidence. Good for you Amy Anderson, you are an inspiration to so many. 

Con amor,

Vero