1-Sentence-Summary: Perfectly Confident explores the idea of confidence and offers a series of valuable practices that anyone can implement in their life to improve this aspect, as well as an overview of how confidence is supposed to look and feel like in its realest form, without adding or subtracting too much of it.
Read in: 4 minutes
Favorite quote from the author:
Many people think that confidence is a native trait belonging to those who were just born with it. Contrary to this belief, confidence is a skill that you can learn. And it takes way more than just looks or a reputable status to gain it. It is about the way we feel about ourselves and displays it to the outside world.
If you don’t truly feel confident about yourself, but you try to put up a face, it’ll show from afar. People who try to fake this trait usually feel the need to show off, catch the attention of others, or be seen in any way. They all do it just to make it look like they’re comfortable with themselves. However, truly confident people don’t feel the need to be seen, as they already know what they’re capable of. Still, confidence is a vital skill in today’s world.
Without it, you can’t form strong professional relationships, advance in your life and go for what you truly want, or seize opportunities. Faking it can ruin your trustworthiness. Therefore, the only thing that’s left is to build actual confidence and learn how to master it. Perfectly Confident by Don A. Moore can teach you how to do that by offering a series of valuable lessons that you can practice from now on.
Among them, here are my three favorite ones:
- The line between confidence and overconfidence is what makes the difference.
- Live life as it is and don’t try to anticipate or overthink everything you see.
- Skills build confidence and not the other way around.
It’s time for us to go into each and every one of these lessons and see what they really mean!
Lesson 1: Too much confidence can be harmful to you and delay your success.
In life, we have to go for what we truly want and don’t let anything stop us. Isn’t that what the world is all about nowadays? In big lines, this advice is motivational and quite helpful, if you’re looking to get your life together. However, mastering the way you seize opportunities, form connections, create your public persona, all comes down to using the right amount and form of confidence.
Naturally, you want to seem like the type of person who knows what they’re doing, and that’s understandable. You want to make a good impression and have people come to you, right? Still, learning how to tell if you’re being overly confident is a trait people like to learn the hard way. If you let your intuition run the days for you, you’ll end up becoming unsuccessful. Too much confidence leads to poor performance, and that’s a fact.
Just look at all the retail investors betting their life savings on “that one multi-million dollar stock” only to lose it all, or the people buying mortgages in 2008 thinking that they know what they’re doing. Lack of input, hard work, and an unhealthy dose of confidence is what interfered with those people’s success. Allow confidence to nurture your motivation, but don’t let it interfere with your work.
Lesson 2: If you try to see things as they are and stop playing scenarios in your head, life will go smoother.
Underconfidence is another problem some people face. Just like overconfidence, this negative state of mind can interfere with your journey towards success. As humans, we like to see the worst in everything. So when we compare ourselves with others, chances are we won’t like the results.
It’s easier said than done, but stop comparing yourself to whatever you see in others. For starters, you can’t know if you’re in the same phase of the process as the other person. Chances are, you’re just looking at their finished products. Secondly, you can’t tell their weak spots, as nobody likes to show those. Thirdly, you don’t really know how hard they worked and struggled for the outcome. And if they did, they did it long before you even started.
Another toxic habit to break is trying to forecast everything to the slightest detail. Simply put, you just can’t be right all the time, as nobody knows the future. Sure, plans and strategies are a great way to assess probabilities, but always prepare to face the worst outcome, along with the best. Therefore, make forecasts that include a broad range of probabilities, and don’t let your confidence tell you that certain outcomes can never happen to you.
Lesson 3: Confidence must be backed up by skill.
Top performers worldwide are feeling confident because they know their worth. If you’re extremely skilled in a domain, this gives you an edge over the majority. As no one is willing to put in the hard work and thus master their craft at such a high level. As such, not many people reach those levels of confidence.
However, if you want to become truly confident and inspire trust, you’ll have to put in the work. Skill builds self-worth, and it shows. Confidence is a trait of those who truly feel that way, so if you try to fake it, chances are it’ll show and make you look unreliable and seem like you’re trying too hard, or it’ll go well for a brief moment when people will expect you to live up to the expectations.
Frankly, you don’t want to find yourself in a situation when people ask you to dig into your knowledge and you start mumbling, right? Therefore, master your skills, work hard and learn continuously. That’s the way to go if you want to build your self-worth and boost your confidence level. Whatever your area of improvement is, this rule applies to them all.
Perfectly Confident Review
When it comes to learning how to build confidence and stand out from the crowd in a positive manner, Perfectly Confident has got the answers. This book delves deep into the concept of confidence and comes up with a formula for building a trustworthy, self-assured persona that knows how to act in a room full of people and seizes all opportunities. Reading it will reveal significant insights about how to stop being unconfident and get rid of the impostor syndrome, while also avoiding becoming overconfident and looking sham.
Who would I recommend our Perfectly Confident summary to?
The 30-year-old employee who feels like they need to boost their confidence and advance in their career, the 40-year-old team leader who wants to boost their social skills and become a better figurehead, or the 35-year-old who feels stuck in a rut, wants to get their life together and seize opportunities.
Last Updated on May 19, 2023
