subject: How Self-Confidence Helps You in Getting a Promotion at Work [print this page] How Self-Confidence Helps You in Getting a Promotion at Work
Self-confidence is a valuable trait. Though we are not born with it, we have of good chance of acquiring it from early life when family plays an important part in a child's development. If that does not happen in pre-school years, self-confidence will take shape as we develop learning abilities and perform within the school-group we are in. Ideally, a young graduate should already have gained the amount of self-confidence he or she needs to find the right way in life.
Confidence in our own abilities has a lot to do with the way our actions and opinions are regarded by others (parents and relatives, close friends, acquaintances, teachers at school, co-workers and the management of the company that has hired us). Thus we might say that appreciation from others is the measure of our performance and if we get positive feedback for our actions, confidence in our true value will increase. This is only one side of the truth. The other side looks like this: a positive attitude towards the job we are doing and confidence in our abilities and skills will ensure high quality results of the work and consequently will attract positive feedback.
Promotion at work is something that everyone desires but not everyone is able to get. There are roughly two categories of working people. Some of them set high goals and follow strict rules to achieve them. They believe in themselves and trust their abilities and knowledge so, when they are assigned a difficult task, they always say they can do it and start devising the plan to carry it out. They are the ones who always carry things through and the boss knows it. Their colleagues look up to them, though most of them don't admit it, and the supervisor rarely watches' them; he knows they can do their job by themselves with optimum results.
Others never seem to fight for more than they already know or have; they quietly do their job in the shadow of their self-confident peers and may work well in a team as long as they are not asked for opinions or ideas. As they dread failure, they never offer to deal with more than they are supposed to and sigh with relief when the boss gives a hard assignment to somebody else. They don't complain about having too much work to do but neither do they finish a job before the deadline, for fear something more challenging might appear on the horizon.
Which of the above two categories of people do you think is more likely to be promoted? Obviously, not the latter as the boss will never say: I think it is high time I got my inefficient employees stimulated a bit with a rise'. The boss always knows who deserves to go up in the firm, though he might pretend he doesn't and never informs his subordinates of every yearly evaluation detail that he has recorded. The true gems of the company are those who are not afraid to show their knowledge and prove their skills, the people who take on as much as they can and never flee from the battlefield when something challenging arises. They are professionals whose self-confidence and determination attract their superiors' trust and appreciation.
