If you are highly competent but lack confidence hear me out:
I see it around me all the time. People who are well educated, who are very good at what they do, who care about others and the world stay silent. When it is time to speak, when they can actually make a difference for the world, for their surrounding and for themselves they stay silent. They don’t feel what they have to say is something special. They don’t see that they have special talents or competencies. They stay silent, passive, inactive and the world looses, all of us loose.
There are also other people: people who are not that competent, but get pride in their accomplishments and get really confident about themselves. This confidence helps them to get into new ventures, create new possibilities for them. And in every new venture, they create successes for themselves and get even surer of their talents.
By time, a huge discrepancy arises between these two people. One stays as an expert professional in an organization, whereas the other climbs up the corporate and societal ladder and become managers of companies, big organizations and even the countries. (I am sure you all can find “one example” for this person)
This is not a surprise, it is called Dunning Kruger effect.
According to Dunning and Kruger low confidence of the competent people result from the fact that they know how much more there is to know than they know!
The second reason is that the competent people also make an assumption that the rest knows as much as them, so they think their skills and knowledge are nothing special!
The biggest danger in having low levels of confidence and high level of competence is to focus on the negative, on what you don’t know and stop trying, stop creating, stop speaking.
You can change that. You are something special and you are here in this world to make a change, only you can make.
Here are 3 steps to empower yourself when you are competent but lack confidence
1. Create goals and make them your focus
2. Be aware of your competencies by having facts such as successes
3. Make confidence irrelevant and focus on taking all the chances to get to your goal