To Be Productive (aka 2bProductive Blog): Demonstrating the Three C’s Confidence, Competence, Courage

Look at the successful people that you know, do they demonstrate the three C’s? The 3C’s are: confidence, competence, and courage.

We probably have met a few people that had 1 or 2 of the C’s but not all. When people have confidence but not competence, we will believe them for a while because they speak with authority, but then they lose credibility when we find out they do not have competence. In other words, they do not know what they are talking about! Then there are some people who are very competent and we would benefit greatly by their thoughts, ideas and solutions. But if people do not have the confidence and courage to speak up, we never learn from them.

We therefore need to demonstrate all of the three C’s. Here are a few ideas:

Confidence: Confident people believe in themselves and their abilities. Identify your strengths; record your accomplishments and use positive self-talk to remind yourself of them every day. Your body language and other nonverbal behavior will communicate your confidence. Practice behavior in front of a mirror and then with others that show confidence.
Competence: People build competence by continuous improvement of their skills and abilities. What do you need to learn to improve in your chosen field? Technology has made it so much easier to build skills than in the past. For example, let’s say you want to learn how to negotiate. Put “Negotiating Skills” in an Amazon.com book search field and find 10,724 results. Put “How to Negotiate” in YouTube.com and receive 166,000 results. Whatever your preferred learning method is, there is a solution to meet your needs.
Courage: Courage helps us face our fears and hardships with confidence and bravery. Ask the question “what would I do if I was not afraid?” People fears include: not being liked, failure, wrong choices, appearing foolish, being judged, etc. The first step is to find out what your fears are and face them by asking “so what”. So what if some people do not like you, the people who care about you still will. So what if people think you appear foolish, just laugh and get better by practice. Take small steps towards what you want to do even if you are a little afraid.