This podcast is from the archives of our Youtube channel. Chris sits down with Jose Caballer to talk about harnessing confidence in every area of your career.

Let’s say you’re a designer and you’ve never sold strategy before, but you want to start. Well, how? How do you sell strategy as a service as a creative professional? The first step, according to Chris, is to have confidence. Now, Chris is a pretty confident person. But you might not know he’s a natural introvert.

So where does confidence come from? What makes one person more confident than the other? The trick is to train yourself. Push yourself out of your zone of comfort and get familiar with that new territory. Find something that you are really good at and use that as your anchor.

Another tactic is to find a mentor, or someone to model after. We all have heroes and icons we look up to—why not model yourself after one of them? Now we’re not advising you to change who you are, but model the speaking habits, the way the person walks into a room with confidence, and take note of how they do so.

If your hero is out of reach, find a mentor. You can meet your mentor through networking events, forums, or just about anywhere. A mentor will share their wisdom and experience with you, as well as their own strategies for things like boosting confidence.

The third tactic is, as Chris puts it, “not knowing.” Don’t be afraid to hide what you don’t know. It might surprise you, but this makes you more relatable. How? Well, who do you know that knows everything? You don’t have to know everything, nor should you. The more you can relate to the people you speak with and to, the more comfortable and confident you’ll become.