How To Stand Out As The Authority In Your Business Niche (The Top 5 Confidence Builders)

You want to succeed, you want your business to grow. 

You want your clients to love you. 

You want those referrals. 

So you need people to see you as the authority, right?

One of the keys to standing out as the authority in your business niche is being confident. 

But confidence isn’t something you can get quickly or suddenly start being. It’s also not a fake-it-til-you-make-it mindset shift. 

Real confidence needs to be built slowly and in the right way so that it has the right foundations. 

Here are 5 ways to build confidence in your business that set you up as the authority in your field. 

1. Confidence Comes From Knowing How Your Business Works 

Want to grow in confidence? Get into the trenches of every part of your business. 

“Why can't I just pay someone to do this for me? I don't want to do the hard things or learn all this new stuff.” Jill Olish

There are definitely times when everyone on the entrepreneurial adventure feels like this. 

But here's where some of the confidence starts to build: when you've learned something, others can't take that away from you. 

When you have learned the things and played a part in all those areas of your business, you are laying that foundation of confidence in yourself. 

And you don’t have to keep doing them yourself forever. But if you don't even know what you are doing, there's no way to delegate things when the time comes.

2. Confidence Comes From Failing Honestly

Be honest and open about the times you’ve made a mistake or messed up. Failing at something doesn’t make you (or your business) a failure. 

“We've tried more times and failed than someone new has even tried yet.” Kim White

If you feel like you're the only one who struggles with something, you are not alone. You are not the first one to have failed at something or bumped your head trying something new.

It’s natural to think that talking about failures might leak confidence, but being open and honest about them is actually a confidence builder. 

“If we’re taking the lesson that we're learning from it and not just the failure part - that's gonna build our confidence.” Jill Olish

3. Confidence Comes From Your Experiences

Trust your own experiences on the entrepreneurial adventure. It’s tempting to borrow ideas, stories, or formulas from people who have the success you want. 

And it comes with a generous helping of confidence, or so it seems. But here’s the truth:

“If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.” Albert Einstein

You can't teach what you don't know.  You can only parrot what you don't know.

If you're parroting something, you don't have a way to explain how you know it. And that actually leaks your confidence. 

When you're teaching something you don't understand, you can't have confidence in that. How can you? But you can go back to experiences and pull confidence from those because you've lived them.

“I'm very confident in the one subject matter that I can be confident in, and that's me - the things that happened to me, what I did, and how things work.” Kim White

4. Confidence Comes From Practicing

Have you ever left a conversation about your business with your tongue all tied up, feeling embarrassed, and knowing for sure that it will not turn into a new client? 

Sometimes when you’re saying something, you don't say it well because you're nervous. And that can have a direct impact on your business.

“Practicing helps you to say what you want to say, and that builds your confidence.” Kim White

When you practice your stories beforehand to make sure others will understand, it builds your confidence in a big way.  

It can be humbling to get feedback, wherever you are on the entrepreneurial adventure, but it is a major confidence builder for the big moments ahead.

5. Confidence Comes From Who You Surround Yourself With

“I learned to build my confidence by going to the authority that had the answers I needed.” Kim White

If you're building authority, hang out with other leaders who have authority.

If you're building confidence, hang out with other leaders who have confidence.

“I want to go fast. And I want specific. Teacher, can you teach me specifically how to do 'this' in my business?” Kim White

Here’s a challenge for you too: If you want to do something in a particular industry,  go hang out with the leaders in your field. Go where the real authorities are. Don’t just follow the ones that are loud or are trying to prove they know everything. 

Being confident isn’t based on knowing everything.  You don’t need to know how everything works, or have an answer to every question in your industry. 

Having the confidence to be the authority in your field comes from being open and honest about your experiences, and failures, and sharing your stories when it helps others to build their confidence.

“It doesn't mean we're still not learning. We still learn, we still build authority, but some of that authority comes from sharing our failings.” Kim White

If you missed the conversation between Kim and Jill on their podcast Buckets and Boom Gates, you can listen to Episode #96 here.  

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To connect and find out more about Kim or how to create a sexy business for a sexy life, you can reach her and the My Sexy Business Team at www.mysexybusiness.com.  

And to connect with Jill Olish go straight to her website www.mamaoutspoken.com and you’ll find her there! 

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Blog #157