Paths, Confidence, Conviction & Certainty

The topic of confidence comes up whenever I chat with a budding, prospective or even long-standing entrepreneur or a business owner.

It’s unsurprising, but that in no way demeans its importance and impact on people. Or, more correctly, the importance and impact of the LACK of it in so many people.

It’s a stone-cold fact that the average and even the above-average entrepreneur lacks confidence in something, usually their own abilities and the path forward, so let me see if I can help and clear a few fundamental misunderstandings or misgivings up for you in this month’s little ‘Thought Bomb’.

First, some Definitions

Let’s kick off by getting some ‘shared language’, i.e. what I mean by these terms when I use them so that when we speak, we collectively have the same frames and words of reference and understanding. 

As an aside, this is a super-useful mechanism to use with your own tribe or audience. Those who lean into your content and thought pieces will appreciate the clarity, adopt the meanings and move closer to you. In doing so, you build Allegiance Capital, that aspect of brand loyalty that’s almost entirely built on trust in you and your ability to help your people.

OK, so what do I mean when I use the following terms?

1. Clarity – the capacity to remove fogginess or haze and see/understand a situation, direction, or underlying cause with precision & accuracy.
2. Confidence – operating somewhere between “I hope I can” and “I KNOW I can” (knowing being the most potent form of confidence).
3. Conviction – the product of Clarity & high Confidence. When you can see clearly and know that you can do something, you have Conviction.
4. Certainty – this turns the screw on Conviction. You become certain when Conviction is backed by repeated evidence that, for example, you can do something, or a particular process or team member will perform a certain way and to a certain standard.

Here’s a statement that might help, “Evidence builds confidence. Repeated evidence creates certainty.”

Do you see the value of laying out definitions and creating shared language?

Cool.

So, why are these things SO critical to your journey as a good human who is brilliant at what they do, trying to plough the path of Entrepreneurship?

Well, it all comes down to how we roll as humans and how those with that maverick spirit in us attempt to operate outside the conventional lines of what we know from working for The Man.

Let’s face it, most of us don’t like, and therefore rebel against, rules that cage us in, but equally, many of us, in doing so, will literally throw the baby out with the bathwater and sack off some rules & structure that are useful to us.

This creates a raft of hidden problems, with 2nd, 3rd and 4th order consequences, ripples, if you will, that show up in our business in ways we can’t connect back to our decisions and actions. 

Another issue that similarly plagues us is FEAR, even in its mildest forms, such as discomfort or procrastination.

The Path is meant to be hidden.

I’ve talked a lot in The Female CEO Magazine about your Path.

When I refer to this, I’m talking not about where you’re headed - your ‘Point X’, where What Actually Matters Most to you lives - that should be CRYSTAL clear to you (if it isn’t, I will urge you to go back and read some of my earlier articles on this).

Your Point X or ‘True North’ gives you a bearing, a direction from where you are now, your Point A, and that’s the first step to getting some foundational Clarity on your Path.

But it doesn’t give you the Path (or ‘Yellow Brick Road’ as I like to call it).

Here’s why…

The Path appears as you step onto it. Your first step creates the Path; without that step, you have no Path forward.

Read that at least three times. Better still, tattoo it inside your brain.

All too often, I see fantastic people going around in circles because some guru somewhere has espoused some BS about a step-by-step process, a ‘guaranteed blueprint for success’ or some such, frankly, damaging nonsense. 

Here’s a #ThoughtBomb for you… Your Business Journey (the Path) is a journey of personal growth. To build and enjoy the Life you want your business to deliver, you have to BECOME the person who can do that. To think otherwise is naïve at best and perilous at worst, which, once you get Clarity on and embrace this, is GREAT news…if perhaps a little unsettling at first.

The marketers and coaches who suck you in with their magnetic messages and greased slides can do so because we avoid the hard truths of the simplicity of our journey and what lies ahead.

Complexity, often masked as simplicity, is seductive.

Easy answers bring comfort.

A path laid out for us gives us certainty.

…but this is a false certainty. What we really buy here is Hope. And, contrary to what Andy Dufresne and Red tell us in The Shawshank Redemption, Hope isn’t always “a good thing, perhaps the best of things”.

Hope is a very, very weak cousin to Certainty.

 Rather than say “I hope that I can do this” wouldn’t you much prefer to feel solid in proclaiming, “I have absolute certainty that I can do this!” ?

Of course you would.

How, then do we get to this place of Certainty, and avoid the bear traps and blueprints of the gurus that litter the road ahead?

The Roles of Certainty & Uncertainty

 The mistake in judgement that I see most people making - which is wholly understandable - is the misunderstanding of the roles that Certainty and (esp.) Uncertainty should play in their lives.

 As the wonderful Virginia Satir said over 100 years ago, “(Most) people prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty.” A sobering statement isn’t it??

 And that’s precisely because it hits home with almost all of us. No one escapes the truth of Virginia’s observation; we just ‘grow’ our way out of it. This leads me to how we harness the apparently opposing forces of Certainty and Uncertainty.

See, the idea peddled by the gurus that we should be certain about our path and, indeed, almost anything in life (apart from the love for and of our children) is patent nonsense. Life is random and complex, and the trick is to simplify our understanding of our roles in life and the forces that act on us.

THEN Life becomes simpler to navigate, and - rather beautifully - our Path simplifies also. Not to say that it unrolls as a straight line to what we want to get closer to - far from it, but domesticating randomness and risk brings with it a surety that we can tackle anything that comes our way.

So, we build certainty not in the path but in our capacity to handle the twists, turns, pitfalls, setbacks and bear traps - all the challenges - that it will inevitably present to us. And what does the certainty of the inevitability of these unexpected challenges tell us?

That the PATH is Uncertain.

When we embrace this fact and begin to grow through the Uncertainty, our level of confidence, conviction and, ultimately, certainty grows too. 

Certainty flows from repeated evidence, remember. 

And you won’t get that unless you keep going, keep moving forward.

This means you walk the path as it presents itself and do what you must until the evidence that you need to tweak, change tack or forge ahead becomes clear. Then you take the appropriate actions and take your next step.

As long as you have your Point X, your True North, where everything that Actually Matters Most to you lives, you’ll always have a direction for your ‘focus compass’ to get you back on track if Life throws you a proper curveball and knocks you off course.

Certainty applies to you - the clarity you have in navigating whatever Life and your path throws at you - using any and all resources at your disposal, of course.

 Uncertainty applies to the Path, to what lies ahead.

A Better Way

At Success Engineers, our sole focus is to help you Build a Better Business. We do this together by showing you how to grow, build, and BE, and we support you through that growth. Because ALL change for the better starts with behavioural and personal change, and no one does that successfully on their own, not if they’re in business for the long game.

Something that I hope you’ve already figured out if you’re a member of The Female CEO FB group and/or have been reading this magazine for any length of time is this; You, alone, are responsible for your success.

But you should never BE alone on your journey.

Choose your guides and companions carefully.

The clues will ALWAYS be in the quality of the information that is shared with you, the vibe & how it resonates with you, and in how much of a hurry the business, coach or individual is to have you take up an offer or fall in line with their way of doing or thinking about things.

You must follow the fundamentals, but your path is unique to you.

And remember this: Every human is unique, meaning your solution will be as individual as you are. But our problems are incredibly common, they just express differently in each situation.

When you seek help, keep this firmly in the back of your mind as you learn to discern who can genuinely listen to and help you.

To your inevitable success.

Dino Tartaglia is a former Electronics Engineer, now a businessman, mentor, coach and troubleshooter working to help you, if you’re a coach, consultant, creative or service provider, to Build a Joyful, Dependable Business around Being Brilliant at What You Do. 

In his own coaching, and together with world-class coach Simon Hartley, the other half of Success Engineers (their joint business), he helps you to improve your thinking to ask better questions, so that you solve the right problems in your business at the right time, develop your own personal performance as a business owner and get closer to What Matters Most. 

You can find Dino in our FB Group , on his  website or on any of these other locations; Facebook | LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram |PodCast - Back Bedroom to Big Business