At first blush this idea might be difficult to wrap your brain around. That's because you've been taught that self-confidence is achieved through mastery of knowledge or skills.

If you've been an employee for someone else most of your life, you've actually been rewarded for getting your self-confidence from expertise. As an employee, the higher your mastery of a set of skills, the higher your salary. You move logically from a hopeful novice at the entry-level job, to a more confident and higher skilled employee at the intermediate job level, to the highly confident master at the senior job level, and then back to the hopeful novice level when you are promoted out of the role of individual contributor and into management, where you begin the cycle again.

Sound familiar? How many times have you moved through this cycle from novice to master in your life?

So here you are now: self-employed and perhaps not feeling very confident in some areas of your business. That's because you're still relying solely on expertise to build your self-confidence. In today's economy you can't afford to rely on expertise to generate the confidence you need to build and operate your business. You haven't got the time for that. However, you have another way:

You can arrange to have the self-confidence you need.

You don't need to rely on yourself to create your confidence. Nor do you need to wait until you have attained mastery of your services or skills. You can arrange for support structures and encouragement, and can design situations that feed you the confidence you need. For example:

• Instead of sitting there staring at the phone with dread because you know you need to call someone you've never met about the possibility of hiring you, arrange to bolster your confidence first. Call your most ardent business supporter, ask her or him to tell you why they believe so strongly in you, let them encourage you and bathe you in their support. When you're feeling great again, thank your supporter, hang up, and immediately make the call to pitch your services to the person you've never met. Your relaxed, optimistic tone will come thru in your cold call and affect your success.
• Another technique you can use for those important cold calls, is to call your business coach and role play the call until you feel confident that you're ready to handle any direction in which the call might go. Then immediately make your cold call.
• Or, identify the important points you want to communicate during the call and create a checklist for yourself. Remember, the person on the other side of the phone call can't see that you're using a checklist. But don't let the checklist be a distraction