There are multiple traits, characteristics, skills, and abilities that you should develop to discover your leadership. There are many ways to go about this growth process. But whatever method you use, you should first take care of yourself. In other words, you should lead yourself before you lead others.

How do you lead yourself? Well, the most sensible way to get on the right track is to ‘put your house in order’. Simply feel good about yourself. Feel confident about your abilities. Convince yourself that you have the capacity to lead, and that you ought to be a leader. It is only with self-confidence that you will be able to provide a foundation for your followers. Leaders are supposed to provide stability to followers; perhaps a stability that those followers don’t have. Many are counting on their leaders to facilitate that foundation that they haven’t been able to create for themselves. So if the leader doesn’t have that strong foundation, it is impossible to transmit it to anyone else. Perhaps you’re a good actor and attract a following at first, by making people believe that you do have self-confidence. But that building without a foundation will soon crumble.

The remainder of this post will concentrate on some tactics that you should put into practice if you want to be self-confident:

* Set a goal or purpose- If you don’t know what you want, you will never have self-confidence. Self-confidence is all about believing that you are capable of achieving something. But you have to know what that something is. If you don’t, then you have nothing to be confident about! First outline a strong purpose, a ‘North Star’ that you can look towards so you know where you’re headed. This may be as simple (but supremely important) as raising a loving family or as complex as changing the way the world communicates. Nevertheless, it should have some specificity to it, so that you can direct your energy and efforts. Bill Gates didn’t just say “My goal is to change the world”, but “I want every household to have a personal computer.” That certainly changed the world, but in a much more targeted way.

* Prepare- Simply, you should know what you’re talking about. Knowing that you dominate your area will give you the feeling that you have the power to talk authoritatively about anything that involves your scope of influence. Now, I’m not saying you can learn everything there is to know, since you should always strive to know more than the day before. But if you get to a point where you can reasonably say that you dominate your field more than most people, you will have the right to consider yourself an authority. You will have the right to be sure that whatever you say is correct. Now that is self-confidence!

* Practice- Your have multiple scopes of influence. You influence your family, your classmates, your work buddies, your students, your mentors, your bosses, and even complete strangers that you meet in the street. In other words, you have many opportunities to develop your leadership skills. Practice by cheering up a work companion. Propose a cost-cutting process at work. Get involved in clubs and devise initiatives. Take advantage of all those opportunities and use them to consciously practice being a leader.

* Achieve small victories- Some time back I started a short-lived sports tournament business. It failed disastrously. But I did learn many lessons out of that ‘failure’, if you can call it that. One that will especially stick with me is the impact that small victories may have on my confidence levels. A central part of the business depended on raising sponsorship money to cover costs. It is definitely not an easy task, but when I raised my first $50, I felt I was capable of finding $100, and so on. That venture later ‘failed’, but I have nothing to be ashamed of if just because I learned this lesson.

* Talk to yourself- I once thought that I was crazy because I talked to myself. I had these wild pep talks while I was alone in the car or in the shower. But I later found out that many positive and confident people do this. It’s a great way to foster a positive attitude. I feel that after having a solo pep talk, that ‘fake’ or ‘built-up’ confidence carries on to the street. It goes without saying that this should be a positive talk, not a negative one. It works either way.

* Act confident- A variation of the ‘solo pep talk’ is to act confident. It has been proven that physical actions and emotions go hand in hand. It was commonly believed that actions always follow emotions. But it is now accepted that your physical acts have an effect in your emotional state. If you feel sad, smile. Maybe you feel weird at first, but that simple act may put you on your way to a more positive attitude. In the same way, if you feel unsure about yourself, act as if you were confident. Stand up, put your shoulders back, smile, and talk authoritatively. You may start feeling truly self-confident in a while. Now, this tactic shouldn’t be used by itself, but when you don’t have any more time to prepare or practice, it is all you can do. And it works.

* TRUST YOURSELF- If you have done everything that I described, there is absolutely no reason at all to feel down on yourself. Simply let go of all mental barriers and go on with your mission!

By now the importance of self-confidence should be obvious. Do you want to project confidence? Do you want to gain a loyal following? Then you should start by gaining self-confidence. You should lead yourself so that you can lead others.