Building Your Confidence Muscles

I gave my first on-stage tech conference talk yesterday.

It was a solid 6/10.

And I might be overly generous to myself; only audience survey feedback can say for sure. 😂

But what I do know is that I have some work to do to improve my delivery, especially if I want to do more of these talks in the future.

In fact, I am doing more of these talks in the future. One is next week.

One of my major challenges is confidence. It always has been. Networking, events, talks, workshops, and even leading meetings have all been difficult for me, ever since I was a kid.

Especially now that I am diving into more technical topics as a PMM leader, I feel that twinge of doubt every single day.

👀 Will the audience believe me?

🚩 Will the audience trust me? 

😱 Do I even believe me? 

But I've gotten better! Here are a few things to think about as you work to improve your own confidence.

• Communication is your best tool to build confidence. As a Product Marketing Manager, the ability to communicate is your key superpower. Verbal, written, interpersonal, these forms of communication are crucial to your job, but they can also be tools to help you build confidence.

• Endeavor to write (and share!) a little, speak a little, and work cross-team a little every day, and you'll start to see a change in your confidence.

• Confidence comes in many forms. One person’s confident may look different from someone else's definition. And that's okay! It's highly personal.

• Take stock of how you feel on a given day, and try to compare that to a previous day. If you are giving a talk, do you feel different than you did the last time you gave a talk or led a cross-functional project?

• Use every chance to improve. For me, I'm going to make some changes to my 6/10 talk to tighten it up, create more cohesion, and deliver it more confidently next week.

We're all trying to deliver our messaging and positioning in ways that make sense for our products and to our customers.

One of the best ways we can do that is confidently. I urge you to pick up some of your tools today and practice building that muscle.

Pretty soon you'll be jacked.