The Only Antidote to Your Lack of Confidence
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As a student of positioning, I've grudgingly noted that many very poorly positioned firms are doing well. The common thread is that they are confident, which prospective clients sense and are drawn to. If you lack that confidence, consider the two ways normally available to fix it.
The first is your Mommy telling you how great you are. A parent's job is to believe in their kid in spite of any lack of evidence to support that. My parents believed that I could do anything, and we still believe that our kids could do anything. But that matters more when you're young. And besides, I often believe in my clients' ability more than they do, but it doesn't matter. They don't believe me because I'm not their Mommy. (tweet this)
So in your case, we have to default to the only other reliable method of confidence-building, and that's marketplace acceptance. There's a lot of bravado in positioning, and many positioning statements are outright lies ("best" this and "effective" that). So when a prospective client bites and you sink the hook in, you may be even more surprised than they are that you turn out to be good at what you've promised. At that moment, you fill your own shoes and the outside validation feeds your actual confidence level and the cycle continues, continually building on itself.
So how do you achieve marketplace acceptance? It starts with positioning, and then it is applied via the opportunities that your lead generation provides. Each time you do good work, you reach further, you believe in yourself, and you get even bigger opportunities. It's the alternative to Mommy.
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