What if the reason your business isn’t growing at the rate you want has nothing to do with your website, your social media, or how big your email list is? Sometimes, our business struggles are a lot deeper than this, and today I want to talk to you about one of these challenges (and how you can deal with it).

The more I work with clients, the more I recognize that so much of our biz is not about our offers and our website and our sales calls. It’s actually about what’s happening in our heads and our hearts.

So today I want to talk about the one key essential you need this year and how you can get it. That is confidence. If you want to grow your online biz, you have to grow your confidence. I’m going to share the 2 places you need to place your confidence AND I’m going to share a personal story of a time when I was lacking confidence in my business.

You might think that this is something that only brand new people struggle with, or just people who don’t have a strong faith. But NO, I will tell you that even those who are well established and/or who have a strong faith can still struggle with a lack of confidence at times!

The word confidence is thrown around a lot and it often means different things to different people. So I’m gonna start by defining what I mean by it for the context of this episode.

The dictionary has the first three definitions as follows:

1. full trust; belief in the powers, trustworthiness, or reliability of a person or thing:
2. belief in oneself and one’s powers or abilities; self-confidence; self-reliance; assurance:
3. certitude; assurance:

Confidence comes from a Latin word ‘fidere’ which means “to trust” (wikipedia).

So essentially, the idea of confidence is putting your trust in something. So when I talk about confidence in business, what do I mean?

Well there are 2 main ways I think confidence plays out in your business.

First and foremost is the confidence you have in God. Throughout scripture, we can see that the object of our trust should be GOD not ourselves.

Psalm 33:20-22 – Our soul waits for the Lord; he is our help and our shield. For our heart is glad in him, because we trust in his holy name. Let your steadfast love, O Lord, be upon us, even as we hope in you.

The word used for “we trust” is the Hebrew word batach, which means: to trust, trust in; to have confidence, be confident; to be bold; to be secure. So we can see that the psalmist’s trust, or confidence, is directly related to God’s steadfast love.

“Such is the confidence that we have through Christ toward God. Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God, who has made us sufficient to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” 2 Cor. 3:4-6

So we see here that confidence (or trust) is not based on our own abilities, but on God who gives us everything we need. God has given us abilities. He has given us gifts.

If you are trying to run your business purely out of confidence in yourself or others, it’s always going to be a struggle. If you are not settled and secure, placing your full trust and confidence in God, then you will constantly be second guessing every step of the process.

But if you can start by placing your full trust in Him, recognizing that He is trustworthy and that He has given you the gifts and abilities you have, you are in a much better place to build your business!

The second type of confidence you need is the confidence in what you have to offer. Note that I’m not saying in yourself specifically. But in the thing that you are putting out into the world. You do need to have confidence in that offer.

In my course Shine Online, I refer to this as your “confident offer.”

By this I mean that your offer is something YOU are confident in because it meets certain qualifications that show that it is a trustworthy offer. I’m gonna give you a sneak peak into Shine Online right now and share with you the elements of a confident offer:

• Solves a big problem
• Produces one clear result
• Provides the client/customer benefits
• Is priced well
• Is validated

Now of course, inside of the program I go into detail in each of these elements and how you can create an offer that does these things.

But I want to hone in on probably one of the most important aspects: provides the client or customer benefits.

So when you are out there and you are trying to build your business…. You need to know that the thing you are offering your potential clients and customers will actually BENEFIT them. You need to believe this wholeheartedly. If you don’t, it’s going to be a struggle to sell it.

So this brings us to the final question: how exactly do you develop confidence –in God as well as in what you are offering?

1. Spend time with God. How do you build trust in someone? You get to know them. You learn their character. You do life with them. So in order to put your full trust in God, you’ll need to spend time with Him. I recommend digging into God’s word, as this is the tool He has given us to learn the truth about who He is. Two resources you can check out if you need help getting started are The Bible Recap reading plan – it’s available on YouVersion as well as online, and there’s a podcast that goes with each day’s reading. Also, you can check out my friend Eva Kubasiak – she has lots of resources including a free Bible study summit coming up (that I happen to be a part of).

2. Get clarity about your business. If you are not clear on what you are wanting to offer or the business model you are building, it’s going to be a challenge to have confidence in your offer. So you need to start by gaining clarity. If you’re listening in real time, it’s not too late to jump into the Ideal Biz Bootcamp. This will help you gain clarity about what you are offering in your business.

3. Develop a confident offer that you feel good about selling. Once you have clarity about your business, you need to make sure that your offer is one that you can have confidence about. It helps if you have previous experience getting people results with the thing you are offering. If you have no previous results, you are going to need to offer this at a lower rate or potentially free so that you can get some proven results and build up that confidence. If you want support in building your offer and gaining that confidence, then you’ll want to check out my Shine Online course + coaching program.

4. Take action! In order to develop confidence, you’ve got to take action. No one gets results by doing nothing. So once you have that offer out there, you’ll need to take action to both share it and implement it.

5. Document your wins. Once you have clients or customers who buy your offer, you should document your wins! Keep track of the amazing results you are getting for others so that you can use this information for the future.

One final thought about confidence and what it does not mean. Confidence does not mean a guarantee. So you can have confidence in God and confidence in what you are offering and still not be able to GUARANTEE that your client or customer will have certain results. So be careful in how you word things or market things, as it is important, of course, to have integrity in how we market ourselves.