Here we are with our course, The 12 Most Important Skills You Need to Become a Powerhouse Professional Assistant.

For me, everything starts and ends with confidence. So, I'm going to start our first portion or the first video talking about Confidence. I mean, it's such a misused word, like, "I don't have confidence," or, "I need confidence." And yet, people squander and wander and don't even really know how to get it. They start reading books or put up little notes for themselves saying, "You are worthy," and other types of things, which are about changing self-talk, which again are valuable, but they don't necessarily - over time - hit at the core of the things that are actually causing you to feel a lack of confidence.

When it comes to work, confidence is kind of funny because to some degree, it almost doesn't even matter if you have it all the time. What matters is that you project it. I'm not talking about being inauthentic or lying about yourself, I'm just simply talking about projecting an attitude and projecting an energy that is simply and only about the idea that you know a few things and that you're clear that you're going to make mistakes... that you're not going to do things perfectly, and it's all going to turn out OK.

My first point to make about confidence is it's all about how you feel about yourself, literally, figuratively, mentally, emotionally, physically. I mean, if you ask yourself right now, how you feel, do you know the answer? I mean, right now, I feel pretty happy. Maybe a little nervous, but I feel generally good. It's a little warm out, so I'm a little hot, but that is a basic description of what's going on in my body and in my immediate environment. That might seem trite or you're like, "Who cares how you feel, Nicole?" (I'm used to hearing that) but fundamentally the point is is that you should know how to be able to answer that question. And you should know that how you feel about yourself permeates your entire environment - and your whole day.

If you wake up in a bad mood and just say to yourself, "Ugh, I'm in a bad mood," you're going to go to work with that attitude. And the truth is that your day is not going to go that well. The worst part of it is that the day might not go that well for other people in your immediate environment either. So understanding how you feel about yourself is crucial - as well as understanding how to take care of yourself so that you don't have to feel ugly, stressed out, hungry, angry, or tired.

The way to prioritize avoiding feelings like that is to prioritize your self-care. Do you wash regularly? Did you brush your teeth? Did you get enough sleep? Did you take a shower? Were you were around people that made you feel good? Were you just overextending yourself, and then in your head, worried and getting anxious and stressed about things that you can't control? Did you run around like a maniac trying to do everything and never get a couple of minutes to just sit in a chair and relax? Did you have no downtime? Did you end up hanging around people that were aggravating? Did you have negative experiences that you don't quite know how to either talk yourself through or work through, either with that person or on your own slightly thereafter the experience occurs?

Summary: you have to prioritize taking care of yourself. The place within which you exist, your mind, your self, your soul, whatever you want to call it, is YOUR BODY. If you're not taking care of yourself, if you're not taking care of your body as you're moving through your life and moving through your day, you're probably going to have a bad day. All right?

When you DO make a practice of prioritizing your self-care, you come to trust your abilities. You come to know that even if you don't know, even if you look stupid, even if you feel like nobody likes you, even if you have all kinds of yada yada running through your head, you still have a sense of trust. You still know that you have abilities, that you have skills, that you have assets, that you have talents. You can trust those even when you make a mistake. You can trust those when you don't feel so good about yourself. Because nobody ever has a perfect day. There's no such thing.

These things that I talk about about how to improve your day, they work great 95% of the time. And the more you practice them, the better they work. But that doesn't mean I don't still wake up and have a bad day; no matter what I do, it seems I don't quite get out of that attitude. But I trust my ability to move through it. I trust my ability to grow. I trust my ability to show up, despite how I might feel about myself that doesn't quite feel good.

The last point I'll make about confidence is that it's highly integral to your self-confidence to surround yourself with good people, positive people, people who amp you up, people who will give you criticism when you need it, because they know you need it, not because they need to criticize you or anybody. There's an old expression, "Show me your friends and I'll tell you who you are." That's a really, really accurate statement. When you feel confident and you hang around other positive, confident people, those people will infuse you. You will infuse them. And generally speaking, you have a more productive, happy, and useful life.

And THAT is what we're looking for here in this course, at least that's our aim or our course objective is to give you tools so that you can make your work better, which will in turn make your life better. Because there's nothing worse than going somewhere for eight hours and feeling awful about it. It'll just put your self-esteem in the crapper again and again and again if you don't build these skills. You show up for work again and again and again and again and again, and don't feel good about what you're doing and don't feel good about yourself.

Summary: Confidence building is crucial.

Thanks for joining me for this 1st video of The 12 Most Important Skills You Need to Become a Powerhouse Professional Assistant. I'll look forward to seeing you again when we talk about our second skill, which is Assertive Communication.