Tricks I use to remain confident

Imagine this, you're in the your office and are having a hard time meeting your monthly sales quota, you've heard from your co-workers that your boss doesn't take too kindly to unmet quotas and the stress is piling up. To make matters worse, your boss shows up and demands to speak with you. How would you handle such a situation?

Unluckily for me, I did not need to imagine the above scenario and neither did Joshua, my coworker. He and I were off our quotas by a combined margin of $500 and my boss was not having it. Following him to his office, all I could think about was "this is it, I've got to look for a new job now."

Wondering if Joshua was in the same boat, I turned to look at him but he seemed cool as a cucumber, leaving me to think that he had some kind of a plan to get us (or at least himself) out of this. I decided then and there that I would allow him to speak once our boss was done grilling us.

Not a second had passed after entering my boss' office and the grilling began. Now, the first few things I did were copying Joshua's posture, standing up straight and strong, and his breathing pattern with slow, deep breaths.

As my boss went on about his expectations of us, I noticed a shift in his tone. Perhaps it was something about him seeing Joshua and appear perfectly steeled and ready to respond to him with solutions to improve our sales numbers.

Once he was done, I followed with my plan and let Josh speak first and observed how spoke: slow, clear and controlled. He then went on to accept that he, and only he was responsible for his sales numbers and acknowledged the fact that he was underperforming. Finally, he told our boss his plan on how he would bump his numbers up all while keeping his response concise.

Throughout all this, I noticed three key elements in his response: posture, tone, and pacing. These were unique in that they were the only things about the response that did not change. As a result, he projected an air of familiarity with his own response leading me (and my boss) to believe he knew what he was talking about.

"That's it!, I thought. That's what confidence is: believing in yourself because you know what you're talking about. By the time I realized this, my boss had dismissed Josh and wanted to know what I was doing about my sales numbers.

Copying Joshua's method, I calmly (i.e.: spoke in a clear and slow but not too manner) explained my plans to him and gave him a rundown of how I would put them into effect.

One thing that fascinated me during this whole exchange was that even though I faked being confident for a --by while simply copying what Joshua did-- was that my confidence grew the longer I spoke. Though, I suppose it also helped that my boss was showing signs of softening up.

However, I did make a mistake where I dragged on for too long, exasperating my boss to the point where he stopped me and reluctantly let me go. In Hindsight, I realize that the strength of my words kept decreasing the longer I dragged on and, were I talking to perspective customer like this, I would have surely lost them.

Regardless, my boss did let me go, and I learned an important lesson from Joshua that day. I hope you too will be able to benefit from this, till next time!