When you feel confident, you’re truly able to step into self-belief. It’s not that your problems disappear – it’s more that you feel like you have the ability to face them head-on. You’re able to speak up when needed, ask for that pay rise you’ve been wanting, have that difficult conversation with your best friend or mother-in-law… because the “what ifs” don’t hold you back any more.

Cultivating confidence isn’t easy, but it is pretty straightforward. It takes practice (every day) and a commitment to do the work.

My proven five-step process, the 5Cs, will help you create more confidence, starting now.

Step 1: Choice

To walk through life with confidence, first you need to acknowledge that you have choices. You make dozens of choices on the daily.

The question is: are the choices you’re making leading you towards empowering decisions? Or have your choices been keeping you in fear?

When we aren’t actively choosing to make decisions for the things that matter most to us, we end up idle… this is when we “wish” things would change and “hope” for more in our lives, but we haven’t actually DECIDED to choose something better for ourselves.

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The first choice you need to make is to decide! Instead of procrastinating on this little choice, just decide that you’re going to start moving in the direction of what you desire.

Step 2: Courage

Courage is when you do something, even though you are literally terrified about it. It is one of the most important parts of creating confidence. It is THE thing that gets us through uncertainty and it also goes hand in hand with choice.

Courage doesn’t come to you unless you actually do the scary thing… in other words, you don’t muster up the courage to do the courageous thing. It doesn’t work like that. Instead, the courage comes AFTER you have made the choice to just go for it, regardless of the fear and the unknowing.

Step 3: Create

Create is about taking aligned, creative action. It’s about becoming resourceful and innovative.

When you create, the actions you take are in alignment with your choices, your emotions and your feelings.

What you’re creating needs to feel good, exciting and inspiring. Anyone can take action. But action just for the sake of action is not useful. It’s not going to change your world. It’s not going to help you live with vitality and purpose.

The truth is, you may not know what the next clear step is. Sometimes, the things you need to do may not be available or obvious to you yet. So – you create it.

Step 4: Consider

Reflection, evaluation and perspective: that’s what our fourth step, consider, is all about.

Once you take the action in step three to create, you’ll get a result. Now, you need to pause for a moment to consider how that action went.

What was the outcome or the result of the action you took? Every time you take an action (whether it’s in alignment or not) you will get feedback on your results. Was it positive? Did you succeed? Did you get the outcome you wanted? Or was the action you took no good? Do you feel like you “failed”?

This is where you have the opportunity to LEARN instead!

Step 5: Continue

This is all about momentum! It’s the “snowball stage” of the practice. Continue is about being committed to moving, growing and evolving.

If you stop, you don’t grow. If you stop, you don’t create. If you stop, you don’t keep making choices and decisions don’t get made in your life (or at least not the ones you want to be making).

There’s no courage being created in your world. There’s no alignment and no action being taken, no small steps towards the things that you want.

When you continue, it means you are committed to always going back to step one and choosing what’s next, into step two to get that courage going, into step three to create the aligned action, into step four to consider your results, you evaluate, reflect and then boom!

Continue – YOU. DO. IT. ALL. AGAIN. And again!

These are the steps the most confident people in the world do on a daily basis and if you commit to practising confidence, you too will be creating confidence on the daily.

Erika Cramer is an award-winning international confidence coach and host of the Confidence Chronicles Podcast.