6 Easy Ways to Build Your Competence

Competence describes more than just your skills and knowledge. Competence represents anything that improves your ability to perform including your knowledge, skills, relationships, resourcefulness, processes, systems and information.

Building your competence boosts your confidence … and confidence is a close friend to high achievers.

Building your competence is like cleaning your house. If you stop cleaning, dust collects. The need to clean never ends. In order to stick to it and achieve the success you deserve, the task of building competence also never ends.

Here are six tips from 107 Ways to Stick to It that highly successful people use to build their competence and boost their confidence:

1. Seek feedback about your performance.  Building competence requires courage…courage to face the facts. Be ready for what you might hear and be prepared to make changes that might feel uncomfortable but will build your competence.
2. Listen more than you talk. Remember what Mark Twain said, “If we were supposed to talk more than we listen, we would have two mouths and one ear.” When you listen, you learn and also prevent “blind spots” — weaknesses that are apparent to others but not to you. The higher you rise in an organization, the more you must listen.
3. Build your BEST team — Buddies who Encourage Success and Truth. Lee discusses this this topic in this interview with Zig Ziglar. Choose your team wisely. Ensure each member offers the energy, truth and positive perspective you need to succeed. Connect with your BEST team, individually or as a group, on a consistent basis. Learn from them and help them — it goes both ways.
4. Create it once, use it many times. If you know you will perform a task more than once, create a checklist, form or template to save time and improve your consistency over the long haul. No need to reinvent the wheel every time you conduct or coordinate an off-site meeting, prepare a proposal, send out a mailing, plan a new project timeline, etc.
5. Learn along the way. After you complete each task, ask yourself, “What should I Stop, Start and Keep?” Identify those things that did not go so well (Stop), those you did not do that would have helped (Start) and those that went well (Keep). Continually improving your performance is a powerful way to build competence — it turns good to great!
6. Ask the right questions. The fastest way to change the answers you receive — from yourself and others — is to change the questions you ask. Asking the right questions will get you better answers whether you are asking it of yourself or of others. The questions you ask will either limit or expand the possible responses.

Check out 107 Ways to Stick to It for more tips to build your competence.