98. How to Increase Your Confidence in Your Interior Design Business

Are you relying on the right kind of confidence to grow your interior design business? How often does the thought, “I’ve never done it before,” stop you from believing you’re on the right track? What if I told you that you have plenty of evidence to prove you can trust yourself to create new things that have never existed before?

There are two distinct types of confidence that you can leverage in your interior design business to help it grow and also get out of your own way when your brain tells you, “Well, you've never done it before.” If it feels like your brain is holding you back from achieving your biggest goals, you’re in the right place.

Join me on this episode as I explore the two types of confidence that every interior design CEO needs to master. You’ll learn why your level of confidence affects every aspect of your business and how to build unshakable confidence, even when you're venturing into uncharted territory.


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What You’ll Discover from this Episode:

  • How confidence impacts every aspect of your interior design business.

  • The critical difference between evidence-based and inherent confidence.

  • Why relying solely on evidence-based confidence limits your growth as a CEO.

  • How to generate inherent confidence through your thoughts and beliefs.

  • Why hitting big goals isn't a prerequisite for feeling confident.

  • How creating mini-results helps expand both types of confidence.

Listen to the Full Episode:

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Full Episode Transcript:

Hey designer, you’re listening to episode 98. In the last Summer School episode we talked all about you showing up at your best and those times that you have felt great in your interior design business so that you can have more of those days.

Often when I ask a designer how they know they were at their best, they respond by saying I was feeling so confident. Confidence is required as an interior design business owner. And that doesn’t mean that you never doubt yourself or that you don’t hit a road bump and start to wonder, oh, can I really do it? But confidence does require you to trust yourself and your business.

Because confidence is so important and one of the many ways that my clients grow during our work together, I wanted to bring back this episode on the two, yes, two distinct types of confidence that you can leverage in your interior design business to help it continue to grow and also get out of your own way when your brain tells you, well, you’ve never done it before. Let me tell you, it is not necessary to have ever done it before in order to feel confident. And I’ll be sharing more about that in today’s episode.

Before you dive into that episode, I want to make sure that you know that now is the time to get your name on the waitlist for one-on-one private coaching if that’s something you’ve been thinking about doing. All you have to do is go to desiid.com/privatecoachingwaitlist, enter your email, tell me a little bit about yourself, and then you’ll be the first to know when availability opens up this fall.

This is the most high-touch, intimate way for us to work together. And if that is calling to you, now is the time to get your name on the list so that you are the first to know when those spots are available. I hope you enjoy revisiting this topic on confidence and I’ll be back next Wednesday with an episode on how to use your CEO Summer School lessons to their fullest as we move into the last few months of the year. I’ll talk to you soon.

Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you’re ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you’re in the right place. I’m Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let’s go.

Today what I want to talk to you about are two types of confidence that you can lean on being the interior design business CEO that you are. And I never knew that there were multiple types of confidence, and this is something that has been a huge area of growth in my own life and something I’ve been thinking about a lot as I continue to grow and evolve my own business, so I wanted to bring it here today.

It’s really important to understand what these two types of confidence are and it’s also important to know which one you’re using and when. Confidence really touches every aspect of your business, whether that is managing your time, managing a team, being a leader, creating systems, and how you price your services. And that makes it a critical part of being a CEO.

Before we dive into the two types of confidence I want to lay a little groundwork from a mindset perspective. One of the biggest roadblocks to creating the business you want is the way that you are thinking. It is not that you don’t have a particular skill set at this moment. And the thought that comes up so often when I see designers getting in their own way and putting up those stop signs for themselves is this belief that I’ve never done it before.

I see this pop up when clients want to start working on a new project type, start working out of state, open a retail shop, hire a bigger team, set higher fees. They’re embarking on a new phase of their business. I even see this with planning too. I’ll have designers tell me that they really want to join Out Of Overwhelm or maybe they even do take the leap and they join Out Of Overwhelm. And they want to get their schedule under control and achieve some balance in their lives.

But they tell me that they’ve never been a planner before. Or that they’ve tried to plan or bought planners in the past, but they’ve never been consistent. This is all just a version of I’ve never done it before. And because they haven’t done something in the past, they don’t feel confident that they can create the result in the future. This feels very, very true when I’m speaking with new clients or clients who have never encountered my work before.

Now, I don’t see the fact that you’ve never done it before as a problem because I’ve had so much experience with myself and my clients show me that past actions and past results are not ever the deciding factor in what you’re capable of doing in the future. This is not what we’re taught though. Society teaches us to rely on what I call evidence-based confidence.

Evidence-based confidence is where we use evidence that we’ve created or collected in the past to bolster our belief or allow ourselves to believe in what we can do or create in the present or future. I’m going to give you an example that’s sort of outside of business because sometimes I think when we’re not as in it, it can be a little bit easier to see the perspective.

So here’s the example I want to give you. Every night I make coffee and prepare it for the next day. I get it all set in the machine. And just a side note, I never, ever want to do this. And this is where my future self always is so happy that I did it in the morning when I get back from my walk with my dog and I’m so happy all I have to do is press the button and the coffee magically starts coming out. I am always so grateful to past Desi for that.

So, side note, but think about that when you don’t want to do something.

All right, so back to the example. I make coffee every night. Because I’ve used the scoops, because I’ve filled the water, because I know where the paper cones are located and stored, I can do this process without much thought. If you asked me, how confident are you that you can make a cup of coffee? It’s a 10 out of 10. I for sure know that I’m going to make some coffee. I know how many scoops I put in, I know how much water I like to have in it. It’s a very repeatable process. I’ve done it hundreds and hundreds of times. So I’m using evidence-based confidence, meaning I’ve done this many times before and have been successful at it, to create confidence that, yes, I can totally make a cup of coffee.

The other part I want to point out here is it also means that the days where I spill the beans, literally, I don’t make it mean anything terrible about me. I don’t start thinking, “I’ll never be able to make a cup of coffee. You’ve really messed up. Who do you think you are?” No, I sweep up the mess. I might feel a little annoyed. But I make the coffee and I still believe I can make coffee in the future.

This is evidence-based confidence at its core. We’re saying I’m pretty sure I can do this because I’ve done it before. I have the evidence. There’s no reason I can’t do it in the future. This can work really well until it doesn’t. Relying solely on this type of confidence is a mindset roadblock because it limits your future based on your past.

This could be showing up in a wide variety of places in your business. For example, you don’t go for the big project because you haven’t done it before. You don’t even bother making a plan for your schedule for the day because you haven’t done it before or you’ve made a plan and then completely dismissed it. It’s like you’re putting yourself in a do not go position. You only allow yourself to believe you can do something and then have the confidence to take action only if you’ve done it before.

And what that means is that you are likely to only create more of the same results you’ve created in the past, versus creating new results you have no evidence to support whether or not you will succeed.

This is where the second type of confidence becomes so important. As a business owner, you are constantly doing new things that you’ve never done before. This second type of confidence is what I call inherent confidence. This is confidence that comes from within, and it’s a type of confidence that’s always available to you. It’s something that you can generate on your own in the absence of evidence.

I call it inherent confidence because it’s something that really exists already within you. It’s something you just need to nurture and help it grow. Consider this, you wouldn’t be thinking, “I want something more, I have bigger dreams for this business,” if you didn’t have at least a seed of belief that you could be successful. And that’s the belief that comes from within. And that means you already have some of this type of confidence.

If you remember from episode two where I walk you through the coaching tool, The Model, you might remember that thoughts create feelings. Your actions and results are not what create your feelings. Your feelings are what drive your actions and create results.

Even with evidence-based confidence, just because you’ve done it before, doesn’t mean it’s going to happen again. But in that instance, we do give ourselves circumstances, which are the evidence, that make it easier for us to have thoughts that generate the feeling of confidence, certainty, maybe trust. You can get started by creating this inherent confidence, by the way you choose to think about yourself.

It is really that simple and the impact is really that profound. One of my go-to beliefs about myself is I know I’ll figure it out. This has served me so, so well over the years. I actually think back to when I transitioned from being a commercial interior designer to having a residential business. Or when we bought our rental properties. Or even just when I started my coaching business.

I really had no business thinking, “Oh, I’ll just start a design business,” or “Oh, I’ll just buy these rental properties and figure out how to market them, lease them, the legal piece of it, and how I’m going to create systems around tracking rent.” I really had very little evidence, if any, that I could do that. And yet, I had a strong belief that I know I’ll figure it out. And that was enough to get me into action and start creating the evidence.

Another belief you might want to try on is I’ve created things in my life that didn’t exist before, I can do that again. I want you to really consider that one. Think about this, when you started your design business you had no evidence that you could be a design business owner. So you must have had some of that inherent belief in yourself, that inherent confidence to just get started. You’ve created a business that never existed before, so you can certainly count on yourself to create even more new things that never existed before.

Another confidence belief could be feeling challenged means I’m on the right path. Or I’m a person who is willing to try new things. And lastly, you could try this one on, all I need to do is commit, have the courage, and I’ll develop the capabilities.

I think so often we think that if we don’t know something or don’t have the skill right at this moment, that something has gone wrong. Versus it’s just part of the process, and that’s where we can lean on this inherent confidence to start developing the capabilities and creating that evidence.

This is going to be something you actively have to choose to remind yourself of because while we’re told you can do anything, there are so many conditional rules we absorb about doing it right and getting the gold stars, especially for my clients who identify as perfectionists, that these sentiments are often just nice sayings or maybe a nice graphic you see on Instagram, not truths that we take in for ourselves.

Now I want you to consider a new result you want to create in your business right now. What are some of your goals? Maybe it’s your business running like a well oiled machine. Maybe it’s doubling your revenue, or purchasing a storefront, or creating a three or four day workweek. Whatever that goal is, I want you to think about it now.

Then I want you to ask yourself, which type of confidence have I been relying on to take action toward that goal? It could be the evidence-based confidence, inherent confidence, or a bit of both. Ask yourself is the type of confidence you’re relying on beneficial? Is it helping you take action or is it keeping you stuck? Which one needs to get a little bump up in the priority?

Just be honest with yourself. As always, this is never a moment to judge yourself when we evaluate what’s happening. We want to use this information to serve us and support us. If you’re going after goals you’ve never hit, you’re going to have to try new things, learn new things, do things you’ve never done before. Meaning you’re going to have to rely on inherent confidence, which is that belief in yourself in order to get into action. So this is just going to be a part of the process.

So decide what you want to believe about yourself. Believe you’re capable of figuring things out. Believe you’ll know the next best step. Believe you’re going to have your own back and be your best supporter. That isn’t to say that I totally dismiss evidence-based confidence. You can also absolutely leverage that as much as possible if it’s supportive. You could think about your big goal again and at first glance you might not think you have evidence because it’s a new goal. But I also encourage you to look at some of these other three areas where you might be able to leverage the evidence-based confidence concept a little bit more.

The first area is where are you discounting or not seeing evidence that you do actually have to bolster your belief? I’ll give you a personal example here. When I was starting my coaching business, one of the things I was doing a lot of was reaching out to podcasts to pitch them on how I could support their audience. However, I had no experience on how to pitch a podcast host on a topic or suggest that I be a guest.

I could have used that to mean that I don’t know what I’m doing and I don’t know how I’m going to make this work. But instead, I thought about where have I done something similar that I could apply those skills now? And for me, that was in the fundraising and nonprofit committee work that I had done years prior, where I had written press releases, pitched local businesses on supporting some of our fundraising efforts. So I had some of those skills, but I had initially discounted or not even seen them until I took a pause and looked.

The second thing is asking yourself how do you already do that thing, or have done the thing or skill in another area? I see this a lot with clients who come to design as a second career. Interestingly, I’ve had quite a few clients who have had backgrounds in finance and then started their interior design practice. I see them thinking that because it is two different industries, that there isn’t an overlap.

And yes, it’s not exactly the same thing, but there are for sure transferable skills that you can leverage. And this might not be in another career. Think about even selling, or sales, or marketing. A lot of clients say they don’t like marketing, or they’re not good at selling. But then I find out they’re parents, and as a parent you’re constantly selling your children on getting their shoes on, on doing their homework, on why this fun family activity is something they’re going to enjoy. So look for those transferable skills.

And the last one I want to point out is to ask yourself, who else do I know, either personally or from afar, that was able to do the thing I want to do? And then consider if they were able to do it, how could that be equally as true for you as well?

One last thing I’ll share, and this is one of the things I work with a lot with my clients, is creating mini results. Mini results are all the results that have to happen along the way to create a big goal. And not only does this help with planning and execution when you’re busy, it gives you traction for a quicker cycle of wins.

Once you start taking action, which doing new things will require some of this inherent confidence, you will start to get bits of evidence that you’re on the right track. And so what ends up happening is your evidence-based confidence grows right alongside your inherent confidence. The two support each other and both expand.

What I really want you to take away from this is that so many of you believe that you have to hit the goal, or get published, or land that dream client before you can start feeling confident. I’m here to tell you that that is not the case. Confidence is always available and you can start to build it today. Using a blend of evidence-based and inherent confidence, and knowing when it’s helpful to lean more heavily on one or the other is really the key to continuing to grow your interior design business and create new levels of personal and professional success, however you define that for yourself.

So that’s what I’ve got for you today, I’ll talk to you in the next episode.

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Thanks for joining me for this week’s episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit www.desicreswell.com. And if you’re ready to take what you’ve learned on the podcast to the next level, I would love for you to check out my signature group coaching program, Out of Overwhelm.

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