Have Confidence In Your Plan

I interned at an environmental insurance brokerage firm during the summer of 2019. If you’re not familiar, this type of company works with a diverse range of other companies to provide them with the right insurance coverage in case certain environmental events interrupt their business.

I truly enjoyed working there. My day-to-day consisted of a healthy mix of client-specific work and occasional one-off projects. One of these projects required me to research the structure of a company and write a report on it. I spent multiple days on that project, and I was afraid that it had taken me much longer than my superiors had expected. Additionally, I wasn’t confident in the results I produced. These two factors in tandem are not a good combination.

I ended up sending my results over to my superiors in an email full of “hedging” language. I used the words “may”, “might”, “think”, and “should”  WAY too much for a professional email. It resulted in a talk about confidence that I’ll never forget. The lesson I learned through this mistake is applicable in a variety of situations, ranging from the work you do to the life you plan.

It’s important to have confidence in the results you produce. If you don’t, your work comes across as worse than nothing. Do you think my superiors were able to use my results at all? I would personally be scared to rely on work that had such a low level of confidence behind it. It would’ve been more productive for my superiors to just handle it themselves so that they could ensure the soundness of the information.

The same rule of confidence goes for your life plan. Confidence about where you’re headed next in life is vitally important. If you have that confidence, you’ll feel good about each step you take in that direction. With each subsequent step, your confidence builds. Even as you experience setbacks and failures, the distance you’ve traveled so far along your planned route will keep you going. In short, you MUST be confident in your life plan to be successful.

If you don’t have that confidence, on the other hand, the path gets slippery. Taking a break from making progress on your life plan becomes a tendency - you may worry that it might not all pan out the way you want it to. It gets easier to settle in wherever you’re at, even if that place is nowhere near the place you originally intended to end up at.

That’s where the importance of The INDUSTRY comes in. We ensure that each of our students creates a life plan according to their strengths, and we make sure that each student MAKES IT THEMSELVES to achieve the highest possible level of self-confidence. When your life plan is built in a precise, strength-oriented way, it becomes harder to fail. You can see each step laid out before you clearly. When you enroll in The INDUSTRY, the next stage of your life doesn’t remain some ambiguous “something” - it becomes a real target that is entirely possible to hit. Confidence comes from keeping the promises you’ve made to yourself, and through The INDUSTRY, you can create a bold life plan.

-David Smith