How to be a MORE CONFIDENT Drone Pilot, so you can fly BETTER and MAKE MORE MONEY!

SUMMARY:

As Drone Pilots, particularly those who are looking to start a business or make money flying their drone... One of the things we hear most often from our Students in The Drone Mentor Academy and our one-to-one Drone Mentor Coaching Clients is that they're not as confident as they'd like to be.

Click HERE to listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts

In addition, this lack of self-confidence or self-belief is holding them back from achieving their goals.

So, the topic we're going to be taking a look at here is CONFIDENCE.

How do we get it, how do we BECOME more confident and how can it help us?

The BEST THING about confidence (and the absolute game-changing realisation for our Students and Coaching Clients when they go through our training) is that it is a skill that can be taught and, once you've been given a couple of simple ideas, techniques and frameworks...

YOU CAN MASTER IT TOO!

This is a MASSIVE topic that I could (and probably will do one day! :) ) write a book on... But, to help you out - here's 3 quick things to think about and implement TODAY, that'll help you to start build your confidence as a Drone Pilot, Operator or Entrepreneur straight away...

1. Competency. When we get more competent at the thing we’re talking about, that we’re presenting, that we’re delivering to a client… We’re naturally more confident about it.

2. The second thing you need to consider carefully if you want to appear more confident when operating in or around the drone industry is Planning… Obviously, this stand to reason if you’re going to go out and OPERATE a drone; you do the appropriate amount of planning for the task at hand before you head out to site and fly… But this concept goes WAY beyond that in this context.

   Plan for EVERYTHING you do. Be deliberate and work everything through BEFORE you take action. Whether it’s an email you’re sending to a potential customer, a video you’re going to shoot to pop up onto your website or a podcast episode you’re going to put out there to start attracting more customers into you…

3. INTEGRITY.

   For me, this is THE ABSOLUTE. 

   This is the value that I hold above all else, for myself and for others… And I use it to make me appear more confident. I leverage this main value of mine because it means that I NEVER have to remember what I’ve told someone. Why not? Because always trying to retain my integrity, to hold myself accountable to my words and thoughts and actions, makes it easy to remember your place. It makes it easy to tell people your story and you and they know that what you’re talking about is YOUR TRUTH.

FULL TRANSCRIPT OF THIS EPISODE; CONFIDENCE FOR DRONE PILOTS BY MATT WILLIAMS, THE DRONE MENTOR

[The following is the full transcript of this episode of The Drone Mentor Podcast. Please note that this episode, like all TDM Episodes, feature Matt speaking extemporaneously; he does all his episodes and training unscripted & filmed in one take]

Hey there, it’s Matt Williams, I am The Drone Mentor and welcome to this week’s Monday Motivation Podcast!

Hey there, it’s Matt Williams & welcome to another Monday Motivation podcast with me, The Drone Mentor… You join me here today, at the start of another week… The weekend behind us and ready to hit the road running today as we head into a new week together… A BRAND NEW week which brings with it another set of opportunities for us to continue in our mission together, to learn, build and grow… Not just in the drone world but on what is our mission to always be LEARNING about ourselves, BUILDING your knowledge of what it means to be you and GROWING your understanding of how to achieve success and financial freedom.

In this week’s episode of the podcast, we’re going to focus on building and improving our confidence so we can put ourselves out there and make unbridled progress. Progress where WE aren’t the thing holding ourselves back and we’re going to realise that oftentimes, WE’RE the very thing that’s stopping us from being successful… Not other people, our financial situation or any of the other thousand excuses we might use to not make progress… It’s down to us and our lack of self-confidence or self-belief that’s getting in our own way.

This week, we’re going to commit, together, to learning a little more about ourselves, leaning into our strengths and chipping away at our weaknesses. Exploring a couple of methods that can help us become more confident and start to make progress.

Progress towards our goals, our ambitions and our success…

But, before we get into this week’s main topic, as I always encourage you to do on the Monday Motivation podcast, we’re going to take a second to look back at what you managed to achieve in the last week. What did you do that you’re proud of and gave you a sense of satisfaction and achievement, and conversely… What could you have done better.

Look back at your last 7 days, the last week of individual opportunities that each day bought you and think of the things you’re proud of achieving, the things you’re glad you managed to acheive. Think about how they helped move the needle for you on your journey and what they mean on your route to YOUR success… 

Then, once you’ve got those positive actions in the back of your mind, or ideally, written down on a piece of paper or the journal that you’re using to help keep track of your journey… Take another moment to think back on the things you could have done better. What things did you say you were going to achieve and didn’t get round to doing? What distractions did you allow to creep into your day and what caused you to procrastinate and lose your productivity and positive momentum? 

Take a note of those things too. Learn from them and come up with a way, a method you can use to allow you to block those things out this week.

Don’t let those things manifest in THESE next 7 opportunities you have and control YOU. Take control of them and find a way to eliminate them from your days so you can REALLY start to build positive momentum this week. Momentum towards your goals and your success…

Turning our attention now then, to the main focus of this week's episode… Confidence.

Throughout all the coaching and mentoring I’ve done over the years AND based on the feedback, comments and questions I receive every day from you; it seems that one of the biggest hurdles that people in the drone industry face is a feeling of a lack of confidence.

This lack of confidence takes many forms when you talk about it; it can manifest as anything from a lack of belief in yourself, your capabilities, your ability to fly, your ability to network, your ability to call people on the telephone, the butterflies you get in your stomach before sending an email or posting a video onto social media that stops you from sending or posting… You, get the idea… We all know, pretty much, how it manifests for us…

But do you know what the coolest thing about confidence is?

It’s a skill that can be learned. It’s a skill that, with practice and with the right support, practice and frameworks in place, we can get better at. 

We can become (or appear to become) more confident.

And that, in itself, creates more self-belief and confidence!

I’ve spent many years, battling with my self-confidence too… And I’m not quite where I want to be, yet either. You see, this is one of the quirky things about confidence… People might look at someone and think ‘crikey, they’re confident’... You might be listening to me now and thinking exactly that... You might see me in my videos and think ‘I could never do that… Matt’s so confident on camera’... But you should’ve seen me for the first few years of my public speaking career… I was a MESS before I got up on stage or when I knew the camera was about to roll!

You might see an actor on the screen or a singer on the stage and think that nothing that could stop them. They’re super confident… How lucky are they that they can just get up there and do that? 

But the reality? 

We’ve all got our demons, we’ve all got our issues and we all need to do a certain number of things to APPEAR confident when we want and need to.

But, again, here’s the GREAT thing about confidence; once we realise what those things are, the key factors that I believe you need to realise and nurture in order to achieve ‘confidence’, it actually becomes a pretty easy skill to practise and improve on.

Now I could talk ALL DAY about this; in fact, I could probably take a deep dive in to this one topic alone and talk for an entire week on stage about it… BUT, I want to package up the 3 most impactful things you can do THIS WEEK, to help improve your confidence and get things moving… Things you can work on, think about and start practising TODAY, to help make you appear more confident.

First up then:

Competency. When we get more competent at the thing we’re talking about, that we’re presenting, that we’re delivering to a client… We’re naturally more confident about it.

For example, if I wanted to sell a DJI Matrice 300RTK and knew that I was about to have a sales conversation on the phone with an interested Client… I’d take the time to research the aircraft, the specs, I’d make sure I’d got a list of the available payloads, an outline of the key facts and the deals I was able to do and, even if I knew all about it before the call; I’d refresh my memory before I picked up the phone, just in case. Just to help me be more competent and therefore, more CONFIDENT on the call.

If I was heading out to do my first mapping job for a client with my drone; I’d make sure I’d been out and done as many practice mapping jobs as I could beforehand. That I knew how all the software works and EXACTLY what I needed to do with the drone when I arrived on site to get everything going and capture the relevant data. I’d make sure I was FULLY COMPETENT before I took the job on, so that I could be CONFIDENT in my ability.

This stands true for ANY element of what we’re trying to do in the drone world. Make sure you’re COMPETENT BEFORE you rock up to do anything if you want to be and want to appear more confident in yourself.

Second: Planning.

The second thing you need to consider carefully if you want to appear more confident when operating in or around the drone industry is Planning… Obviously, this stand to reason if you’re going to go out and OPERATE a drone; you do the appropriate amount of planning for the task at hand before you head out to site and fly… But this concept goes WAY beyond that in this context.

Plan for EVERYTHING you do. Be deliberate and work everything through BEFORE you take action. Whether it’s an email you’re sending to a potential customer, a video you’re going to shoot to pop up onto your website or a podcast episode you’re going to put out there to start attracting more customers into you…

PLAN, PLAN, PLAN.

It’s only through YEARS and YEARS of practice, by doing hundreds and hundreds of stage appearances, podcasts and videos that I’m competent enough to do very little planning when it comes to recording things like this… But even then, to have the confidence to record at the level I do, I have to think through how I want the message to come through to you. I have to have an outline plan in my head, otherwise, I wouldn’t be confident, and I wouldn’t be able to serve you effectively and confidently.

For me, this concept even goes so far as when I’m attending things like networking meetings… I plan out a bunch of questions BEFORE I attend, that I’m going to ask people, to break the ice, or start particular conversations BEFORE I even get to the event. This planning not only allows me to move things towards a certain outcome but it also makes me APPEAR confident!

Try it the next time you meet someone and see how it works out for you; have a few pre-planned questions that you can always have up your sleeve that allow you to kick-start a conversation and avoid those awkward silences once the introductions are over. Be THAT person in the group who appears confident and can take the lead… Not because you ARE more confident... But because you’ve planned ahead!

Third and finally for this week's episode; INTEGRITY.

For me, this is the ABSOLUTE. 

This is the value that I hold above all else, for myself and for others… And I use it to make me appear more confident. I leverage this main value of mine because it means that I NEVER have to remember what I’ve told someone. Why not? Because always trying to retain my integrity, to hold myself accountable to my words and thoughts and actions, makes it easy to remember your place. It makes it easy to tell people your story, and you and they know that what you’re talking about is YOUR TRUTH. 

We touched briefly on this in the previous Monday Motivation podcast, but if you’re clear on what you’re looking for, where you’re headed and what you need to do to get there… If you have CLARITY… Then combining this with integrity means you can always be confident in yourself and your ability.

You KNOW that what YOU’RE striving for, what you’re working towards, what you’re saying to people and what you’re doing to get you to your goal is the RIGHT THING and that, in turn, means you can be confident in YOUR thoughts, words and actions.

So… Wrapping this episode up then, this week, we’re going to strive to become more confident. We’re going to work on this skill and force ourselves to improve.

We’re going to practice our craft, we’re going to be deliberate in our thoughts and actions and we’re going to hold ourselves accountable.

Taking these three simple steps is going to help us build our confidence and help us build more and more positive momentum towards our goals and our success!

If you want to know more about this, or take a deeper dive into how to gain more confidence, then it’s covered in much more detail in my confidence masterclass, which you can find inside The Drone Mentor Academy AND if you join me in my one-to-one coaching programme, there’s a dedicated module on this exact topic.

So, make sure you go check those out and join the waiting list if enrollment is closed when you visit the website, as we only allow a certain number of people into the programmes every 12 weeks.

With that, that’s all for this week - I hope you have a great 7 days and are able to make the most of the opportunity that each morning brings.

Until next time my friend,

Fly safe & blue skies.

Matt