When you love your work, it's more likely that you will feel confident about the way you perform your role. But when you're struggling to enjoy what you do and your performance is less than ideal, it can have a significant impact on your confidence.

Building confidence can be difficult - unlike other fields of learning, reading about or understanding what makes people confident won't necessarily make you feel any more confident.

It's unlikely that you will achieve beyond a certain point in your career without feeling reasonably self assured and more importantly, it's often difficult to feel truly happy within yourself while you feel a sense of self doubt about how you perform in your role.

We are all born with a natural inclination to feel either more or less confident. Your family environment, your position in the family and your experiences in the outside world, including those in your workplace play an important part in how that confidence develops.

It's never too late to build on your confidence - but before you begin, it's worth considering a few key points.

Almost all of the clients I work with have experienced some self doubt with regard to their career along the way. When I ask them how others perceive them, they generally agree that people would say that they appear more confident than they feel inside.

I have found it intriguing (and humbling) to realise that regardless of whether a person is the CEO or the office junior, some sense of self doubt is inevitable. Most of us do well to mask that but it's comforting to know that even your most self assured colleagues will experience periods of uncertainty from time to time.

Knowing that these feelings are normal will help you to keep them in perspective. Rather than over generalising, you can keep your thoughts specific to a given situation. Thinking 'I'm not confident to speak up at meetings' or 'interviews make me nervous' is better than creating a general self belief such as 'I lack confidence at work'.

To begin to build your confidence, think about an area of your life where you already feel self assured and consider how your body language, the words you use, your voice projection and your overall manner is different. Choose one of these qualities that you can easily incorporate into the situation where you feel less confident and start to practise behaving differently. That old saying 'fake it until you make it' is worth remembering here!

Building confidence in your workplace takes time but it is a worthwhile pursuit. You're more likely to speak comfortably about your achievements, perform proactively and be considered for better work if you exude an air of confidence. And most importantly, you'll be happier within yourself when you are self assured within your role.

How to build confidence in the workplace:

The quote reminded me that success wasn't what mattered most anyway. Of course I knew this - it was a philosophy that I had lived my life by - but I still needed the reminder.

So I set about creating a business that would make me happy. I brought together the things that I loved and along the way, refined the way I worked so that the business continued to bring me pleasure.

I found this difficult at times. When I stopped offering evening appointments because I wanted to be with my family, I was worried that I'd lose my clients. When I said no to opportunities that came my way that would compromise my values, I worried that I'd never make any money.

Yet every time I said no to something I didn't love, it was as though I had made room for something better to come along. And each time that happened my self belief grew.