Being young and starting to pitch your own new ideas brings up questions of how to do it and have people take you seriously, which is hard to master if you have little experience. You don’t want to sound arrogant, but in trying to be humble, you could end up under-selling yourself.

Even when I was looking for summer jobs and I was “selling myself” to a doctor’s office to be the office assistant, I was nervous. I was naturally humble, and nervous because I had never had to sell myself before and I didn’t want to sound overly confident, even though I knew I had the responsibility and skill sets to take on the work. But then I started figuring out that there is that thing called under-selling yourself.

I know I discussed what to do when your ideas get turned down, but along those lines, what are ways that people sell their ideas, or themselves for that matter, in a confident way without sounding arrogant?

And as kind of a follow-up to my last post, what if your new ideas or your services might offend someone because it will be replacing an idea or work they did themselves? To sell your idea you might have to point out how much some of their own previous work isn’t working… you might step on a few toes.

It seems like a big dance to me sometimes and I wanted to hear other people’s experiences or lessons learned.

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