Do you find that in some situations you are fully confident, yet in others you are quaking? You know confidence, yet you need to feel that confidence in more situations. Here are some tips that will help you to build your confidence:
1. a. Think about situations where you do have self-confidence – analyse these to find the roots of that confidence. What has to be there for you to feel confident?
b. Once you have identified the elements that support your confidence you can make sure you prepare for any situation, by bringing those elements with you to the situation.
For example, typically people feel confident when they know what they are doing and have experience of having done it before successfully. So research the knowledge you need, so you enter the situation from a place of ‘knowing’, not that insecure place of ‘not knowing’. Think of experiences you have had that are similar, where you felt confidence and take that confidence with you into this (new) situation.
2. Where you have to do something new for the first time and can’t prepare the required knowledge, acknowledge this upfront. Tell people that this is new for you and you may be asking some basic questions – then you have licence to ask whatever you need. It is surprising how often such basic questions stimulate new learning for the group and generate new solutions, which add value to all.
3. Rehearse where possible – the brain doesn’t differentiate between an actual experience and a practise experience or even an imagined experience, so the more you can imagine and rehearse a positive experience beforehand, the more it will feel like you are on solid ground in the actual event.
4. Keep a log – jot down in a separate learning journal or in your diary experiences where you have left feeling confident. This tracks the evidence of your confidence and makes it more difficult for you to tell yourself you lack confidence … the evidence that you are a confident person is there.
5. Behave ‘as if’ you are confident – this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Internally you will respond to this ‘as if’ confidence and grow real confidence. Externally others will see you as a confident person and treat you as such, this will then boost your sense of confidence and you are in a positive cycle. (You can see how the opposite would apply, if you behave as someone who lacks confidence, others will challenge you, which will set off a negative cycle.)
Author: Amanda Bouch specialises in helping people develop their leadership style from the inside out.
