Welcome to the August edition of The Inbox Coach, a monthly email to bring you a little bit of coaching to your inbox and help you to make time for your personal development. This month I’m focusing on confidence at work.
Before I get into this month’s topic, I want to take a moment to celebrate that The Inbox Coach is 1 year old this month. I started this email last year to help people to make time for their career development every week. It’s been a pleasure to hear how these emails have helped you to make your career development a priority. I’m a huge fan of little and often when it comes to working on your career, and I hope this weekly prompt and reflection questions helps you to keep nudging your development up the to do list and moving your forward in your career.
Confidence
If there is one topic that consistently comes up with my clients, it is confidence. Wanting to be more confident, not feeling confident enough to take an action, having your confidence knocked by a bad boss or a toxic workplace. It is at the heart of so many conversations.
Confidence is a strange thing, because it isn’t something you can achieve in its own right, it is how you feel and behave when doing something else. And on top of that, it also has two sides, how you are perceived by others and how you feel yourself. Someone can appear to be very confident but have lots of doubt about their ability, while someone else may seem unsure of themselves but possess an inner confidence that they don’t waiver from.
Ability vs self-belief
Two things underpin confidence, your ability (made up of your knowledge, skills and experience) and your self-belief. It makes sense to lack confidence when you don’t have the knowledge, skills or experience in a situation (although this doesn’t stop some people!). Whilst you are learning you aren’t always going to get it right and this is just part of the process. The more you practice a skill, the better you get at it and in turn the more confident you become. The self-belief part of confidence is trickier. So many of my clients can objectively say that they are good at their job, they have the skills, they have the experience, but they still say they don’t have the confidence or they doubt their own abilities.
That belief impacts on how we behave. If we are unsure of our ability we show up as hesitant or reluctant, which in turn can come across to other people and impact how we are perceived. If we believe we can do it, it shows. We are more assertive in speaking up, we offer suggestions, and our confidence is recognised by other people and reflected back to us, which in turn makes us even more confident.
Getting more confident
So how do you cultivate that self-belief and create a confident version of yourself? It’s not quite as easy as “fake it until you make it” but I do believe that how we frame the situation we are in can help us to approach it in a more productive way. When you are faced with a question you don’t know the answer to, your focus can either be on the answer that you don’t know or what you are going to do to find out the answer. Rather than thinking that you don’t feel confident about giving presentations, reframe it as an opportunity for you to practice your public speaking skills. If your doubt comes from your ability, practice or ask for help. Finding confidence is about asking what do I need to feel confident in this situation and then seeking out those things.
Reflection
*If you can’t do the exercises from this email now, then don’t forget to pick a time when you are going to do them and add this email to your calendar
Feeling more confident at work comes from addressing the underlying cause of your lack of confidence. It’s working out what you need to practice more so you can lean on your abilities and what stories you need to retell about yourself so that you believe that you can do it.
When you are feeling a confidence wobble ask yourself these questions:
What is stopping me from feeling confident?
How can I reframe this situation from a lack of confidence to something else?
What resources do I have to draw on to help me in this situation?
How would I approach this task as my most confident self?
What do I need to tell myself to believe that I can do this?
When you better understand what is getting in the way of you feeling confident you can do something about it. Think about what answers come up for you when you are asking and answering these questions. Spend a few minutes writing in your journal about how answering these questions makes you feel.
Action
Like so many things in your career development, getting more confident at work requires you to take an action. You either need to practice more so that you can trust in your ability to do something to find your confidence, or you have to work on your self-belief that you are capable and resourceful.
Task
When you find yourself feeling lacking in confidence ask yourself how you can reframe the situation to a more positive one. Take the pressure off yourself by approaching a task in a curious way and see what happens. Try giving yourself a pep talk, reminding yourself of all the resources you have to use, that you are capable, and you’ve got this!!
If you can’t do the exercises from this email now, then don’t forget to pick a time when you are going to do them and add the prompts in this email to your calendar.
Inspiration
“I want to say to all the young women out there, as I say to all young people: believe in yourselves, follow your passion and never give up, because you will create a future filled with possibility.” – Marin Alsop
Being a conductor is a role that has confidence at its heart. Your job is to stand in front of an orchestra or choir and take control over what is going to happen next. Everyone is dependent on you to bring the ensemble together and you have to show up with complete confidence, not a shadow of hesitancy, to get the best out of the musicians sat in front of you. And that job is made all the harder when not only is your musical talent judged but also the fact that you are a woman is judged as well.
Marin Alsop is an American conductor who studied at the Julliard School and had Leonard Bernstein as a mentor. Marin is a wonderfully vibrant conductor, and she certainly isn’t afraid to take on a challenge, one of the biggest being the lack of female conductors, and women in general in leadership positions in the classical music world. It is hard to believe that in the last 8 years, Marin’s career has included two big firsts for women. In 2013 she was the first female conductor of the BBC's Last Night of the Proms in its 118-year history! Her appointment in January 2018 as director of the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra was also the first appointment of a woman in its entire history. Not only has Marin had to have confidence in her work to do her job, but she has had to cultivate a confidence and self-belief that she can take on roles that no woman has taken on before.
The advice that I take from Marin Alsop is to not let the current state of the world knock your confidence and stop you from dreaming big. In her lifetime, Marin has achieved some huge firsts, but as she said in her conductor’s address in the 2013 Last Night of the Proms, she looks forward to the day when we aren’t celebrating the first woman but many of the other women who have taken up that baton. You can find out more about Marin Alsop and why I consider her to be one of my unconventional mentors here.
I can’t believe that I have been writing these emails for a year. They are the favourite part of my week and not only are they helping you to make time for you development but they also help me too, so thank you for being a regular reader. I love hearing how these emails help you, so hit reply and let me know what has been your favourite topic that I have covered and which topics you would like to see in year two of The Inbox Coach
I’ll be back next week with more thoughts on how to cultivate confidence at work
