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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Ratgeber
- Sprache: Englisch
Build up your confidence levels and become more effective in all areas of your life Self-confidence is more than just a feeling inside - it's an indispensable ingredient for success in life. Written by two of the most sought-after executive coaches in the world, Confidence For Dummies, 2nd Edition arms you with proven tools and techniques for overcoming insecurity and social inhibitions, and for learning how to think and behave with more confidence at work, socially, and even in love. * Know where you stand - gauge your confidence level, identify which aspects of your life need confidence-building, and find out what's keeping you stuck in place * Get on track - tailor a personal programme for creating the new super-confident you that you want to present to the world * Find your focus - find out how to let go of perfectionism and unrealistic expectations * Project self-confidence - broadcast your new-found confidence to the world and connect more easily with others Open the book and find: * What confidence is and where it comes from * How to connect confidently through social media * Top tips to prepare you for a presentation or job interview * Advice for approaching romantic relationships with confidence * How to say 'No' with confidence * Ways to recover quickly from any setback Learn to: * Recognise your strengths and believe in your ability * Develop your confidence both personally and professionally * Get the results you want, whatever the situation
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Seitenzahl: 381
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012
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Confidence For Dummies®, 2nd Edition
Table of Contents
Confidence For Dummies®, 2nd Edition
by Kate Burton and Brinley Platts
Confidence For Dummies®, 2nd Edition
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd The Atrium Southern Gate Chichester West Sussex PO19 8SQ England www.wiley.com
Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, West Sussex, England
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, West Sussex
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except under the terms of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of a licence issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS, UK, without the permission in writing of the Publisher. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, England, or emailed to [email protected], or faxed to (44) 1243 770620.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-118-31467-8 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-118-31468-5 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-31469-2 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-31470-8 (ebk)
Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
About the Authors
Kate Burton (see www.kateburton.co.uk) is an international Neuro-linguistc Programming master coach who challenges individuals and organisations to create lives that are sustainable and fun. Her business career began in corporate advertising and marketing with Hewlett-Packard. Now, she works with leaders and managers across industries and cultures to enable them to work at their best. Kate loves to deliver custom-built coaching programmes that support people to boost their communication skills, motivation, self-awareness, and confidence. She believes that people all have unique talents, abilities, and core values; the skill is about honouring them to the full.
In addition to co-authoring Neuro-linguistic Programming For Dummies, Neuro-linguistic Programming Workbook For Dummies, and Confidence For Dummies, Kate is the author of Live Life, Love Work (published by Capstone, a John Wiley & Sons imprint). Her latest addition to the For Dummies personal development range is Coaching with NLP For Dummies.
Brinley N. Platts is a leading executive coach, researcher, and consultant to FTSE 100 companies. He is one of the UK’s leading authorities on CIO and IT executive careers and works with international companies on the integration of senior executive life and career goals. He is a behavioural scientist by training, and his passion is to enable large organisations to become places where ordinary decent people can grow and express their talents freely to the benefit of all stakeholders. He is a co-founder of the Bring YourSELF to Work campaign, which aims to release the pent-up talent and passion of today’s global workforce to create the better world we all desire and want our children to inherit.
Authors’ Acknowledgements
From Kate: The seeds for this book were sown long ago, so I’d like to acknowledge my teachers who got me curious about this elusive concept of confidence and Margaret who asked the powerful question I wanted to answer: ‘So where do you keep your confidence?’
Writing another book is like having another baby. It seems like a great idea until you are giving birth and then a joy when it’s safely delivered. My special thanks go to my writing partner Brinley who adopted this concept with me. To all my family and friends I appreciate your continual love and support. Bob – you’re a star.
To my clients, colleagues and coaches, thank you for the stories, inspiration and support. To Dan, Kathleen, Sam, and Jason plus all at Wiley, thank you for your cool, calm confidence over the hurdles.
Now it’s over to you the reader to make this book really work for you. Please take the baby now and run with it!
From Brinley: After a long and relatively conventional business career it is an amazing thing to reconnect with the passions and drivers of my youth and find them all as fresh as they were in the 1970s and bursting for their opportunity to be fully expressed in the world. This has been my experience over the last 4–5 years and I am grateful to everyone who has played a part in my awakening.
My mission now is to be an awakener to anyone who feels there should be the opportunity for a full and rich life that integrates home and work and which doesn’t ‘cost the earth’.
My special thanks go to Kate for this opportunity to work with her, the Wiley publishing team, and to my wife Nicola, mother of our two young children. I also want to acknowledge my older children Loretta and Oliver for their wonderful inspiration and love over the last 20 years, and my parents who raised me to think for myself.
I encourage you, the reader, to take on your work in the world with a renewed confidence and sense of purpose. The world is changing and it needs to change further and faster. With your commitment we can make it happen.
Publisher’s Acknowledgements
We’re proud of this book; please send us your comments at http://dummies.custhelp.com. For other comments, please contact our Customer Care Department within the U.S. at 877-762-2974, outside the U.S. at 317-572-3993, or fax 317-572-4002.
Some of the people who helped bring this book to market include the following:
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Commissioning Editor: Kerry Laundon
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Publisher: David Palmer
Cover Photos: © iStock / Sean Nel
Cartoons: Rich Tennant (www.the5thwave.com)
Composition Services
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Proofreaders: Lauren Mandelbaum, Dwight Ramsey
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Publishing and Editorial for Consumer Dummies
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Introduction
Confidence is one of those odd things in life that turn out to be surprisingly difficult to tie down (beauty and quality belong to this strange, subjective group too). You may think that you know what it is, and you may feel certain that you can recognise it when you see it, but you may struggle to define exactly what ‘it’ is.
Confidence is an everyday experience, something you have quite often, except on those all-important occasions when it seems to leave you and you could really use more of it – whatever ‘it’ is. Whether you’re a mature business person or a school leaver, confidence has this annoying habit of disappearing unexpectedly. Yet when you really need to dig deep, you find you have amazing internal strength to draw on from your toughest life experiences. In this newly updated second edition of Confidence For Dummies, you can clear up the confusion around confidence, and particularly what you may refer to as self-confidence. You dispel a lot of the mystique around how you can develop and build your self-confidence; perhaps to an extent you feared would never be possible for you.
We’ve designed every chapter of this book to help you understand: where your personal confidence comes from, how you can generate an incredibly powerful type of confidence in your life on demand, and how you can do it more reliably with less stress. You will make the fastest progress by immediately putting what you discover into action, by trying out the advice and exercises as you go along, and thereby achieving the deep and lasting personal confidence you were born to enjoy.
Are you up for this? Let’s go.
About This Book
Type the word ‘confidence’ into an Internet search engine and you can expect over 50 million hits. That’s a lot of published material about something so natural. Those hits are also an indication of the breadth of the subject so, as you want to get straight to the heart of your confidence, we have been selective in Confidence For Dummies.
The task ahead of you is to build your confidence so that you can be more powerful, more engaging, and more at ease in every aspect of your life. These areas include your work and your private life (friends and family, romance, community, and so on). We steer clear of more complex explorations of personal development, except where they translate into immediate practical guidance.
You should be able to dip into this book for practical and rapid support on such everyday confidence problems as:
Preparing for an important presentation or job interview.
Asking the man or woman of your dreams to marry you.
Picking up the phone to make that difficult call to an important new customer.
Asking for the order, if you’re in sales.
Picking yourself up quickly and appropriately after any setback.
Connecting online with the wider world through tweets and blogs.
Conventions Used in This Book
To help you navigate through this book, we set up a few conventions:
Italics are used for emphasis and to highlight new words or defined terms.
Bold faced text indicates the key concept in a list.
Monofont is used for web and email addresses.
What You’re Not to Read
Confidence For Dummies is primarily an action guide to building your confidence. In many places, this requires us to set the context you need to grasp the situation. In other places, we include material useful for your full understanding, but not essential for you to be able to take the action and get the benefit. Much as we want you to take all of it on board in time, we make it easy for you to identify those parts that you can leave for later.
When you’re short of time, or when you just want to stick with the essentials, you can skip over these sections:
The text in the sidebars: The shaded boxes that appear here and there share personal stories and anecdotes, but they’re not integral to your taking action, and you can safely skip reading them if you’re not interested.
The stuff on the copyright page: You’ll find nothing here of value unless you’re looking for legal notices and reprint information. If you are, then this is the place to look.
Foolish Assumptions
We make a few other assumptions about you. We assume that you’re a normal human being who wants to be happy and confident. You’re probably interested in becoming more effective in various parts of your life and in becoming more comfortable when you face demanding situations and people. Although you’re probably already acting confidently in many areas, you may lack the power and skills to perform the way you want to in some others.
This book is for you if you want to:
Grow in the areas where you currently feel stuck.
Become better at your job and get acknowledged for it.
Feel less anxious and stressed about things you have to do.
Step up to become a powerful leader in your work or community.
Feel confident that no matter what life throws at you, you can find a way to deal with it.
How This Book Is Organised
The book is divided into five main sections, with each of these sections broken into chapters. The table of contents gives you details on each chapter.
Part I: Considering the Basics
In this part, we explain exactly what we mean by confidence and how it feels. You can evaluate how much confidence you have currently. You discover how to spot where your confidence is waxing or waning, in what areas of your life you need more confidence right now, and what is keeping you stuck.
Armed with all this insight, you can create your personal programme for the new super-confident version of you that you want to present to the world.
Part II: Gathering the Elements
Everyone would like to be more confident on occasion, but to take action, whether at work or socially, when you’re feeling anything but confident, requires motivation. In this part, you’re invited to connect with your main drivers in life, gain a better understanding of your deepest values, and leverage this information to get what you want.
You venture into the sometimes messy world of emotions and mood swings – including the extremes of ecstasy, anger, and despair. This part guides you to safe connection with your personal motivation.
Part III: Building Your Confident Self
In this part, you pull up your most confident self and reconnect with how you do it. You let go of perfectionism in pursuit of effectiveness, let go of unreal expectations to enjoy your experiences. You find out how to extend your comfort zone and become relaxed and focused in achieving whatever you want. You forge a link between your mind and body and realise that taking better care of yourself helps you maintain your self-confidence. You also discover how to project your confident self out into the world through your powerful voice. Best of all, you discover the Guaranteed Success Formula as a fool-proof approach for getting the results you really want.
Part IV: Engaging Other People
In this part of your journey to confidence, you get tips on putting your increased personal power to use at work and in your private life. You use what you know about building confidence to ensure that your approach to romantic relationships is successful, and you find out how to take the plunge into social media to form a powerful, confident online presence.
Part V: The Part of Tens
When you want a quick fix of inspiration to spur you into action or a reminder of what is important every day, you can find it here. The familiar Part of Tens gives you straight-talking confidence-boosting advice in bite-sized chunks.
Icons Used in This Book
Within each chapter you find the following icons pointing you to particular types of information that you may find immediately useful. Here is an explanation of what each icon stands for:
This icon brings your attention to a personal story you may find inspiring or useful.
The bull’s-eye highlights practical advice you can use to boost your confidence immediately.
This icon indicates an exercise you can use to broaden your understanding of yourself and your own confidence issues.
Information to take note of and keep in mind as you apply your boosted confidence in the world is indicated with the finger and string.
Text next to the Warning icon urges you to take special care of yourself in dealing with specific issues.
This icon does what it says and gives you a clear definition of terms that may not be familiar to you.
Where to Go from Here
Although all the material in this book is relevant to developing your most confident version of yourself, you don’t have to read it cover to cover over any set period. You benefit most if you address first those sections that are most relevant to the areas of your life where you feel the need for more self-confidence most keenly. For example, if you’re feeling nervous about changes happening at work, or going to a party, say, go first to the chapters that deal with this; feel free to dip in where you need guidance and support right now.
After you read the book and are keen to take your levels of confidence and achievement to even higher levels, we recommend more personalised forms of development training and coaching. Take a look at the further guidance and resources we recommend at www.yourmostconfidentself.com.
Part I
Considering the Basics
In this part . . .
From understanding what confidence is and how it feels to tackling unhelpful assumptions you make about yourself, the chapters in this part help you lay the foundations for your new, confident self. Armed with all kinds of insights into what you want for yourself, savour these chapters to design your own journey and set the milestones along the way.
Chapter 1
Assessing Your Confidence
In This Chapter
Identifying the key ingredients of confidence
Rating yourself on the confidence indicators
Celebrating your good points
Visualising the super-confident new you
Getting started on changing
Welcome to the start of your confidence-building programme. It’s great to have you on board for what we promise will be a wonderful and transformational journey. With confidence comes more fun, freedom, and opportunities to do what really works for you.
In this chapter, we lay the foundations for our travels together, starting with some definitions of confidence and a practical, nuts-and-bolts assessment of where you are today.
Here you start flexing your confidence muscles – and we know from experience that you’re already in a much more confident shape than you may give yourself credit for. You can also celebrate what you’re already good at and imagine the new super-confident you on the horizon as your confidence-building work progresses.
Then, it’s about getting tooled up ready for action. After all, what’s the point of hiding your talents when there’s so much important work to be done in this world?
Defining Confidence
When asked to think what confidence means, most people have a feel for it but find it quite difficult to tie down precisely. After all, confidence is not some miracle pill or wonder food you can buy in a shop.
Before you dive into this book on how to be more confident, we invite you to explore the definition of confidence. A good dictionary provides at least three definitions for confidence, and you need to understand each aspect as it is easy to muddle them:
Self-assuredness: This definition relates to your confidence in your ability to perform to a certain standard.
Belief in the ability of other people: This definition focuses on how you expect others to behave in a trustworthy or competent way.
Keeping certain information secret or restricted to a few people: This definition concerns the idea of keeping a confidence.
We’ve found that an even better definition exists. One that’s more useful to you in everyday life. One that’s true no matter how tough a situation you face, or how comfortable you feel about it. Our definition:
At its heart, confidence is the ability to take appropriate and effective action in any situation, however challenging it appears to you or others.
Confidence is not about feeling good inside, although it’s a bonus if you do.
What it is in practice
Now, how does confidence show up in daily life? Well, have you ever started something – perhaps an exercise session or presentation at work – even though you didn’t feel like doing it at that moment, only to find that when you got going, you started to feel okay about it and even glad you tackled it? This kind of shift in how you experience a situation gives you a taste of what confidence is in practice. It is your ability to reach beyond how you’re feeling in the moment in order to take action that leads to the outcome you want.
Anish is an accountant turned management consultant who has travelled the world on international assignments for large corporations. Now running his own partnership, he leads complex projects and presents a calm, rational, and focused image in business meetings. When deadlines are pressing and tempers rise in project teams, he is the one who patiently exudes confidence that delivery can and will happen on time.
How does he do this under pressure? ‘I experience the situation as a series of hoops that I just need to get through – like a tunnel,’ he says. ‘Sometimes there will just be two or three. At other times, as many as twenty in a row. I can feel as anxious inside about what needs to be done as the next person, but I experience it as a sequence to go through patiently one by one, and it gets easier as I see the light beckoning at the end.’
Approaching challenges with confidence in Anish’s style brings clear benefits. For example:
You believe that it is possible to tackle and achieve things that others consider difficult.
You inspire others around you and stop them panicking.
You break down a large project into smaller parts that you can tackle one by one.
How it feels
Don’t worry about whether you feel comfortable performing a challenging activity or are fully relaxed about the action you’re taking. Confident people are okay with the feeling of not knowing all the answers. Phew, what a relief. Confidence is just the feeling that it’ll be okay.
The sense of feeling confident inside comes with increased practice and familiarity with what you do. You can also create it from your life experiences and bring it out when you need it. Doing so doesn’t mean that you won’t ever feel scared. You will, but the good news is that you can live with the fear.
Here are some ways that you can recognise confidence in yourself:
You feel poised and balanced.
You’re breathing easily.
You’re moving towards a goal or action with a sense of purpose.
You’re being proactive rather than defensive.
You know that you can deal with whatever life throws at you, even if you can’t control it.
You can laugh at yourself.
You know everything will be alright in the end, however long it takes.
So, we’re going to support you as you find your inner confidence to take the first step to wherever you want to go, however scary or difficult it seems just now.
Determining Where You Stand Now
Any measure of confidence is, by its nature, subjective. Other people may form an opinion about how confident you are based on your outside appearance and actions, and only you can know for sure what you feel like on the inside – what you believe to be true, and what it’s like to be you.
In this section, we invite you to make your own assessment of where your confidence level is today.
Your confidence level is different according to the time and place. If you think back ten years to a younger you, you probably realise that your confidence has grown since then according to the experiences you’ve faced, knowing that you’ve lived to tell the tale. How confident you feel differs in various situations, and may well fluctuate from day to day and week to week according to what’s happening at work and at home. There may be areas where you’ve taken a risk, or suffered a loss, for example, and your confidence has dropped.
If you’ve been unwell and have taken on too much work, your confidence level may dip and wobble. Yet when you’re well and have a sense of completing your work, you may feel as if you can conquer the world. Think of your confidence as a pair of old-fashioned scales – your confidence is a delicate balancing mechanism and anything, even something feather light, may tip it either way unexpectedly.
Make change easy on yourself. Rome wasn’t built in a day. We’re not going to suggest that you go hang gliding off a mountain top today if standing on a stepladder gives you the collywobbles in your stomach. Allow yourself time and space to improve. Lots of smaller steps are often more realistic and maintainable compared to giant leaps for mankind.
Looking at indicators of confidence
We pinpoint ten core indicators of confidence that we explore in depth throughout this book. When you act with confidence, you’re likely to have a good selection of these ten qualities:
Direction and values: You know what you want, where you want to go, and what’s really important to you.
Motivation: You’re motivated by and enjoy what you do. In fact, you’re likely to get so engrossed in what you’re doing that nothing distracts you.
Emotional stability: You’ve a calm and focused approach to how you are yourself and how you are with other people as you tackle challenges. You notice difficult emotions such as anger and anxiety, but you work with them rather than letting them overcome you.
A positive mind-set: You’ve the ability to stay optimistic and see the bright side even when you encounter setbacks. You hold positive regard for yourself as well as other people.
Self-awareness: You know what you’re good at, how capable you feel, and how you look and sound to others. You also acknowledge that you’re a human being, and you don’t expect to be perfect.
Flexibility in behaviour: You adapt your behaviour according to circumstance. You can see the bigger picture as well as paying attention to details. You take other people’s views on board in making decisions.
Eagerness to develop: You enjoy stretching yourself, treating each day as a learning experience, rather than acting as if you’re already an expert with nothing new to find out. You take your discoveries to new experiences.
Health and energy: You’re in touch with your body, respect it, and have a sense that your energy is flowing freely. You manage stressful situations without becoming ill.
A willingness to take risks: You’ve the ability to act in the face of uncertainty – and put yourself on the line even when you don’t have the answers or all the skills to get things right.
A sense of purpose: You’ve an increasing sense of the coherence of the different parts of your life. You’ve chosen a theme or purpose for your life.
You can use these indicators to help figure out where you’re stuck in life because you lack the confidence to move on.
Finding your place on the scale
The 20 statements in Table 1-1 relate to the indicators of confidence we laid out in the preceding section. Consider each and decide on the extent to which you agree or disagree using the five-point scale provided. Take the test as often as you like and keep a note of your developing profile.
Do the evaluation now and make a note in your diary to come back and review it in, say, six months’ time and notice what you’ve discovered.
Completing this questionnaire provides you with a simple stock take of some of the main areas of your life affecting your confidence right now. If you answer the questions accurately, you can use specific chapters of this book to target the areas that merit your immediate attention.
There are no right or wrong answers. Simply answer as honestly as you can.
Frankl’s search for meaning
Viktor E. Frankl, the founder of Logotherapy, was one of the 20th century’s great therapists. He formulated his revolutionary approach to psychotherapy in four Nazi death camps, including Auschwitz, where he was captive from 1942 to 1945.
At the heart of his theory is the belief that, whatever our personal circumstance, what keeps us going most surely is the meaning we find in living. This belief helped him survive the camps against all odds when millions of others perished, and after the war it enabled him to treat many of its victims.
Frankl agreed with the philosopher Nietzsche that ‘he who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how’. In the camps, Frankl saw that people who had hope of being reunited with loved ones, who had projects they felt a need to complete, or who had great faith tended to have a better chance at survival than those who had little to keep them going through the difficulties.
When one of Frankl’s patients faced a collapse of confidence through the loss of meaning in his or her life, Frankl would seek to bring relief through three routes:
1. To broaden the patient’s appreciation of life by making conscious the fuller value of all that person was achieving, creating, and accomplishing (and yet dismissing).
2. To recover and re-live powerful if transient experiences of feeling most alive: the view from a mountain top, the love for another, the perfect athletic performance (what Maslow may have called ‘Peak Experiences’ see Chapter 4).
3. To find a powerful positive meaning by the reframing of apparently meaningless situations. For example, a man surviving his wife after a long and happy union had saved her from the trauma he was having to bear of living alone.
Frankl’s experience and his thinking are set out beautifully in his book: Man’s Search for Meaning.
Now, give yourself 5 points for every tick in the strongly agree column, 4 for every one in the agree column, 3 for neutral, 2 for disagree, and finally 1 for strongly disagree. Add up your points and check the next section for advice related to your total score. The second stage of the scoring process – in the ‘Personal profile’ section – encourages you to determine which areas of your life and this book are worthy of your immediate attention.
Overall rating
Find your total score in one of the following categories:
80–100: Congratulations! By any standards, you’re what most people consider to be a confident person. You’re clear on your priorities and are in positive pursuit of the life you want.
Take note of any areas where you scored below par and consider the advice in the ‘Personal profile’ section below.
60–80: Well done! You’re already pretty confident in most situations. Just a few areas bring you down in the test and in your life. You can find plenty of guidance for dealing with these trouble spots in this book. Look at the advice in the next section to make the most rapid progress.
40–60: You’re in the right place! You may be experiencing some confusion or uncertainty in your life right now, and you may wonder whether you can do anything about it. Give yourself time to work on the areas that need attention and you will be amazed by the progress you can make.
20–40: Full marks for honesty and courage! Your confidence may be at low ebb right now, but it doesn’t have to stay that way. You can find good advice that you can put to use on almost every page of this book. If you take our advice, and act upon it, you face the possibility of life transformation.
Personal profile
After you score your questionnaire and read the relevant advice in the preceding section, take another look at your scoring and note the areas that brought your overall score down. Look at statements you most strongly disagreed with. If you scored high on most questions, look at the statements with which you find yourself unable to strongly agree.
You can use your individual scores to create your personal confidence profile. This profile now gives you something specific to think about. Let’s say you’re unclear about what is most important to you in life, or you beat yourself up over every little mistake. Perhaps you fail to consult others, or you feel alone and isolated. All these things affect how confident you feel, and how prepared you are to take action.
You can find advice and action guidance on all these issues in the chapters that follow. Use the contents pages and chapter summaries to find those areas that can give your confidence the quickest and biggest boosts.
This exercise is a simple one, designed to give you a quick start and an immediate agenda for improvement. You can use the test to monitor your growing confidence. However, if you want a more detailed analysis, go to our website at www.yourmostconfidentself.com.
Recognising Your Strengths
Mark Twain said that each one of us has the substance within to achieve whatever our goals and dreams define. What we are missing are the wisdom and insight to use what we already have.
A key aspect of confident people is that they’ve high self-esteem – they hold themselves in positive self-regard. This means that they know how to love themselves and that they acknowledge what they’re good at. These realisations boost their resilience and ability to take on greater challenges.
Your ability to take appropriate, effective action is affected by various things in your life that may seem to have little direct relation to the task at hand. Your values are a good example of this. Your self-confidence is likely to waver if you don’t value what you excel at doing. Research shows that if you value what you’re good at, you’re likely to be highly confident in that area. If you value what you’re not so good at, then you will not feel so confident, even though your friends may reassure you that this lack of confidence is not much of a problem at all.
Building confidence begins with going with your strengths. If you’re great at music, don’t beat yourself up because you’re not going to play international rugby. Pat yourself on the back, practise accepting compliments for everything you do well, and enjoy the positive reinforcement from others. Respect and honour yourself, and you’ll find that you get respect and honour from those around you.
For confidence to thrive and grow, you must concentrate your attention on what you’re good at, rather than trying to turn yourself into something that you’re not.
You also need to free yourself from unhelpful negative thoughts about your shortcomings or negative incidents in your life – more about that in Chapter 2.
Celebrating your own talents first
Everybody has different interests and skills. (Thank goodness for that!) So, your first step in developing confidence is to decide what you’re really good at, and build on it. It’s time to recognise your qualities and build up your talent store. Use the worksheet in Table 1-3 to list some of these talents that show up at work and in your home life. Record during what period of your life you best put those skills and talents to use.
The sample worksheet in Table 1-2 gives you some ideas for the kinds of strengths you can include in your own worksheet.
Now, fill out Table 1-3 with your own strengths and talents.
Decide which of these talents you’d like to make more of and what action you can take to sponsor and encourage each of your useful talents.
When you’ve created your list of actions, don’t file them away and forget about them until next year. Instead, set a timescale for things that you’re going to do in the shorter term – next week or month – and for those to do in the longer term. Chapter 3 offers advice on setting steps to achieve your goals.
Gathering feedback
Getting feedback from others is a powerful shortcut to building your confidence. Apart from performance reviews at work, you may not be in the habit of asking people to give you feedback on how you’re doing, and you may be amazed at what you find out about yourself by doing so. People rarely recognise what they do well. ‘Isn’t everyone good at that?’ they ask. Most people are their own worst critic, and it can be a wonderful experience to receive positive feedback from your nearest and dearest. Having that outside view from another person helps you uncover hidden talents.
Ask six people who have known you a while if they’d be prepared to give you some feedback. Choose people who represent the different groups in which you mix, including family members, friends, work colleagues, and those who know you from your interests in the community, church, or a sports club. Ask each of them these questions:
What am I good at?
When have you seen me operate at my best?
What should I do more of?
What should I do less of?
What can you rely on me for?
Where do you think that I can stretch myself?
After collecting feedback, look for the common trends and themes and think of ways to build them into your goals and development plans. If a number of people tell you similar things, it’s likely there’s some truth in the message and worth taking notice. (The odd negative comment from your nearest and dearest may be less helpful and more about their needs than yours – test it out.) Focus your attention on working with the good stuff, stretching yourself and letting go of the rest. For example, if you’ve particular talent, look for ways to tell others about it and use it more. Begin delegating or changing the things people suggest you should do less of.
