Confidence tricks

I’ve talked in the past about the importance of asking yourself those simple – but crucial – questions and when it come to workshops, one of the questions I like to encourage delegates to ask themselves is “what do I want?” I’m not surprised that the most common answer is that, almost regardless of the topic of the workshop, delegates want more confidence. It seems like a reasonable request: who couldn’t use a little more confidence? Who wouldn’t find their life enhanced if they had more confidence? Who wouldn’t live the life they wanted if they had more confidence? But what is confidence and where does it come from?

The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms, so let’s look at how confidence is defined in the dictionary: “belief in own abilities; self assurance or a belief in your ability to succeed”. The thing that strikes me about that definition is that it contains the word “belief” twice, so we can be relatively confident that confidence is a belief although we usually take it to be a feeling. This is important; we can create our own beliefs and change them when we need to.

The second thing to bear in mind about confidence is that we often get it the wrong way round. How many times have you said to yourself; if I had more confidence, I would… (insert dream/task/objective here)? But where does a belief in our own abilities come from? Is it going to arise, magically, before we attempt the things we want to do or does it arise afterwards, from reflection and hindsight, from learning from experience?

I knew someone once who was adamant that people don’t change but she’s wrong because it’s a fundamental part of being human – the ability to take action, experience the consequences, learn from them and behave differently in future. That’s where confidence comes from – reflecting back on our experiences and learning from them that we are able to succeed; because either we did succeed or because, having failed in the past, we have learned what it takes to succeed.

It’s also important to remember that having confidence doesn’t mean not feeling scared or apprehensive or worried: I’m not pretending that confidence is easy. I would love to have some magical injection or form of words that would give anyone more confidence but the truth is that confidence arises from inside, from our experiences. From grasping the nettle and taking chances; from risking failure and achieving success; from daring and reflecting. Confidence is a result, an outcome of a task or an experience, not a tool to tackle the task in the first place.