Confidence Tricks (Part Two)

The competency profile for trainers is an interesting one. I’ve always have joked that we have to be part Blue Peter presenter, part sadist and part furniture remover but there is another element to it, one that goes unspoken amongst trainers. Well, today I’m breaking the code because the one competency that all trainers have in common is that we’re psychic – we can read your mind. And because I can read your mind, I know what it is that you want. Deep down, you want to be confident.

You may laugh (I certainly hope you do) but I can be fairly – pardon the phrase – confident that you want to be confident because I’m playing the odds, rather than reading your mind. When I ask people what they want from this assertiveness workshop, or time management workshop or leadership workshop the answer the majority give is a variation on “I want to be more confident.”

Being part sadist, my immediate response to that request is “When you say ‘more confident,’ what does that mean to you?” The answer is enlightening because, very often, they don’t actually know. In fact, when I ask them what confidence actually is, they can’t define it for me. So I press on (told you I was a sadist) and ask them “What has to happen in order for you to feel confident?” Again, they usually don’t have an answer.

Rosabeth Moss Kantor defines confidence in this way: “Confidence is certainly mental, but it's... a situational expectation – an expectation of a positive outcome. And that expectation leads to all kinds of investments in making that outcome come true. Because of confidence people put in the effort. They invest financial and other resources. Instead of giving up, they stay in the game longer and, therefore, have more chances to succeed...” But now we know what it is, how do we know we have it and how do we get it?

Confidence is a belief and it’s slippery – sometimes our minds play tricks on us. If confidence is an expectation of a positive outcome, my advice is to look at the evidence in your life. Look for the situations that you have found yourself in and which you have handled; look for those situations that you influenced, turned around, resolved, dealt with. I’m willing to bet (because, after all, I’m psychic) that, more often than not, the outcome was positive – whatever it was, you dealt with it and it turned out okay in the end. The fact is, you’re already a confident person; you just have to start trusting the evidence in your own life and believing it.

Fact or fiction?

I’ve always been a fan of horror films and I’ve watched more than my share. It’s a rather masochistic experience, a similar kind of thrill to that experienced by people who ride on rollercoasters, although I haven’t seen a horror film that genuinely scared me for a very long time.

This was brought home to me recently whilst playing on my PS3. I’m not a very big fan of games – my experience is normally restricted to racing games or the excellent Lego Star Wars and Batman games – but as I had some free time, I thought I’d invest in an RPG, something I could get my teeth into. I’d read a couple of things about Dead Space and so, being a fan of the films Event Horizon and Alien, which seemed to be inspirations for the game, I bought a copy.

I couldn’t play it.

I mean, of course I could play it – I could read the instructions, operate the controller, and move the character around. What I mean is, I had to stop playing it because it was just too scary!

As sophisticated as we are on the outside, sometimes it’s difficult for our brains to distinguish fact from fiction. For whatever reason, playing Dead Space circumvented all those layers of intelligence and sophistication – all the bits that knew, on a theoretical level, that it was just a game – and put me fairly and squarely in a dark corridor, on a deserted spaceship with only about a million nasty things for company!

The idea that what we see, the kind of information we take in from our environment, affects the way we feel is not new. In the middle ages, people believed that our eyes worked by absorbing tiny particles of what we saw and that, the eyes being the windows of the soul, what we saw would affect us profoundly. To take care of our souls we should nourish them by looking at wholesome and beautiful things. While we can dismiss the idea nowadays, there is a germ of truth here. What we see does affect the way we feel – we experience that every time we cry at a film, or feel happy when the hero and heroine get together or feel tense when a character walks into a darkened room. We know we're safe in a cinema; we know that the people on the screen are actors, following a script, enhanced by CGI or special effects - none of which stops us feeling scared or excited or anxious.

The biggest reason for this is our capacity for empathy and I’ll talk more about that next week. In the meantime, does anyone want to buy a barely-used copy of Dead Space...?

What are you doing right now?

I read a story about a life coach, who recorded this message on his answering machine: “Please tell me who you are and what you want; if you think those are trivial questions, consider that 95% of the population goes through life and never answers either one!” It’s an entertaining story and it reminds me that seemingly trivial questions are often the most effective. I often joke with groups that my primary role on a workshop is to ask all the really obvious and “stupid” questions and recently I started to ask myself the obvious question – when it comes to my chosen career, what am I trying to do?

Having thought about it quite deeply, I think there are three answers to that question. The first – and most superficial – is that I’m trying to train people on various topics. That’s fine but training someone is never an outcome: the purpose of training, after all, is not knowledge but action. The second answer is that I’m trying to help people or make their lives easier in some way. That’s a key value for me; I know that the times in my life when I’ve been most dissatisfied with my work are those times when I don’t feel like I’m helping anyone. But, laudable as it may be, it still doesn’t quite answer the question.

For me, the answer is that I’m trying to create three things in delegates. Awareness: you cannot make any changes – or even decide not to make any changes – if you are unaware of what you’re doing now and/or unaware of the alternatives. Secondly, choice: whatever we do, whatever our situation, we are all volunteers. We do what we do because we choose to do it – even when it comes to something as fundamental as living. We continue to live because we have not chosen the alternative. Thirdly, consequence: whatever we do, whatever actions we take or do not take, there are consequences that flow from it. Those consequences may be obvious and what you intend or they may be unintended and come as a complete surprise.

I’ve presented those three things – awareness, choice and consequences – as sequential but they are inextricably linked. For instance, understanding as much as possible about consequences makes for better-informed choices. The one thing that I’m not trying to do in my workshops is convince or persuade you that what I’m saying is right. Persuasion leads, inevitably, to competition and conflict and that doesn’t help me achieve my objectives. I believe a little scepticism is a vital and healthy ingredient in a delegate and I encourage it. You don’t have to believe what I say just because I say it – I encourage you to try for yourself.

As you go through life this week, stop periodically and ask yourself what it is you’re trying to do – and what you’re not trying to do: you may be surprised by the answer.

Pig whistling

I’ve been working with some groups recently on a personal impact workshop. It’s been a fun experience and they’ve been good groups, open and ready to take on all the stuff we threw at them. On one of the workshops I encountered a delegate who was newly promoted into quite a senior role. As a facilitator, you begin to get a bit of a sixth sense about delegates; the quality of some just strikes you and this was one of those cases. She was bright, articulate and smart – the fact that she’d just been promoted into a big role clearly spoke volumes about her abilities and her organisation clearly had confidence in her. The one thing she lacked was confidence in herself.

She was role-playing, with an actor, a scenario involving her manager: she wanted his support (by which she meant his reassurance that she was doing a good job) but he wasn’t giving it. It wasn’t that he was a bad person or unsupportive – he’d recommended her for the promotion, after all – but he was totally unable to understand or deal with the emotional needs she was describing. The other people in the group, watching her role-play, suggested that she shock her manager in some way, to force him to change his approach and give her the support she needed – the most common suggestion was for her to burst into tears. I know they were motivated by good intentions but I couldn’t help saying I thought that was a bad idea.

I was reminded of an old saying: never try to teach a pig to whistle – it never works and it annoys the pig. The fact is there was nothing particularly wrong with the manager. Of course, perhaps she – and I – might prefer it if he was a little more in tune with the emotional needs of his staff but as he was in his mid-fifties, that was unlikely to change and wasn’t the problem, anyway. The problem was that she had perfectly reasonable needs which she insisted that he meet, despite his obvious inability to do so.

My advice to her was to use her manager for the things he was good at – his technical expertise and his practical guidance on the job she was being expected to do – and to stop banging her head against a wall, expecting him to do something he was clearly incapable of doing. Better, instead, for her to focus on getting those emotional needs met elsewhere – perhaps through a coach or a mentor.

It sounds like I’m blaming her and letting her manager “off the hook” in some way but I’m not. We deal with the world as it is, not as we would like it to be; sometimes people don’t do what we want or don’t give us what we want. No one can change another person any more than someone else can change us – they have to want to change and sometimes they don’t want to or feel they can’t. In that case, as Victor Frankl wrote, when we cannot change our circumstances, we are forced to change ourselves.

A guide on the side? (Part Two)

Last week, I was talking about the degree to which groups can – or can’t – trust their trainer. In the past, I’ve always joked with groups that you can’t trust a trainer; what I’ve meant by that is that no one in a training session should just take everything I say for granted – they have to think about it, test it against what they already know to be true about the world. One of the best things a group can have is healthy scepticism, by which I mean an openness to learn but the attitude of mind that they question what they learn in order to understand it. My intention, in the training room, is to develop a form of Socratic debate and get the group involved in a two-way discussion about the material, rather than being in a passive, more didactic style session where the trainer teaches the material and the group “learns” it.

In order to create that type of debate, two things must happen and the more I think about it, the more I wonder whether they are – to an extent, at least – mutually exclusive. The first is that the group has to trust that it’s okay or “safe” for them to disagree with the material or, at the very least, to question it. Secondly, for the sake of the argument and in order to stimulate or move the debate forward, I might have to take on positions with which I don’t necessarily agree. So, on the one hand the group has to trust me whilst on the other I might occasionally need to mislead the group.

That tension must, on some level at least, be confusing for groups and could get in the way of the workshop material. I can imagine that, as a delegate, it would be very easy to be suspicious of any question that I ask because, at the back of your mind, there’s always the suspicion of my motives in asking it – am I trying to catch you out? Am I, in other words, not to be trusted?

I don’t have any pat answers to these questions – just a much longer series of questions that they raise in my mind. But I’d love to know what you think about it – what’s your view on what happens in the training room? Do you trust trainers?

An honest man

This week, a man talked himself out of $1m by owning up to breaking a rule that no one saw him break and which most observers would feel was a rather nonsensical one. In doing so, golfer Brian Davis has become a bit of a hero to me although there is something about this story that troubles me greatly.

In case you missed the story, last weekend Mr Davis made the playoffs of the Verizon Heritage tournament in America. Whilst playing a shot, his club hit a reed. No one saw him doing it and it made no difference to the quality of his shot. It gave him no advantage. Nevertheless, Mr Davis immediately called over a rules official and incurred a two-stroke penalty, losing the playoff and the $1m prize. Speaking about it afterwards, Mr Davis reportedly said, “I could not have lived with myself if I had not called it.”

In his excellent book “The Speed of Trust”, Stephen M R Covey defines trust as the confidence born of the character and competence of a person or organisation. Mr Davis is a great example: the integrity of his character speaks for itself. His decision to draw attention to his mistake was motivated not by the fear of being found out but by his understanding that, even if no one else ever knew what he had done, he would know.

However, as I mentioned that the start of this piece, there is something about this story that bothers me – and that’s the fact that it’s even a story at all because it really shouldn’t be news. It should be what my journalist friends call a “dog bites man” story. A dog biting a man isn’t news because it happens all the time. A “man bites dog” story is news because it’s unusual. The fact that Mr Davis’ honesty was reported so prominently – and not just in the sports headlines – indicates that it doesn’t happen very often. And it should happen often; that kind of behaviour should be the norm, not just in sport but also generally in life.

Amongst the general population, our trust in institutions, in leaders, in management is crumbling. The financial crisis eroded our trust in the competence of banks and bankers; the expenses scandal eroded further our trust in the character of politicians. Often their defence was that even though they might personally have thought it was wrong, the rules allowed it. As we approach the election, I wonder what Mr Davis might think of that excuse.

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.