Leadership - Confidence - development part 1
Confidence - development part 1
Definition
It is hard to define when a person has ‘confidence’. It is not easy to gauge when an individual just moves into confident behaviour.
It is easy to see when a person lacks it or when they have an abundance of it.
Naturally, you could ask the person how they felt.
However, even when they appear to be very confident, from an external assessment, they may reveal a complete lack of confidence if asked.
It is probably best to start with your own fears and improve your confidence before moving on to others.
Note that an abundance of confidence doesn’t necessarily translate to excellent performance.
On the other hand, low confidence, may well lead to poor performance.
Self diagnosis
You might want to start by asking yourself some questions.
- Do you try to avoid particular areas of activity, situations or persons?
- Do you believe you have the correct skills, experiences and characteristics?
- Do you worry about the situation causing a lack of concentration?
- Are you happy with the available resource – training, people equipment?
Positives and negatives
Begin by looking at various scenarios and asking yourself what is happening when you feel confident (positive) and when you feel less confident (negative) in order to gain a better understanding.
What situations, people, or particular roles cause these increase or decreases of confidence.
Were you really high or low in confidence? Where is the evidence?
In other words, write down the situations and the evidence as it manifested itself in your behaviour.
For example, went quiet, became angry, walked away, didn’t mention a relevant piece of information etc.
Rationalise
The next step is to try to rationalise these behaviours. We tend to judge the severity of the problem by the size of our reaction.
This may not relate at all to the true size of the problem.
The first part of this is to try to visualise your fears.
What images come to mind when you are feeling low in confidence?
Key areas
We have already mentioned a few areas where fears may lead to a loss of confidence.
For example, specific activities or situations, people and new experiences.
Another is negative ideas and views.
Try to consider each of these key areas with particular occurrences of low confidence.
- Situations
- People
- New experiences
- Negative ideas
The last case is a negative mindset. This usually results from yourself or others expressing their dismay at your poor performance as a direct result of low confidence.
You (or others) will put yourself down with negative comments as a punishment.
‘Why did you do that?’ A negative tone implying blame.
‘I’m useless’.
‘Why does this always happen to me?’
Unfortunately, this just exacerbates the problem and confidence gets worse.
To deal with this behaviour consider an example and work your way through the key points and feelings.
Challenge your opinion of yourself and look for the evidence.
An example might be chairing a meeting.
- You arrive at the meeting early.
- You worry about people turning up on time and not doing anything about it.
- You try to direct certain topics in the agenda but others keep interrupting and you feel frustrated.
You can carry on this analysis for all the key problems in the session.
You must then challenge the evidence that may have lead to this behaviour to ascertain whether it is really true.
How often does any one turn up late? Is it the same person? How late was he?
It may not have been a big problem. Did you challenge the person? Was there a suitable reason?
Had you laid down any ground rules before hand?
It may be that no one else worried about this as much as you did. Some may even have seen it as good leadership not to go overboard on this occasion. Try to put the problem into perspective.
Were you really interrupted when trying to raise an agenda topic? Was it easy to control? Did this interruption cause frustration amongst the others at the meeting?
Again you are looking for evidence of its existence and severity. Put all problems into perspective by providing and challenging evidence.
People
What people cause a drop in confidence?
The boss is a favourite in this area.
What is it exactly that this person does to make you feel ill at ease?
Is there an opportunity to talk to the person about their actions?
Do you need specific training to deal with this situation?
New experiences
Trying to make do in an area where you lack skills and experience can be emotionally draining.
Yes it is good to gain new experiences to develop but this must go alongside suitable training, mentoring or coaching activities.
Assess the problems and review possible solutions.
Company culture
If the values of the company conflict with yours it may cause a poor fit.
This in turn could lead to an erosion of confidence and even to stress.
Poor delegation may make roles unclear.
Try to think what these may be then consider your responses.