How to... have conversations about confidence
Understanding Confidence
According to PsychologyToday confidence is a belief in oneself, the conviction that one has the ability to meet life’s challenges and to succeed – and the willingness to act accordingly. Being confident requires a realistic sense of one’s capabilities and feeling secure in that knowledge.
As managers, being confident in our decisions is important. Our confidence reassures our teams and leaders who rely on you. There is a fine line between self confidence and over confidence. You should aways be checking where your confidence lies. There are many reasons having confidence as a manager is important:
- Confidence creates vision and requires courage
- Confident communication reassures and builds trust
- Confidence comes from sufficient belief in your skills and abilities and your team need to have confidence in yours
- A confident manager makes others feel confident
- A confident manager builds strong and lasting relationships and doesn’t avoid the difficult conversations
- Confidence brings ambition
- A confident manager is calm in times of difficulty
- A confident manager acknowledges and responds to feedback
- Confidence is not to be confused with arrogance. A confident manager is not arrogant
- A confident manager is genuine and trustworthy
Most of us at some point lack confidence, even if it doesn’t seem like it. Often the most apparently confident people are covering up at some level a lack of confidence. A healthy dose of confidence is really important in the workplace and if team members are showing signs of a lack of confidence it is important to understand the underlying cause of this so you can help them develop a healthy level of confidence. Confidence is something that is created and as a manager you can ply a significant role in supporting an employee to do this.
Overconfidence is a biased way of looking at a situation. When someone is overconfident they often misjudge their value, opinion, belief or ability. Under most circumstances, having self confidence is a good thing. But when confidence makes you inflexible, opposed to trying new things or incapable of listening to others it can become detrimental. As a manager it is important that you are able to highlight effects of overconfidence to those exhibiting these behaviours.
Things to consider
Useful Questions
Identify key people in your family, workplace or public figures. Write down the qualities you admire about this person
Often we don’t recognise our strengths or bury our weaknesses. Both hinder growing in healthy confidence
This is a good question to ask regularly, as a check in either for yourself or someone else around you. What might be behind this? How is this impacting others around you / them?
It is also worth relfecting on how you felt then too. What could you take from then into now?
Be aware of the next time you just go to shrug off a compliment from someone. Instead, simply say thank you.
Sometime we take our own skills for granted. Write a list of those that come to mind.
Often failures in the moment turns out to be a stepping stone to something else. Post It notes wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for turning a repeated failure to make super glue into something else.
Find out what works for the person and see where you could apply this in your relationship
We often don’t believe we can, but when we look at what we would do if we did we can use those insights to take the first step in the here & now
Helping someone focus on these will either help them realise what they offer; or help you both see that perhapps the current situation is not playing to their strengths
Sometimes we get overwhelmed by too many things in front of us and we loose confidence to take just the next step
We tend to believe things about ourselves that aren’t true and they limit what we can do. Exploring yours can help you reframe your beliefs. If you were to let go of a certain belief, what could be possible?
Often we hinder ourselves because of a perceived lack of confidence. If we give ourselves permission to be ourselves our core confidence grows
