Chapter one

Make confidence work for you

Everyone has a comfort zone, at work and outside of it. When you’re in your comfort zone, you’re confident and at ease. You are in control. You perform well and get results. It’s energising and rewarding. But, sometimes, you have to step outside that zone and its wrap-around security blanket. This can happen now and then, with lots of notice or unexpectedly, without even giving you the time to open your laptop.

That’s where this book comes in. It will give you the means to extend your comfort zone, so that you won’t have to step outside it again. Whatever the situation you want to deal with more confidently, there will be something here to help you. Each chapter will look in detail at the kinds of work situations many people would prefer to cope with much better, from making a pitch to facilitating a team meeting, from managing staff to video-conferencing with co-workers in other cities or other countries. And in each chapter you’ll learn skills and techniques that will help you to improve your performance, whatever the situation. There will also be quick and easy ways to tackle those nerves, which often get in the way too.

Making a start

This first chapter will lay the foundations for the whole book. To make any headway in improving your self-confidence at work, you first have to really know yourself, your strengths, your weaknesses and what’s important to you. You have to make sure you have a positive sense of your own identity. And you need to know how to appear calm and self-assured in any situation. There are no magic wands or special tricks, just sound and reliable common sense and easily grasped specific skills.

Sometimes we stare so long at the door that is closing, that we see too late the one that is open.

Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, 1847-1922

Typical problem areas

Here are some of the typical situations that many people would like to deal with better and approach with more confidence. Can you pick out those with which you can identify? Are there others you would add?

What is a confident person?

The following diagram lists a few ideas of what a confident person behaves like, and how they think. The diagram represents a rounded individual, with confidence across a range of areas. Most people won’t have this rounded shape, and will have areas where they have less confidence than others. Have a read through them. Which aspects do you tick already? And which do you feel you want to work on?

Can you be too confident?

What about being too confident? Is it possible to be too confident? No doubt you will have heard criticisms of others who are ‘getting too big for their boots’, or ‘arrogant’, and this might make you concerned about becoming confident at all, far less over-confident. All I can say here is that, when I talk about ‘confidence’, I’m talking about a quality best described by the list just given in the previous diagram. ‘Over-confidence’ is a term usually used in a critical sense, and most often in connection with the following behaviours, and this is certainly not what I want you to aim for.

I’m not aiming for you to become:

self-important

aggressive

arrogant

superior

selfish

vain

bossy

conceited

big-headed

over-confident

full of yourself

What is important to you?

If you want to become more confident, even in just one or two small areas of your work, it can be beneficial to think about the bigger issues in life, and how important these are to you, so that you can put it all into context in your personal great scheme of things.

What to do

For the following list, give each item a score of 0, 1, 2, 3 or 4, as described in the box below. Note in your personal journal any for which you score a 3 or a 4. Choose the number that best fits how you rate the importance that item has for you. Don’t think too deeply, your first thought is probably the most accurate. Think in terms of how important you feel each item is to you, in general, most of the time.

To think about

• Which are your lowest scores - 0s and 1s - what’s least important to you?
• What about the highest scores? How many 4s? What are your highest scoring items?
• Thinking about the areas of work you would like to deal with more confidently, are any of your high or low scores connected to these in any way? (This isn’t the case for everyone.)
  

You’ll never solve problems using the same thinking you created them with.

Albert Einstein, theoretical physicist, 1879-1955

Less tension means more confidence

Some common tasks at work, maybe facilitating a meeting or contacting an important client, can make you feel a little tense, anxious or uncertain. These feelings can mean you perform less well because anxiety particularly affects your memory, how you deal with quick decisions, complex tasks such as mental arithmetic, and how articulate you are. It has much less effect on more physical tasks such as keyboard skills or filing.

That’s why you’ll find a box called ‘Chill time’ in every chapter. Each of these will contain a ‘quick and easy’ relaxation technique others have found helpful, so that you can try these out and find which works best for you. These reduce tension and anxiety, meaning you can be more confident in all your tasks. Earlier chapters such as this one, will give you ways of relaxing your body, and later chapters will concentrate on calming your mind.

This chapter will kick this off with a quick and easy relaxation technique for your body - at the end of this section.

But first, here is what makes ‘Chill time’ especially important for you:

1. It gives you a bit of a break from reading!
2. ‘Quick and easy’ relaxation techniques take seconds to do, and are especially good for calming you and helping you to think more clearly at work, whatever you’re doing.
3. Chill time techniques are totally invisible to others, and can be done anywhere, any time. Or in any ‘empty moments’ such as in a lift, on an escalator, waiting for your laptop to fire up or something to print, stopped at traffic lights, in a queue, or during any break time.
4. To combat long-term stress, try using Chill time techniques several times a day.
   

Why weaknesses are not all bad

We all have strengths and weaknesses. It would be nice if everyone had no weaknesses but, we live in the real world, and everyone has weaknesses. The important idea is to be aware of our weaknesses, and take these into account in our lives without being weighed down by them. But, correspondingly, we should also try to be aware of our strengths, and build on these.

Here is a list of some common strengths. Look over the list and choose up to five of those that you would consider to be your main strengths. Or maybe there are some other strengths you feel you have which we have not listed. Make a note of these down the left-hand side of a new page in your journal. No modesty allowed. Go on, be honest!

Common strengths

Now look over the next list of characteristics commonly viewed as weaknesses, and choose up to five of these that you would consider to be your main weaknesses (or maybe there are some other weaknesses you feel you have which we have not listed). Take a new page in your journal, and make a note of these down the left-hand side.

Common weaknesses

But there is also a much more positive note to the weaknesses we all have. And that positive note is that, for every weakness, you will have a corresponding strength. Sounds odd? The two go hand in hand, each the partner of the other. If you think about it, a colleague who is very passive may have a corresponding sensitivity that they would not otherwise have. An employee who isn’t good at following instructions might be very creative and have good ideas. If your line manager talks too much it could be because they are very enthusiastic and keen to help. Let’s think about this idea a bit more.

Weaknesses are strengths, too

For each weakness you picked out earlier, and listed in your journal, try to find its more positive partner and write it beside it. There is always one! You can’t have one without the other … but it can sometimes take a bit of thinking time to work out what the corresponding strength is. Here are some more examples to give you the idea:

As an optional extra, you could repeat this process, this time for your list of strengths, and think about their more negative partners. This can also throw up some useful outcomes for you, which may also be illuminating.

It’s really getting down to basics when we put our strengths and weaknesses under the microscope like this. You can feel a bit exposed. But the process can be very revealing and very helpful. It can even help us to grow as people. Most importantly, it can help us to see our weaknesses in a completely different light, which has less of a draining effect on our confidence. And it does help when we are able to see the full picture and not just part of it.

The myth of perfect confidence

Perfect confidence is something of an illusion - nobody is completely confident all of the time and in every situation. And we all have good days and bad days, too. People have also become very good at hiding a lack of confidence, through excuses, bravado, avoidance and delegation. So don’t be overly self-critical and don’t make things too difficult for yourself. Making some headway on a few key points that matter most to you could be all you need to start with. You can then move onward when you’re ready. You’ll reap the rewards in day-to-day enhanced performance and improved health and well-being, as well as securing improvements in your long-term career path.

Problems are not stop signs, they are guidelines.

Robert H. Schuller, American motivational speaker, b. 1926