Career track Tuesday - Confidence

Increasing your confidence and enhance your self esteem in a personal and professional context

The idea of this workshop was to discuss confidence, such as where do we need to get out confidence from? 

• Why might we want to increase it?

• How necessary is it to have confidence?

• And how much do we need?

Theses main points were discussed in the 3 main ideas 

• Cause and effect 

• Reframing 

• Anchoring 

The first point of discussion was - why might we want to increase our confidence? 

• Success
• Jobs 
• Opportunities 
• Abilities 

These points were made at the start of the session for us to then look at at the end of the session and to answer the question if these things can be achieved without confidence?

The first task was to write this diagram and write down a word associated with something in the middle of the circle, in this instance it was chocolate. 

We wrote down what came to mind, whether it was positive or negative or maybe didn't make sense. 

From these words we then compared the words we had as a group, mostly we only had maybe one or two words the same 


This was done to prove that everyone is different, and how they perceive things is  different, this also opened up the conversation about why we feel a certain way about certain things? what kinds of things influence our perception of things?

Such as

• Advertising 
• Family 
• Friends 
• Education 
• etc

knowing this was important as from knowing how we are influenced by things around us allows us to choose how we are effected by those things, in terms of confidence this is about the idea of changing the way we see confidence specifically about our own confidence.

We were then asked to stand on a scale of how confident we are, ranging from no confidence at all, to the most confidence and anything in between. 

Personally i was on the lower end of the scale, it as surprising to see how many people also felt the same as me, then asking the question what can influence our confidence? why might out confidence be low? and can we change that? everyone agreeing that it can be changed. 

Although this is a very obvious statement it is something that I hadn't really heard out loud before so it made quite a bit impact on me.  

Cause & Effect 

This was another exercise which we were asked to put on where we fell on the scale.

Cause and effect being how situations are perceived and whether you find that things are the cause of the problem or whether it is just an effect that can't be controlled.

Putting on the scale where I felt i was. In most instances I don't feel like my circumstances are the fault of anything else but my own efforts so when I fail I only have my self to blame, interestingly the more 'confident people' from the pervious exercise has put that they felt like effect was more of a factor when it came to their circumstances.

Anchoring

Anchoring is what holds us back, what holds us back from being confident? We then discussed this but overall the idea was that as individuals we are in control of what holds us back and whether we allow that to be a defining factor in our confidence 

Reframing 

this was the aspect which was the most effective for me, its something i try and practice and i was interested in it as an official term. Basically reframing something but not solving it, such as if you failed something you could say that you at least know what you need to do next time not to fail, and in an extreme case if you were robbed in some way you could say that at least now you know which parts of your home aren't safe.

Overal 

I found this session really insightful. and i was happy to step out of my comfort zone. The different aspects of identifying confidence and how to have a more positive outlook on certain things was really helpful to learn and I will attempt to apply them in the future. 

I also think I will attend more of these sessions.