Confidence is based on these 5 contexts
TL;DR — change in your context is extremely difficult. The things that gave you confidence are likely to have been taken away from you, possibly without you noticing. Help yourself by exploring your role, get some validation of existing or new skills, invest in your support network and take care of yourself.
Someone that I mentor has recently moved into a really stretching role at a new organisation. Over night the confidence of this high achieving, ambitious person has started to struggle. I think most of us would recognise the situation. I certainly do having struggled in new roles where the first few weeks or even months can feel like a nightmare that have you second guessing why you ever made the change in the first place.
This got me thinking, what factors affect confidence and how can people address them, especially when moving into a new role?
1. Understanding of your purpose
Assuming you work for an organisation, but even if you don’t, you need to know your role to feel like you’re contributing. If you feel like you are helping make a difference to a wider ambition, then you are more likely to feel confident.
To achieve this you need a clear sense of how you add value, what good looks like and what types of action would be seen as negative by your peers. A strong appreciation of the environment in which you’re operating is also crucial.
These sound easy, but take time and effort to achieve. Start by speaking to those around you to find out their perceptions of your role. This can give you a basis for coming to your own conclusions when combined with individual thought and reflection.
2. Validation of your work
The way that people feel that their work is of high quality varies wildly. I tend towards the extroverted style where the appreciation of a wide number of peers through blog articles, conference talks and social media is crucial. For others, it is more likely to be down to a small number of conversations with a meaningful group of experts.
Some folks are totally focussed on the perception of the organisation as a whole — caring deeply about things like their job title, salary brackets and personal ratings.
Others, those that are perhaps truly confident, don’t need anybody else to validate their work. They can look at their outputs themselves and assess what they did well and what they did badly, and the reasons for each.
Having the self awareness to understand what is important to you is crucial if you are going to give your confidence a foundation on which to be built. If you have had a recent burst of whatever floats your boat, then you’re much more likely to feel good going into the next situation.
3. Development of your skills
The feeling of learning something new or mastering an old skill is hard to beat when it comes to confidence. For a moment, you feel on top of the world and like nothing could drag you down. When most powerful, it pulls together the concepts of understanding how you add value and having your contribution validated. It is the intersection of these situations.
For many, the lightbulb moment for a skill is not when you go on a training course yourself. More often than not, it is when you teach somebody else a particular capability. In this moment you have proven to yourself that you understand this skill to such a degree that you can explain it to somebody else.
This is why mentoring relationships can be so helpful in increasing peoples’ confidence — both for the mentor and mentee. Each stands to learn something and prove to themselves that they know what they’re talking about!
4. The strength of your support relationships
The vast majority of people benefit from speaking to others about the challenges they are facing and sharing the successes they have had.
It is my opinion that you need a range of these relationships to truly build your resilience in the work place. You can read more about each here, but they are:
- The Supportive Peer
- The Challenging Mentor
- The Constructive Coach
- The Empathetic Angel
- The Experienced Sage
The practicalities of being able to do this can often get in the way if you’ve just changed jobs. You’re probably not going to be able to pop over to the same Empathetic Angel that used to sit two desks away.
Building a new support network is crucial to building your confidence. This doesn’t necessarily mean all new people, it might mean organising new ways to see those you already depend on. Chances are though, you’ve got opportunities for all new relationships that can help you get through the toughest and celebrate the best of times.
5. Your physical and mental platform
For me, the ring fencing of work and home as separate lives isn’t useful. I much prefer to look at everything in the whole and work out where any stresses are coming from. This then gives the opportunity to fix them in multiple contexts. However, lots of folks prefer to think about them separately. If this is you, then I’d still consider how they might bleed over just a little bit.
If you’re starting a new role, it’s going to be a lot of change which is naturally going to push some of your confidence. If this is the case, then I’d suggest making sure you’re getting plenty of sleep, exercise and eating healthy.
By setting your body up on an even keel, you’re giving your mind the best chance it has to deal with the challenging circumstances it’ll be going through.
So what do you do?
As with almost everything, if you can notice that a change has happened, you’re halfway to solving the issue for yourself. Once you’ve done that, create a plan for how to move forward and keep checking in on it — ideally with someone you trust deeply.
