The Confidence Maze

5 Tips to finding your way through to a more self-assured you

The trouble with confidence is you can’t touch it. You can’t pick it up off a shelf, take it up to the counter and after pay for it. (or now post covid, order it on Amazon Prime and have it turn up on your doorstep 24 hours later. (Much as brand marketers would have us believe you can, it’s just not a thing).

But if you can’t ‘touch’ it, how can it be that you can ‘feel’ it? Or more often it seems, feel an absence of it.

Yes — confidence is something we ‘feel’. and it’s a feeling most of us want more of in some area/s of our life. When I facilitate workshops, I always ask people at the start of the day what they’d like to walk away with, as a result of investing time in their own development. Ten times out of ten ‘to feel more confident’ makes it onto the list of desired outcomes. It doesn’t matter whether the workshop is for:

• Presentation Skills — speaking in front of an audience
• Leadership — influencing others
• Communication — speaking to senior leaders
• Innovation — putting forward ideas
• Storytelling — keeping an audience engaged

The list is endless.

Because it’s intangible, it’s also tricky to quantify and qualify, and so the pursuit of it can be fraught with confusion and setbacks.

In most cases we’re told that confidence is the golden elixir of life: that its importance cannot be overstated, and that you must pursue it lest you be left choking on the dust of your own lack of self-assurance. Other confidence experts tout that the quest for confidence has become overrated, and that self-compassion is more effective than self-confidence, when it comes to improving your relationships and career success. Or that it’s actually self doubt that motivates us to get better and propels us forward in the quest for greater confidence.

Confusing right?

The bottom line is that wherever you sit on the continuum of advocates to detractors, humans have a need, and innate drive or hunger to feel a sense of comfort in their lives and their pursuits. This need for self assurance affects us…