Squiggly Skill Sprint 7: Self-Belief

We are on day 7 of the Squiggly Career Sprint, and are now on a 2 day streak of topics that are important to me, today’s being self-belief: https://www.amazingif.com/listen/skills-sprint-self-belief/

I’m a great believer in the approach that Helen and Sarah have around self-belief & confidence, and had them in to train my team. I have also delivered my own version of their material as seminars.

What struck me most about delivering the seminars was that when I was asking people for examples of confidence and why it was important, everything seemed very external. It was all about giving presentations and coming across as an authority on the topic.

The reason I think self-belief is important is that it gives you resilience, and the ability to bounce back* from setbacks. As I said when I delivered the training, my objective was not just for people to do their job better, but to sleep better at night afterwards.

I’m currently reading another book recommendation from the podcast, which is “Happy High Status” by Viv Groksop. Very early on in the book she cites one of the biggest knocks your confidence can have, which is losing one’s job. I’ve obviously gone through this recently for the first time, and I realised at that point that I was totally cool with the situation. My team won awards, I stuck to my values at all times, I have had a lot of lovely feedback from people, and I don’t see anything that I could have reasonably done that would have changed the situation.

I’m very grateful that I’ve spent so much time thinking about confidence both academically, for myself, and for others. Having gone through something that is considered such a knock on confidence, and coming out pretty unscathed shows the value of taking these things seriously.

*For the record, “bouncebackability” is actually a word, which was a hearty point of debate…