Confidence is something I’m often asked about in coaching. How can you become confident? How can you be more confident? There’s no single solution to this so I’m going to post a series of articles around how I coach confidence.
What is confidence?
One of the first steps is to define confidence. What is it? What does it do? What can it make you do? Google it and the definition will be:
“the feeling or belief that one can have faith in or rely on someone or something.”
So it’s about something intangible, something we just have to trust. We can’t measure it; we can’t say “she has fifty confidence.” As it’s an abstract noun, we can’t physically gain it, there’s no magic potion.
So the first thing would be to define what it means to you. Write down:
Confidence is […]
in order to […]
which lets me […]
Fill in the blanks and see what you come up with. That’s your definition of confidence.
Being in the present
Taking a break from the definition of confidence momentarily, I want to touch on what being present means.
When we look back at things we remember, we tend to misremember, filter out bits based on our present circumstance, and interpret events in a different way. It leads to essentially confirmation bias, where we look for evidence which fits our view, or life position (more on that in another blog).
We take those flawed bits of evidence and we then project it into an imaginary future, one where events and results are bound to repeat themselves. Because something happened in the past, it’s bound to happen again in the future, right? This leads to feelings of doubt, misapprehension, and in effect ending up in a flight or fight situation. We freeze up. Our brains are so focused on what could happen that we’re unable to actually focus on what’s happening now.
If we instead focus on the present, on ourselves staying present, we can rationalise events and instead gauge the situation. We unfreeze our brains and we’re able to function fully again. We can make rational choices, act accordingly, and reach a different outcome than the one we imagined.
Joining up confidence and presence
Confidence as I said at the beginning is the ability to have faith in one’s own abilities. To trust that we are whole, rational, independent creatures, able to make decisions. When we say we “lack confidence” it’s actually an inability to project a different future rather than the flawed, biased one we’ve been clinging on to. And this is where coaching comes in. Coaching can help guide you to finding ways of staying present and by doing so, become more confident, so that rather than be shackled to an asteroid hurtling through space you actually end up being in control of your own emotions and thoughts.
So next time you’re feeling that lack of confidence, have a think about what is making you think like that and focus instead on the present.
