Has Everyone Lost Their Confidence?

Despite the fact that I’ve been a coach for over 20 years, I never cease to be surprised at how often confidence pops up as a topic that clients want to talk about – more often than not because they don’t feel like they have enough of it. Whether they’re first line supervisors or Managing Directors of multi national companies – they all tell me they lack confidence.

Confidence – It’s a Funny Old Word

We use it in lots of different capacities. We talk about personal confidence and consumer confidence. We even hear that the Stock Market is ‘reacting with confidence’.
But what does it mean?

Well whatever it means it seems to be in short supply at present. The world is generally lacking economic confidence other than a few notable exceptions and I wonder if it’s no coincidence that I am hearing a lot of old and new clients asking for help around this subject.

I recently spoke at a mentoring Network group for the NHS, and guess what the topic was? Confidence.

So What is Confidence?

One of the things I discussed with the group was the multi-faceted nature of confidence.

There are many sides to confidence including:

• Confidence in your own abilities – to what extent do you feel competent and capable?
• Positive emotions – how often do you experience strong feelings of joy and enthusiasm?
• Confidence in your accomplishments – are you proud of your achievements?
• Social confidence – how comfortable are you in dealing with others, particularly those you don’t know very well
• Conflict management – are you confident in standing your ground even if it will cause conflict
• Anxiety – to what extent do you worry about things going wrong?
• Negative emotions – how often do you feel downhearted or discouraged?
• Dealing with stress – how confident are you in your ability to cope with potentially stressful situations?

Being positive and confident obviously go together. It would be quite difficult to act confidently while thinking negative thoughts!

In my next post, I’ll share a great exercise you can do to increase your confidence and the positivity in your life. It’s one I use with many coaching clients. It certainly went down well with the NHS group and is a good foundation for more advanced self-esteem building work.

Meanwhile, if you’d like to find out more about how confidence coaching from Spark Coaching and Training could change the way you work and and your life, contact me now.

Julia