Building Self-belief and Confidence

Copyright: ©Strengths Focused Leadership Ltd 2016 1 | P a g e

Building Self-belief and Confidence

Kathy Toogood Strengths Focused Leadership Ltd

Session Handout Page

Confidence checklist 3 Goals for change 4 Confidence is… 4 The power of your thoughts 5 Belief changing exercise 7

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Confidence checklist How confident are you? Tick the ‘yes’ or ‘no’ box in response to the statements in the following Confidence checklist to discover which areas you want to tackle.

Question YES NO 1. Do you feel comfortable talking to strangers for the first time?

2. Do you tend to make a good first impression?

3. Can you enter a room full of strangers and feel positive?

4. Do you enjoy going to social events where you meet new people?

5. Do you find it easy to make conversation with a wide variety of people?

6. Are you relaxed socially?

7. Are you an enthusiastic and motivated person at work and at home?

8. Is life fun for you?

9. Do you have high self-esteem?

10. Do you have a positive attitude about yourself?

11. Do you tend to think positively about your future?

12. Do you focus on your successes rather than your failures?

13. When you encounter difficulties, do you keep persisting to find a way?

14. Are you generally positive about other people?

15. Do you reward and compliment those around you?

16. Do you handle difficult people skilfully?

17. Do you handle your emotions well, expressing them appropriately?

18. Do you cope with conflict and resolve it?

19. Can you speak up in meetings with ease?

20. In the past, have ever successfully changed any aspect of yourself – a bad habit, for example?

21. On a scale of 1 to 10, where do you think you are in terms of your level of confidence? 10 is high.


If you scored over 17 yes’s and a high rating of 10 on question 21 then you’re super-confident and probably don’t need to be at this workshop. However, you probably had a mixture of yes’s and nos. Now turn the negatives into positives.

Goals for change Choose three questions to which you answered ‘no’ and list them below and make them your goals for change.

Begin each goal with ‘I want to….’ For example instead of the negative: ‘I don’t want to feel nervous when I enter a room full of strangers’ write: ‘I want to feel positive when I enter a room full of strangers’ 1. 2. 3.

Confidence is… “The quality of being certain of your abilities or of having trust in people, plans, or the future.” (Cambridge English Dictionary) That means:

- Believing in yourself and your ability to achieve or improve - Believing that you are valuable, worthwhile and capable - Behaving with certainty – knowing you can succeed - Being relaxed, comfortable and secure - Feeling secure in the knowledge of your talents, so being relaxed and keen to

listen and learn from others - Having the ability to act confidently, even if you don’t feel it - Being comfortable with yourself, so not to worry what other people think - Doing what you want to do, when and how you want to do it - Having the self-esteem to fail and make mistakes and keep trying - Acting courageously to achieve that you want


The power of your thoughts “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right.”

Henry Ford

I can / I can’t; I should/I shouldn’t; it’s possible / it’s impossible; I must / I mustn’t; I want to/I have to; it’ll be easy / it’ll be hard; it’ll be fun/ it’ll be painful; people are generally helpful / people always want to be difficult; this company is great place to work / it’s grim working here. The statements above are examples of ways of thinking, or beliefs that people may have about various aspects of their work. These could be about what’s achievable or not, or what their working environment is like, or how easy or difficult achieving things may be. Our beliefs can either support us in achieving our goals or they can make it difficult or impossible. When you have positive perspectives about a situation and have positive beliefs and positive inner dialogues, this will help you achieve your goals. This diagram illustrates how our beliefs (and the thoughts that go with them) influence what we focus on and the results we get. Our beliefs influence our feelings, our feelings (and beliefs) influence our behaviours and our behaviours (and beliefs and feelings) influence our outcomes. This cycle ultimately reinforces our beliefs.

The following example illustrates the point. Starting at the top of the cycle, imagine Joe believes that he is no good at presenting. Imagine how he would be feeling when he goes to work on the day when he needs to present a proposal to his Senior Management Team. He

Our beliefs

Our emotional

state

Our behaviour/ actions

Our results


is likely to feel anxious and awkward about the working day ahead. With those feelings he is more likely to behave nervously and ‘dry up’ during his presentation. This awkwardness is likely to be experienced by his audience, who are then less than convinced by his proposal. Joe has just managed to create a situation where he has proved himself right…he has reinforced his belief that “I’m no good at presentations!” Now, just imagine an alternative scenario, imagine a different person who loves the opportunity to communicate on something he believes in and he knows, without any arrogance, that he is good at it. How would he go to work feeling? How would he interact with his audience? What kind of reactions is he likely to get? How is this cycle playing out in your work life? Are there occasions where this cycle supports you or are there times when this cycle might limit you? What do you want to do about those beliefs, if you are aware of them? How can you make any changes you need to, and reinforce the beliefs that help you achieve results? So, what kind of belief is more likely to generate success? There could be a wide variety of these depending on the situation you find yourself in, but the following beliefs, or ways of thinking, are what we could think of as a ‘mindset for success’:

1. People have unlimited potential 2. I can have enjoyable and fulfilling work 3. I have all the resources I need to be a success right now 4. Everything happens for a reason 5. Whatever happens, I take responsibility 6. There is no such thing as failure, only feedback 7. It is important to keep an open mind 8. I am a good communicator and people enjoy my company 9. I am fine just as I am


Belief changing exercise Person A: Identify a belief which is limiting your performance in some way, and which can be influenced or changed. Person B: Use the following process to coach Person A in developing a plan to change this belief. Step 1: Ask Person A to describe the limiting belief and its impact. Summarise this back to them to check your understanding. Write it here - Current belief: Step 2: Ask Person A to suggest a belief that they would prefer to have that would support them more in achieving what they want to. Write it here - Desired belief: Step 3: Ask Person A to use a scale of 1-10 in relation to this desired belief.

1 = It couldn’t be less true and 10 = I believe this fully Step 4: Ask person A to give examples of occasions when they have been higher on the scale than at present. Find out from them the key things that made the difference on that/those occasions. Where would they have put themselves on the scale on that/those occasion(s)? Step 5: Ask person A to say the lowest they have been on the scale before today? If they have been lower, how did they get from there to here? If they have not been lower, explore how they got to be at their present level which is above zero? (They will already be doing positive things) Step 6: Ask person A to say what will need to happen to take them one notch up the scale? Explore other options (What else could you do?) Step 7: What will they commit to from those options? When will they do it? How committed are they to doing it (1-10?) Step 8: Give person B positive feedback on what they have done/achieved in this process. Reverse A and B roles

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Building Self-belief and Confidence