Your Confidence Recipe
The power of self-acceptance.
Before we start diving in to unearth the Confidence treasures of your historic, meaningful moments, I want to take a bit of time to help you tune in to your relationship with Confidence and what there might be to learn about how Confidence works for you. Understanding how Confidence works for you will probably help a lot for future Confidence building, even if you don’t go beyond this chapter!
As I mentioned earlier, Albert Bandura wrote some great stuff on confidence (self-efficacy theory if you want to go and read about it). In his work, Bandura spoke of the different sources of confidence that we can use. I’m obviously focusing a lot on the past experiences element with Confidence Archaeology, but he also identified other influences that contribute to how confident we feel in a given moment.
Bandura’s other sources of Confidence provide a really useful starting point for how we fully extract the power and meaning of your Confidence Artefacts. Alongside Past Experiences, there’s also Vicarious Experience, Verbal Persuasion and Physical/Emotional States. Over the years, it’s been clear to me that people are wired differently about the role that each of these play and I’ve noticed other ways people engage with the world around them that results in their Confidence levels at any point in time.
I’m going to take you through a quick selection exercise that will allow you to know what your relationship with Confidence is based upon. Once you have a good feel for how you’re wired, you’ll be able to make a lot more sense of your Confidence Artefacts when they’re excavated and recorded. You’ll also see how the different sources I describe provide a bit more detail about how Vicarious Experience, Verbal Persuasion and Physical/Emotional State actually play a role in your Confidence.
So, I’ve got a few choices for you to think through and your job is to work out whether you have a particular bias when it comes to what you know influences your confidence more. I think before I get into those, it’s really important that you’re able to make selections without judgement of whether there’s a right or wrong answer! It’s going to be really helpful to make sure that you’re going into the selection process with a view that SELF-ACCEPTANCE is a key quality to be working on. You are as you are, and accepting and celebrating that is a key ingredient to this whole method I’m introducing. Don’t forget, Confidence is ultimately about the relationship you have with yourself and your attitude towards you, so SELF-ACCEPTANCE is key part of that relationship being optimised.
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
You’re going to find your Self-Acceptance will be increased if you make the selections about how Confidence works for you with the following statements in mind:
There is not a good or bad, right or wrong selection for each of the things I’m presenting. You’re just selecting what your dominant influence is that is part of how your personality works. As Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Easy to say, harder to do, but worth the effort practising this one!
All of the selections I’m giving you result in increased confidence and they have pros and cons to them. Our job is to enjoy the pros and minimise the influence of the cons, but not sweating them too much. They all support Confidence being able to grow so don’t worry that you’re not able to build Confidence with your particular preference. Building Confidence is the key and there’s no point thinking that some kinds of Confidence are better than others!
Just because you’re identifying a preference, it doesn’t mean you don’t make use of the other option available. It also doesn’t mean that you’re not able practise the other option to seek out the benefit of it… you just have a preference to use the influence that comes most naturally to you. Being more aware of how you can add to what comes naturally provides load of potential benefits.
Once you Accept what your preference is, you’re able to understand it more and seek to benefit more intentionally from your bias. For the most part, we tend take our preferences for granted rather than seeking to truly make the most of them through using them with deep skill and curiosity. So, you’re acceptance of your bias is really going to help you start using it, rather than just having it.
Accepting something to be true about you, and seeking the value from it will not result in you stopping wanting to improve. A lot of people worry that acceptance of stuff means you’re not going to strive any more. I’ve found it’s usually the opposite: with more understanding and acceptance of self, there’s usually a desire to make more of it as a result of not really having made the most of it before.
Knowing how you build your Confidence is essential to the success of the Confidence Archaeology approach
So, with as much SELF-ACCEPTANCE in mind, and a desire to get a much greater understanding of what naturally helps your Confidence levels grow, have a look at the following influences and see what you’re able to do to add your readiness to make the most of the Archaeological process that’s going to follow.
Who is most typically the source of the Confidence influence (increase and decrease) for you. Is it, YOURSELF or OTHER PEOPLE? So, no right or wrong here. Who do you know influences your Confidence the most? Is it what you think and what you say to Yourself? Is it what other people say to you and what you think they think about you? If you imagine this on a continuum, you can select whether you are firmly at one end or the other, or anywhere else in between. This is a really useful influence to be aware of and accepting, as it plays right into Bandura’s concepts of Verbal Persuasion and Vicarious Experience and gives you more of an understanding of how to make these two work in combination for you more powerfully.
What typically influences your Confidence levels more? Is Delivering Results or Making Progress? With this one, the Result is all about completing things and being able to take Confidence from the knowledge something’s been completed that is now tangible. With Making Progress, this means you take Confidence from knowing you’re putting in place the steps that move you away from the start line, toward the finish line. The sense of momentum and feeling a degree of being in control of the path towards the finish will typically be a more important influence than actually finishing. Again, no right or wrong here, just think about what you know most significantly influences the level of current and consistent Confidence you feel.
If you take the spirit of 1 and 2 you can also check whether you notice there’s any bigger influence on your Confidence in terms of how you get rewarded/recognised by others. Is your Confidence influenced more by Words or Rewards? If other people are involved in celebrating a success, do you get more Confidence from getting Positive Words said about you or from Rewards that are received as a result of the success you’ve contributed to? Think again where you’d put yourself on the continuum for this choice.
If we keep the theme from 2 and 3 building, the next choice to tune into, is about how you perceive your part in a success. Do you know that you get more Confidence when you’ve achieved something on your own when you’ve been part of a collective success? Does the success have more impact when it feels like it’s all yours or when it feels like you’ve been part of something with others? Don’t over think this one, it’s just going to be useful when it comes to understanding the full potential of your artefacts. In line with this one, I think it’s also worth seeing if you notice any difference when other people are the ones calling out successes. Do you prefer to be singled out for recognition/reward or do you like to be counted in for your part in a collective success? Add this learning to the own/others choice to get a good idea how this bit of the Confidence recipe works for you.
The next choice about your Confidence is focused on Thoughts and Feelings. A quicker one this: do you get more Confidence from how you FEEL or from what you THINK? It’s often hard to disentangle the two, but just go with your first thought or feeling and you’ll probably have the answer!
It’s hard to write about Confidence and not want to have a bit more understanding of how effectively you use Comparison, but more importantly who you use as the most useful comparison. This will relate strongly to number 2, but is worth a separate but of focus. Do you get your Confidence hits from getting evidence that you’re out-achieving yourself or out-achieving other people? If you can accept that both of these approaches simply allow you to get Confidence from the fact that you’re ‘getting better’, you just have to work out if that is more powerful for you when it’s either ‘better than I’ve previously been’ or ‘better than other people around me’. There’s loads of research about these different types of comparisons and as far as I’m concerned, the value of that research is most powerful when you focus on the fact that if you’re ultimately great at getting Confidence from both sources, you’ll do it most easily when you really accept which one is most naturally influential for you.
Just as a quick check, now go back to the rules of self-acceptance and work hard on being ok with the fact that we’re just looking to find where the magnetic forces of Confidence influence are highest for you. Some stuff just appeals to our personality and I’m going to keep pushing that it’s easier to accept and manage those realities than it is to demand we stop being like our natural selves. Accepting with a view to understanding, exploiting and extending how we naturally are has way more value than wishing we were less like us and more like other people!
Having completed the profile (use the graphic and make your own record of where you are on each continuum), you’re going to be using it again later on once we’ve done some excavation for Confidence Artefacts. This’ll really speed up you being able to understand why specific experiences and moments have influenced your Confidence and have the potential to influence even more.
I think as one last idea, you might want to work out what the selection process has done for you in terms of understanding the power of Past Experiences, Vicarious Experience, Verbal Persuasion and Physical/Emotional State. I think that for most people there’s a hierarchy in these four. We’re obviously focusing loads on Past Experiences with this approach, but that’s just because there’s so little help out there how to do this option really well.
If you were to rank order the four different Confidence influences, what order would you give them? Give it a bit of thought and just see if it helps you know whether one has particular influence for you. Again, we’ll be looking to help you benefit from them all equally, but if we can get more bang for your Confidence buck from the one that has most impact for you, we should be looking to do that.
So, you understand some more about how Confidence works for you. Given that, we’ll get ready to start excavating some Artefacts in the next section.
Photo in socials for this post by Ivan Lapyrin on Unsplash
heavy duty thinking CS . as a 'someone ' needing other people's validation ( no judgement right? ) words are my rewards . but rewards as cash is acceptable too