If you google search ‘self-confidence’ you’ll get multiple variations on a theme. Essentially it is an attitude or belief about yourself which enables you to trust in your abilities, knowledge, judgement, and decision making to exert quality control over your own life. It’s about understanding your strengths and having awareness of the things that aren’t in your strengths zone.
In superhero terms let’s think about the ability to fly. Superman inherently knows he has this ability and can trust the decision-making power of his brain, plus the physical ability of his body, to carry out the task. He believes in himself and gets on with it confidently.
Back down to earth: during 2022 when we ran a career insights survey, it was eye-opening when people told us that the biggest career challenge they’d had to date was having confidence and believing in themselves. The advice they most wanted to give their 20-year-old self was to believe in yourself because you can achieve great things.
In my 20’s I think I was still wide eyed with opportunity and progression; I don’t think I needed advice about believing in myself. However, there are periods in my 30’s and 40’s when my confidence took a dip for various reasons.
Interesting how our largest barriers are often self-imposed, and that so many times it takes the power of experience plus a period of reflection to really understand that this was the case. We can get hung up on so many things because we don’t believe in ourselves enough to go for that promotion, change careers, be better managers, tackle those challenging conversations, (insert the thing you are personally stuck thinking about right now).
Reflecting on all of this, we wanted to start a series of blogs about ‘Confidence Superpowers’. We’ll be using the same headline themes which we use to categorise our blogs, and taking a deeper dive into each one:
- Self-awareness
- Communication
- Learning and Growth
- Connection
- Resilience
- Wellbeing and self-care
We want to help people learn more about themselves in relation to these areas. What are your Confidence Superpowers and how can you leverage them to move forward? Find out in 2024 rather than 2044. Check back in next week and get out of the treacle that might be holding you back!
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