Coaching for Confidence
When we think about any performance or skill set I think it's safe to say we want people to do it with confidence or perform with a level of confidence. Confidence is such a strong asset if one possesses it. But it begs the question where does confidence come from? What's the role of the manager in terms of instilling confidence in his or her employees? One of the most fundamental mistakes that I see managers making is demanding confidence when it has not been facilitated. For example, a sales manager looking at a sales person and saying "close that deal with confidence". A friend telling someone at their first public speaking event "make sure you have confidence". Oh come on if this worked we wouldn't even have a training or coaching industry.
If confidence was a button we could push it would make life much easier. Confidence really comes from two major elements. The first, is practice. If people practice whatever they need to improve their association with a particular skill or performance becomes more comfortable. Second, when you combine practice with positive reinforcement people feel better about producing effort in order to get better. Practice and positive reinforcement instills a continuous progression that somebody will get there. Confidence is a very powerful asset. Listen Here for a Great Confidence story: click here
The thing managers need to realize is they have the power to instill as well as destroy confidence within a very short period of time. For example let's take youth sports as a parallel description. When a father yells at his son for striking out have you ever seen the child look back at his dad and actually smile and say "hey pop just sit down and relax I'll get a hit the next time" and look invigorated? Gosh I hope you're laughing. We have interactions every single day with people and they either build people up or drag them down. Rarely do people go home and share with their spouse at the end of the day I had a neutral day-I hope you're laughing again? Manager can do something that we call 30 second coaching by observing a performance and providing specific feedback to that performance with a positive adjective and simply walking away. That is more powerful than sitting in an eight hour workshop with an outsider such as myself! Managers must realize the power and impact their interactions have on their employees and if they scheduled conscious time to go look for the good things their workplace and employees confidence levels would explode for the better.
Would you like to measure your employees confidence levels? Check out our new coaching assessment tool called Get Your Pulse: click here