The Confidence Equation

The Confidence Equation

Whenever we do something new, our confidence takes a knock.

Because brains love certainty, during times of change, self doubt has a chance to make a cameo.

Instead of believing negative thoughts, we can use evidence to top up our confidence.

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In Melbourne recently, I asked 200 people to reflect on one achievement they were proud of from the last 2 years.

Here are a few of them:

• "I sold my business."
• "I got divorced."
• "I raised kids during lockdown."

And my personal fave, "I dated the Tinder Swindler." (A fraudster who’s story led to a Netflix series).

These achievements were forming a part of each person’s Confidence Equation.

The Confidence Equation dictates that confidence is both quantifiable and a skill you can continually work on.

It uses evidence-based thinking to help us quantify and measure what is essentially a subjective experience.

The reason I asked people to share their achievements? It’s a tool we can all use when we communicate with ourselves and others during, or after, a big change: creating the headline we want to remember.

The Confidence Equation

The Confidence Equation is: Confidence = Evidence + Validation + Self Belief.

• When we have evidence of our achievements, we see our talents as independent of our mood or mindset.
• When we have validation from people whom we respect, or who have done what we want to achieve, we trust their feedback and absorb their wisdom.
• When we believe we are capable of learning new things, we are clear on what we want and believe we deserve the lovely things that come with self acceptance, and we are undeterred by circumstances outside our control.

It works because during times of change, our confidence takes a knock.

During change, we lose our comforts: feeling in control and known variables. Change unsteadies that - it serves us a laundry list of uncertainties. Our brains don’t like it!

When we grow, we will stop being good at something and be new at it for a bit. This means we’ll feel like a beginner. This is where self doubt creeps in.

This looks like:

• Starting a new job and wondering if you’re doing it ‘right’.
• Submitting a piece of work and praying there’s no feedback.
• Dating after a break up.
• Waking up in the middle of the night regretting something you said in a meeting.

It’s not that we are incompetent. It’s that we haven’t yet mastered our new?context?yet.

I’ll give you an example.

Earlier this year a friend asked me to come and chat with her team at their offsite.

I was pumped, and packed all my books enthusiastically for my first in person talk in 2 years.

However, on the morning of the event, I was confronted with new things I hadn’t anticipated.

For example:

• A gremlin had crawled into my wardrobe and somehow sewed my suit pants tighter. Very mysterious.
• ‘Past me’ had Marie Kondo-ed my work bag in the back of the wardrobe and it was covered with dust from lockdown. Very annoying.
• As I put the keys into the ignition, a warning yellow light was on in the car. Grr!

I started to feel flustered by these innocuous, tiny things that past me wouldn’t have even noticed.

But, because I was anticipating the prospect of teaching in person, something I?was out of practice of, I felt like I wanted to punch a wall before I’d even left the house.

On arriving at the event, I was even surprised by my nerves.

‘Hang on a minute’, I thought to myself, doing my breathing exercises in the car. ‘Isn’t this my day-job?’

After two years in lockdown, talking to 12 people, in person, had given me, someone who loves public speaking, a total adrenaline workout.

It was a reminder that while I technically knew the steps and what to say, my nervous system needed a minute to re-adjust. I needed a minute to restart the engine and remember which way was up.

And how humbling it was.

It had been a while since I felt like a total beginner.?I was out of practice.

It felt like the time I had gone for a run during lockdown. The next day, I realised I had injured my achilles. I was out of practice.

Without stretching or doing anything except emails, I was hobbling down the hallway from one tiny run.

The catalyst? A simple change to my routine: leaving the house without the ring light.

If we accept that the ‘price’ of growth is self doubt, we can get on with managing it.

No one is exempt from the experiences of doubt.

Some of us have louder voices of doubt than others. But what all people who take action during a time of growth share is that they are willing to prioritise a more helpful voice during times of change.

I asked those 200 people to reflect on their achievements to prove what the research tells us.

When we reflect on our achievements, we separate our identity from our worth. This means we’re able to appraise our achievements for what they are: progress.

In a study of 12,000 diary entries of people’s experiences at work it was discovered one principle influenced whether people had a positive experience: a sense of progress.

When we see - external to our mood, or mental state - evidence of our impact, we see things we can quantify and explain. We aren’t beholden to what mood we’re in: these are facts, after all.

When we reflect on our progress, big and small, we’re reminded of our competence. And this is critical during times of, or after, change, when our perception of our competence has been getting a major workout.

When a pep talk won’t do the trick.

The reason ‘just own it’ and other well meaning phrases don’t give us confidence is because it asks us to lean on our mood. We know that everyone has a different experience.

What the Confidence Equation does is remind us to lean on evidence and tell ourselves the truth by not believing everything we think.

Less indulging in conversations that remind us doing nothing gets us no results and feeling guilty about it. More taking action, in congruence with our own version of success.

Getting stage ready.

I love the phrase that Emmy Award winning writer Mindy Kolling shares that confidence is earned. Not gifted to us.

"We tell young women...to be confident and to just grasp it out of thin air, and I think that’s confusing. Because for me I’ve never had any [innate] confidence. I’ve just done the leg work. It often meant that I never came to anything unprepared."

The true definition of laziness is not a lack of action, but an unwillingness to act or expend energy. Mindy’s quote reminds us that expecting to feel confident, without consciously working on it, is creating a version of ourselves that will?never feel confident.

The Confidence Equation is a private way to work on our confidence at any stage of our career.

All the self help gurus say to have something you’ve never had before, you must be willing to do something you’ve never done before. I’d like to add to that. To maintain a baseline of confidence, we can add a private step: actively reflecting on our accomplishments and creating our own reflective practice.

When we take safe, private, secure steps of action, in our own time, in congruence with our own risk profile, we’re reminding ourselves: we didn’t appear out of thin air. We’ve got something to show for our efforts to date. The Confidence Equation reminds us of it.

This Equation is just as relevant for clients of mine managing retirement, stepping through a personal challenge, or managing their inner critic.

Applying this to work.

It’s not about the size of your achievement that matters. It’s about the personal meaning it has to you.

What one person finds easy, another person finds incredibly challenging. For example, while making a three course dinner for guests would be easy for my spouse Sadie, it’d be a tremendous achievement for me due to my preference of exclusively using the microwave. Therefore the meaning assigned to the achievement has different gravitas.

As you reflect on your achievements this week, try asking your team or boss one simple question:?what is a meaningful achievement to you, and why?

You’ll learn more about what motivates them, and you, than any online quiz could ever tell you.

What successfully-minded people share is a relentless focus on what they haven’t achieved yet.

You’re reading this. I consider you, like me, successfully-minded. So, like me, you might shrug and think what you do ain’t that impressive. And for you perhaps it isn’t.??

But it’s not until you do something really hard, that you start to really impress yourself.

Madonna is not without controversy over the years. Acknowledging this at a recent awards event, she famously declared, ‘"People say I'm controversial. But I think the most controversial thing I have ever done is to stick around."

Sometimes the biggest achievement is not what other people think.

For me, the TEDx talk and book, while lovely, are not my biggest achievements.

They’re outputs.

My biggest achievement is not what I will do, or have done, but what I have done, that has been personally incredibly challenging for me.

It was challenging to talk myself out of bed when I experienced depression. It was challenging to keep positive when cashflow looked dire. It was challenging, to not give up, despite many many temptations to do so along the way.

Confidence is celebrating your life of substance.

It’s nice to imagine a world without self doubt, but really, there’s no getting out of it if we’re doing something of substance.

Perhaps creating a substantive body of evidence, by reflecting on your achievements, is one way you could start reminding yourself of it.

I know it’s doing wonders for me.

Take care,

Rachel and the team at Happiness Concierge.