Confidence: You can’t improve it if you don’t measure it.

One of the challenges with personal development, from the perspective of the company and the individual, is it’s difficult to quantify. The results can be slow and subtle, and differ for each person.

Subsequently, this can make it difficult to see a tangible return on your investment, both of time and money, which can act as a deterrent and unfortunately prevent people from making critical changes that could enhance their careers, wellbeing and lives.

So the question is, how can personal development be made more quantifiable so people and companies can reap the abundance of benefits it offers? Benefits like:

• More energy
• Greater clarity
• Better health, both physically and mentally
• Increased motivation and efficiency
• Greater confidence
• Stronger communication and relationships
• More happiness and fun times!

Unfortunately, there’s no one size fits all answer to this - but actually, that’s not unusual when you’re talking about metrics anyway.

When you sit down to set your KPIs for the coming quarter, you’ll typically base them on your overall goals (so you know where you’re heading) and previous efforts (so you can understand your capabilities and any potential challenges you may face). These metrics will be unique to each company, team and individual, because the influencing variables are also unique.

Once you’ve identified the specific goals for the quarter, you have your measures of success. So then you work backwards and break it down into the individual tasks that will take you towards that success and your ultimate outcomes.?

It’s exactly the same with personal development. The tricky bit can be finding that measure of success - unfortunately when you’re talking about variables such as confidence and communication you can’t just put a number to it.

What you can do however is identify a situation or task that will be improved when you have more of what you want. So for example, if you’re wanting to increase your confidence, you may choose the scenario of presenting to your team as a measure. Or perhaps sales pitches, or conducting performance reviews.

Next you can outline what it means for you to be confident in that situation. For example, I know I’m confident when:

• I feel calm - which means I don’t experience anxious feelings of tightness in my chest, shallow breathing and sweaty palms
• I’m able to speak clearly and concisely
• I’m present in the moment and stay focused on achieving the outcome
• I feel clear in my mind and don’t have constant racing thoughts

You now have some measures of success, so you can quantify your progress towards these by rating each variable on a scale of 1-10 every time you experience said situation. Again you need to define what each scale means before you start, so you’re always measuring against the same parameters. E.g.

I feel calm

• 1 = I feel anxious as all hell and don’t think I can face the situation
• 10 = I’m completely calm and looking forward to the experience

I’m able to speak clearly and concisely

• 1 = I fumble over my words and say “um” a lot
• 10 = I speak at a steady pace, I’m articulate and I say what I want to say in the way I want to say it

And so on…

Once you’ve completed your ratings, you’ll be able to identify where to focus your time and efforts to continue your growth. So if, for example, you score an average of 6 for ‘calm’ over a few situations you may focus on creating a calming routine to follow before facing these scenarios, so you can bump that rating up.

This is something I incorporate before I go on stage or camera. I run through my voice warm ups, I rock out to a particular song, I do some deep breathing and I repeat to myself, “You know your shit, the words will come.” My confidence rating is always higher when I do this.

And as mentioned above, you would also pair these metrics with your overall goals to ensure you’re on the right track, and perhaps even be pushed towards them a little quicker.

If you know, for example, that greater confidence will allow you to progress in your career more quickly, to grow your team more efficiently and/or be more inspiring to your kids - you’re going to be encouraged to prioritise the confidence building activities so you can bump up that rating and reap the rewards, and also ride the uncomfortable feelings that come with change more easily - because you know it’s for a greater purpose.

For me, I know that continuing to grow my confidence will allow me to accelerate at a greater speed towards my ultimate career goal - to create meaningful entertainment. “Old Laura” would never have had the confidence to deliver business satire and comedy to the real world (or even admit that’s what I wanted to do), for fear of looking stupid or being rejected.

But new Laura has increased her confidence ratings so much, I’ve now been able to excitedly launch a new comedy business podcast without living in constant fear that someone won’t like it (or me). For me, being able to show up on that every week as myself and just go wherever the conversation takes us without concern of what people will think, is the perfect measure of my confidence and success ??

So my question to you is - what can you do to measure your personal development success, and empower your teams to do the same?

P.s. If you need help with that, just shoot me a message and we can have a chat - [email protected] ??