Confidence at Work

Get It, Feel It, Keep It

Ros Taylor

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780749467760
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

Confidence is the foundation of success. It empowers you to do more and do it better. While many of us have learnt to fake it to limited affect, how many of us can say that we have cultivated self-belief from within? By navigating the fascinating psychological theories and latest thinking, Confidence at Work takes you on a journey of self discovery to help you become bold, charismatic and influential at work. Beginning with an in-depth questionnaire to understand your 'confidence quotient, ' it encompasses leading theories and insights including those of Daniel Goleman and Tony Buzan. Including twenty case studies of successful people from all walks of life, Confidence at Work will help you understand the reasons behind lack of confidence and overcome any hindrances, ensuring that you can handle difficult people with elegance, create your own personal brand and excel in your career.

PART I

Who are you anyway...?

01

Bring yourself to work

Who are you anyway and what can you bring to the world of work? We are all so busy living inside our heads that it is difficult to objectify our distinct contribution. However this discovery is essential to increasing your confidence at work. Many of the people who discussed the nature of confidence with me mentioned self-awareness as being at the very heart of confidence at work.

Daniel Goleman, of Emotional Intelligence fame, spoke to me on a recent visit to London about his views. He felt there were two sides to confidence. In his words: ‘Healthy confidence is a high sense of self-awareness with a true understanding of what you are good at. Bad confidence is a narcissistic over-inflation of capabilities.’ For me that sounds more like arrogance than confidence. But let’s not get too precious about semantics.

Selma Hunter, VP of the Process Division, Jacobs Engineering, says: ‘My definition of confidence is an understanding of what my strengths and weaknesses are and leveraging these strengths without being arrogant.’ Selma is a woman in the male-dominated engineering profession. She not only started the Process Division but exceeded expected first-year profits by a multiple of four. She was of course promoted to vice president.

Former Vice Chancellor of St Andrews University, Brian Lang, felt that: ‘Confidence at work is an awareness of your ability to deliver.’ Brian knows all about delivery as he headed up the British Library project delivering on one of the most exciting new ‘fit for purpose buildings’ in London.

Working strengths

So these replies led me to reflect on when I knew what my working strengths and ability to deliver were. As an only child born of loving middle-class parents, I hadn’t a clue who I was, never mind what I could contribute. Position in a larger family gives you some definition of where you fit in and the role you play. I was free form, with no boundaries but also with no sibling feedback. So it was as if I grew up in a vacuum. I did know, however, that I liked to talk a lot and sing but found it difficult to stand from a cross-legged position on the floor, which provided great angst at gym class. These aspects of me have persisted to this day. However, with a career in psychology I can talk and sing if I feel so inclined and I don’t have to get up from the floor with my legs crossed. Done deal.

I am convinced this lack of personal awareness drove me to read psychology at university. I had always wanted to go on to higher education but, in retrospect, for all the wrong reasons. I used to go past Glasgow University on the 10A bus with my mother. There was a cafe called ‘the Papingo’ on the corner, which served frothy coffee, as it was called in those days, with interestingly skinny, black-attired students lounging louchely outside discussing, I presumed, the esoteric niceties of philosophy or politics. It all looked so debauched and glorious. Of course, by the time I matriculated, the cafe had closed and I would never know if these ‘über cool’ students had been debating existentialism or eyeing up talent. Probably the latter.

I was hungry for intellectual stimulation and of course for a bit of personal debauchery too, but with no idea what I was eventually going to do with all this learning. I did not get around to deciding that psychology was my academic choice till the second year and then it was Saul on the road to Damascus. I simply loved it. My journey with psychology and confidence was always driven by trying to understand myself and then subsequently my clients. This upfront analysis of how the bits of a person fit together is, I discovered later on, much underestimated and underutilized by psychologists and coaches alike. However, this investigation to me defines psychological intervention. It is a kind of ‘House’ of the mind; a cross between Hugh Laurie, Columbo and Sherlock Holmes.

The glorious thing about Homo sapiens is that everything we think, feel and do is an extension of what is truly ‘us’; a bit like a radio mast with waves spinning around it. This radial nature of who we are permits the exploration of all sorts of personal aspects using theories of psychology, psychometric tests, personality profiles and other more symbolic exercises. All reveal different pieces of what makes us unique.

The theories and practice of psychology I uncovered on my journey for enlightenment I will share with you throughout this book and, where I can, I will adapt questionnaires and checklists so you can share in these insights. And of course the more you know about yourself and what you offer, the more you will enjoy your own journey with confidence.

Nature versus nurture

At a basic level during my degree course I was beginning to understand that a strength I had was an interest in people and what made them tick. The nature versus nurture debate was in full swing when I was studying and was tipping towards nurture as the major influence in our lives rather than genetics. It was such a hopeful time, the 60s and 70s. So I shouldn’t have found it surprising that with a mother who talked to anything that moved I might be so disposed myself. I took her on the tour of Buckingham Palace, which takes normal people two hours to navigate all the rooms. Five hours later, having talked to every member of staff and uniformed flunky, we emerged blinking into the dusk. Of course they loved someone being so interested.

Once, after visiting Wimbledon in the former standing room only section, my mother found herself in the Royal toilet and chatted about the match even-handedly between Princesses Margaret and Alexandra as they washed their hands. Clearly used to such interactions, she forgot to tell me till we were travelling home.

My mother is also very assertive. She knew what she wanted and single-mindedly went after it. Not for her a restaurant table outside the toilet. To this day we often move three or four times till we achieve the right seat, usually by the window. She also liked a green banana. If the poor banana became prematurely yellow or dared sport a brown spot, back it went. I used to cower with embarrassment behind the vegetables as she returned the offending item. I there and then vowed never to be like my mother. Yesterday, a London bus accelerated past me on a zebra crossing missing me by centimetres. Before I could say ‘green bananas’ I was knocking at the driver’s window calmly telling him that what he had just done was against the law and the pursuit of Grand Prix status in his bus would be at the expense of his licence. I had officially become my mother.

Reflections of childhood

It is worth carrying out your own reflections of childhood, as they can reveal what you are truly like and what you love to do. But what has this to do with work? Being in touch with who you are, where you have come from, your family background and childhood aspirations help define your contribution at work. If you choose a job that you might be able to do but does not tap into your major strengths, then you will be eternally frustrated. Never feel that ‘it is just a job’ so any one will do. Work can be fulfilling and challenging, stretching capabilities way beyond your wildest dreams. This is the stuff of confidence.

The more you bring yourself to work, the more unique will be your contribution and the swifter will be your path to success. Compliant conscripts at work tend to be ignored when promotions are handed out whereas vociferous volunteers are heard and fostered.

In the next chapters I want to share with you my favourite theories in psychology so that you will be better able to understand yourself and as a result become more confident at work.

Steps to confidence at work

• Begin to understand your working strengths by looking back to childhood, as that is when they emerged.
• Look at your parents and see where you might have inherited or learned your skills.
• Reflect back on childhood aspirations and calculate whether you are still on track to fulfil these or have chosen different ones to pursue. Are these the correct ones to satisfy your desire for confidence and success? If not, readjust your goals.
• Don’t settle, seek success.

02

Eric Berne’s transactional analysis

Eric Berne, in the late 1950s, suggested that we are like our parents not perhaps in the content of our lives but in the way we communicate. His theory of transactional analysis is based on the belief that we can learn from studying more closely the way our decisions and communications are based on our thoughts and feelings. He proposed the concept that all experiences were laid down on a ‘tape’ during our early years to be accessed later when necessary. Although we can’t remember the first three years of our lives that tape was even then recording and is still playing back to this day. Berne has it that there are three aspects to our behaviour – the parent, the child and the adult. He calls these aspects ‘egos’.

The parent ego

The parent ego has two sides: the critical, disciplining, restricting parent and the helpful, caring, loving parent. The controlling parent is the one who scolds when the children are late for dinner and the caring parent is the one who is happy they arrived home safely.

In Berne’s theory, our parents were a huge influence in our lives. The basic information that we use comes from a lifetime of experience with our parents and teachers, particularly in early life. Remarks such as ‘Sit up straight at the table’, ‘Use your knife and fork not your fingers’, ‘Bring it here, mummy will help you’, will be on your parent tape whether you like it or not and can be played back at any time.

You can hear children scolding each other like parents, for example, ‘Don’t touch that – mummy says so’. When we feel, think, talk and behave in the ...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title page
• Imprint
• Dedication
• Table of contents
• Foreword
• Before we start
• Introduction
• Confidence starts here
• Part I: Who are you anyway...?
• Part II: Branding for confidence
• Part III: Influencing for confidence at work
• Part IV: Be a confident leader
• Some final thoughts
• Index
• Full imprint