confidence e-booklet r4 · hillary’canhelpseries’ confidence:) thereal)mccoy)...

Hillary Can Help Series

CONFIDENCE: The Real McCoy

Hillary Hutchinson and Associates, LLC Phone: 843-225-3224 [email protected]

© 2012

Hillary Hutchinson, The Change Strategist

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Confidence is a state of mind .............................................. 3 Section 1: 3 Techniques for Building Your Confidence ........................ 4 Section 2: 6 Tips for Creating Confidence and Poise .............................. 6 Section 3: Shame Versus Confidence, or, From Darkness to Light ... 9 Section 4: Rewrite your own story! .......................................................... 11 Section 5: Confidence Without Egoism .................................................... 13


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INTRODUCTION: CONFIDENCE IS A STATE OF MIND How many times have you said to yourself, “I’m not good enough? Smart enough? Talented enough?” The time has come to stop!

Why is it that so many of us doubt our own abilities? Until you own your excellence, you will continue to doubt yourself and perhaps stop yourself from taking on new challenges that you most certainly could accomplish. If you are always afraid of saying something stupid or doing something stupid you may not even be willing to try new things.

There is a reason this little e-‐booklet is subtitled, “The Real McCoy.” The origin of the term, which has come to mean “the real thing,” has been debated in linguistic circles for some time. One version says American boxer Norman Selby, known as Kid McCoy, American welterweight champion from 1898-‐1900 had so many imposters in scheduled bouts across the small towns in the United States that he finally had to start calling himself, “The Real McCoy.” Another version says it’s a corruption of the term “The real Macao,” pure heroin imported from the Far East. Most likely it was once “The real Mackay,” referencing to a Scottish whiskey but was adapted by Americans to “the real McCoy. ” No matter where it originates, it’s clearly still in vogue to mean “the genuine article.” And that is what real confidence is all about: it’s knowing your true accomplishments have worth from the evidence of all your past successes in a way that does not require you to be offensively egotistical. And when you feel that, you truly have the world in your hands.

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Section 1 3 Techniques for Building Your Confidence Confidence is something that can be learned. Becoming more confident can make you more successful. Success breeds success, adding to your sense of confidence. This creates a powerful inextricably linked cycle of success, confidence, success.

Confidence comes from real, solid achievements, which no one can take from you. This is not the same as self-‐esteem, which may be built on nothing more solid than nice words said to you. Solid achievements are built upon a “can do” mindset, then actually doing.

Envision success. In other words, say to yourself each time a new opportunity arises, “I can do this,” letting go of any negative thoughts about failing, and do it. One way to get in a positive mindset is to look back on your life and identify past achievements. It doesn’t have to be job related:

Did you successfully raise children? Volunteer to chair a committee at school or at church? Buy a house on a shoestring? Learn to play an instrument for fun? Come up with a solution to a scheduling problem? Join an adult soccer team?

Every one of these things is an accomplishment. Your achievements don’t have to be ‘life-‐altering.’ Even small achievements are achievements. 1) Write It Down So, get yourself a notebook, and create an "Achievement Log." You can do this today. Start your log by identifying at least ten things you have accomplished in your life so far. Here are some more suggestions: Think about the tests you have passed, the times where you did something that made a difference in someone else’s life, or any tasks or projects you completed. Once you get started you might find it hard to stop at ten!

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Put your Achievements Log somewhere you can look at it often. Commit to looking at your list of achievements each week, reminding yourself of the success you have already experienced. Sit up straight while reading and your posture will send your brain success messages, too. The log can be a reminder of what you are capable of and what is yet to come. You can celebrate what you accomplished in the past week and grow your list of successes by adding new ones. Tip: if you are feeling down, re-‐reading the log can be a great way to lift your spirits. 2) Strengths As you create your log, think as well about the personal strengths you have exhibited in your accomplishments. If it’s difficult for you to look at yourself objectively and recognize your strengths, try placing yourself in the shoes of a friend or family member. What strengths would these people see in you? What would they consider your talents to be? As you identify your strengths, make sure you take the time to really acknowledge them. Is it easy for you to be organized while people around you remain scattered? This is a natural strength. Enjoy a few minutes of being proud and reflecting on your talents. 3) Goals Next, think about the things that are really important to you, and what you want to achieve in every area your life: Work, personal life, social life, health and fitness, and anything else that is important to you. Make sure you add some deadlines to keep yourself on track. Setting and achieving goals is a key part of building and sustaining confidence.

When you have set your goals, fear, doubt and uncertainty may rear their ugly heads. At this stage, you need to manage your mind. Learn to recognize any negative self-‐talk and replace it with confidence building talk, such as “I have already achieved much, and I can do more.” “I can use my knowledge to help myself, my colleagues and my family.” Make a clear and unequivocal promise in your mind that you are absolutely committed to achieving your goals, and that it is in your power to do so.

Building your confidence is a process. Applying these principles will help your sense of confidence to grow, and therefore your success.

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Section 2 6 Tips for Creating Confidence and Poise Why do we find it so very difficult to acknowledge our own abilities? It seems to be part of the human condition to believe that other people are “better,” “abler,” “more gifted,” “smarter,” etc. It’s all about believing in ourselves for a change, and that takes confidence. Confidence is at the heart of a successful professional life, because if you don’t believe in yourself, no one else will either. People aren’t just born with confidence. Confidence is learned behavior and must be practiced. I work with many academics that, despite all the objective evidence to the contrary, continue to see themselves and their career trajectories as “failures.” Why are they so harsh and judgmental when reviewing their own accomplishments? The simple answer is that owning their achievements is hard for them. Until you give yourself positive feedback, you will never own your own abilities or feel truly confident. There are many simple tips you can implement to help develop your confidence. As with any list of tips this is not everything you can do, nor is the intention for you to do all of them at once. Instead, choose one or two that feel like they would work best for you in your particular circumstances. Practice will be required, so give them an honest effort and be patient waiting for the results. Continue to look for evidence that you are more able than you think, can accomplish more than you realize, and allow yourself to feel confident. Tip #1 – Ask yourself, “What is the worst things that could happen?”

When we do not manage our own minds, we often let our fears overtake our thoughts. We start imagining things in unrealistic terms, and build improbable results for what might happen. Asking yourself, “What’s the worst thing that could happen?” will help you get a realistic picture of potential consequences, which often turn out to be less dire than we first thought.

Tip #2 – Use your imagination


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Imagine a more positive outcome through the use of visualization. See yourself behaving in more confident ways in the challenges you face. See an excellent outcome of your efforts in your mind. Pianists that practice their concert performances in their heads while traveling have often used this method to enhance their actual show.

Tip #3 – Think of positive memories

Dwell on positive accomplishments and experiences. Why would dwelling on previous failures and difficulties help you? The answer is, “It won’t.” Amazingly, when you hear something negative about yourself, it takes seven positive comments to balance that out. (This may be an evolutionary adaption for survival, so that we more strongly retain memories of mistakes that could cost us our lives. In the

modern world, though, you rarely have to run from a tiger.) So, concentrate on the positive things that have happened to you. Consciously reverse the tendency to dwell on the bad and concentrate on the good results. Tip #4 – Look back from the future

Imagine yourself a few years in the future of your life. From this vantage point ask yourself: “Will this be a big deal or even something I’ll remember?” The answer will almost always be no. By asking yourself this question, your day-‐to-‐day troubles are placed in proper perspective.

Tip #5 – The past is not the present

What happened in the past doesn’t necessarily mean it will happen in the future. Or to paraphrase a popular commercial, “What happens in the past, stays in the past.” We create our futures in the here and now. Keeping this in mind, realize that you don’t have to let the past sabotage your future. The future can be different. Hooray for that.

Tip #6 – Look at ‘failure’ differently


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The most successful people don’t take failure personally. Any good scientist knows that experiments will fail 99% of the time; that’s just how you figure out what really works. Look at what you can learn from experience. Failure is just feedback on what you need to work on to do better the next time. Remain open to the learning that failure gives you, and be willing to change your formula for success.

Engaging in one or more of these behaviors over time will allow your confidence to grow, you to grow into your own authentic self, and offer the world the best you have to give.


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Section 3 Shame Versus Confidence, or, From Darkness to Light

I’ve been thinking a lot about shame lately, in part because I have been reading Brené Brown’s latest book, and in part because I have begun to realize how shame sometimes holds me back from putting my best self forward. Shame is all about feeling unworthy, perceiving the whole self as somehow inadequate, defective, or fundamentally flawed.

Brown’s title, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent and Lead (2012), is drawn from a Theodore Roosevelt speech delivered on April 13, 1910, “Citizenship in a Republic.” You may already know the famous bit, which I shorten here:

“The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, who face is marred by dust and sweat and blood,; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short time and time again…who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.”

For those of you who don’t know her, Brené Brown has made a career of studying shame as a research professor at the university of Houston Graduate College of Social Work. Her TED talk (http://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability.html) from June 2010 has generated 6,736,536 hits to date on YouTube alone, a number that could easily be twice that once all possible platforms have been considered, and led to what she called her own “vulnerability hangover”(translation: shame). With that, she began to look at her research from a more personal perspective, flipping the question, “What leads to shame?” to “What leads to self-respect?” In short, studying shame led her to look at vulnerability, and examining vulnerability led her to ask (I paraphrase here),”What do the people have in common who are willing to reveal their own imperfect selves, risking rejection, mockery, humiliation, embarrassment, disappointment, regret, or disgrace, yet persevere in ‘daring greatly?’ ” The answer is clear from the title of her earlier work, The Gifts of Imperfection: Living with Courage, Compassion and Connection (2010). Shame, she discovered, was actually about the fear of being disconnected from other people, and the ultimate rejection: being shunned. Like fear and anxiety, there may be an evolutionary component, keeping members of a social group in line, to ensure the survival of the whole group. Part of combating the shame voices is to recognize the need to calm down the limbic system. (For more on this topic, check out the link in the box below.)


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So many people, my clients included, suffer from the fear of not being “enough”: smart enough, funny enough, rich enough, athletic enough, productive enough, in short, good enough. I work with them to hear the source of the bad tapes, and find productive responses to the old canards. Brené Brown calls this “shame resilience.” Psychotherapist Gershen Kaufman calls it “returning shame to its origins” by “refocusing attention.” Dr. Kristin Neff, another psychologist following Buddhist philosophy, sees it as building self-compassion, so that you can “stop beating yourself up and leave insecurity behind.” Some coaches call it “reframing.” I call all of this “building confidence.” Confidence is the ability to see yourself clearly, to know that like every other human on the planet you have your own flaws, and still be able to connect truly by daring to open yourself up to the critics in the world, whether you are leading, parenting, loving, inventing or writing. Confidence grows by doing, by trying things you didn’t initially think were possible, pushing yourself along your own growing edge, and not letting the shame thoughts get in the way of unleashing your best self into the world. The flip side of shame is learning to feel worthy, defined as “having merit.” Let me be clear: it is not about “dumping” all your insecurities and emotions on to someone or something else. It is about balancing strength and vulnerability. Every time I write a newsletter, I hear my own gremlin worrying away in the background, and every time I write something personal about my life, I wonder how it will land with others. My authentic voice is sometimes pretty timid, but I still dare to send it out into the world electronically. As the darkness descends during this winter season in the northern hemisphere, let us remember to shine our own light. To illuminate the dark recesses of our self-doubt, shame, and cowardice in favor of living a whole life, one constructed from the confidence to be vulnerable. We are each of us imperfectly good enough, just the way we are.


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Section 3 Rewrite your own story!

People learn through the stories we tell about life, whether we are discussing someone’s success in school, a tragedy in their personal life, the moralizing of fables and sermons, the truth embedded in every myth ever told. You will most likely not remember an academic abstract of an article, but you will understand the point through the examples that are used. You may not remember the theory behind a marketing presentation, but you will remember the pictures in the slides if a story accompanies it.

The exact details don’t actually matter as much as the arc of the storyline, and the lessons we take away from it. Consider my life: For years, I defined myself in terms of my ability to put my husband through his PhD.

When he died in an auto accident after teaching only two semesters as an assistant professor, I redefined my life in terms of taking care of my two children who were 8 and 10 at the time of his death. The problem with this story line was that once they were both fledging the household, I could no longer find my purpose. I truly suffered through the dark night of the soul, before discovering that my new purpose had to do with helping other people achieve their dreams while simultaenously pursuing my own dream of a private coaching practice. 1) Change Your Story And Change Your Life I am old enough now to have known many people that have suffered serious tragedies in their lives: children who died young of cancer; parents that suffer dementia; bankruptcy due to a generally failing economy and not from mismanagement of funds; the inability to find work in a beloved field and choosing underemployment over unemployment. So many stories of sorrow exist. There are also the lovely stories of triumph: desperation leading to radical changes that work out in unexpectedly delightful ways. Losing all material possessions and deciding to sign on as a cook on a cruise liner to see the world; a child’s death leading to the foundation of a charity to help those in similar situations; realizing that diet is a lifestyle change, not an on again/off again affair, finally leading to


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sustainable weight loss; marriages on the brink of dissolution salvaged through better communication as a result of tragedy. Tragedy may shape your story, but it does not have to define it. 2) Even Small Changes In The Story Matter Small changes in perspective do matter. For instance, Dorothy [the names are fictionalized for privacy], a client of mine struggling to finish a PhD, consistently told herself that she wasn’t as smart as her classmates. That she was studying in a non-‐native language in a culture foreign to her did not enter into the equation. This led her to question every sentence that she wrote.

I asked her if there was anyone else in the world that knew her topic like she did, and what did they know about it? She could come up with one name only, someone who had been studying her topic for over 30 years. “What does that tell you about your knowledge of the topic?” The words spilled out of her, fairly tripping over her tongue on the way out of her mouth. She was an expert on the topic. She

acknowledged it. And, lo and behold, the dissertation went from chaotic and amorphous to polished and solid. 3) What You Tell Yourself About You Matters What is the story you are telling yourself now about the life you are leading? You can use the intention (not a resolution! That word can sabotage the best of intentions) of redefining yourself, and telling a new story about your path, as the direction you want to take in the next year. Ask yourself:

• What is the story of my life? • Are there patterns I repeat over and over

again? • Am I attached to these patterns? If so,

how? • How do I want to define my life? • How would I be different if I defined

myself differently? • What do I see as the meaning or purpose

embodied by life? • How do I want to be remembered?

Start today. Because the story you tell about your life is your life.


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Section 5: Confidence Without Egoism Just to recap some of the suggestions from the previous sections so you can put them into practice today:

• Use positive affirmations. • Look at what you've already achieved. • Think about your strengths. • Think about what's important to you (act from your own values). • Stop negative self-‐talk and silence the critical voices. • Keep building your knowledge base. • Others believe in your abilities, too. • Let go of perfectionism. • Know you are the expert.

Here’s a chart that can help you tell the difference between confidence and insecurity. Remind yourself that egotism is often insecurity that masquerades as arrogance.

Self-‐Confident* Low Self-‐Confidence

Doing what you believe to be right, even if others mock or criticize you for it.

Governing your behavior based on what other people think.

Being willing to take risks and go the extra mile to achieve better things.

Staying in your comfort zone, fearing failure and so avoid taking risks.

Admitting your mistakes, and learning from them.

Working hard to cover up mistakes and hoping that you can fix the problem before anyone notices.

Waiting for others to congratulate you on your accomplishments.

Extolling your own virtues as often as possible to as many people as possible.

Accepting compliments graciously. “Thanks, I really worked hard on that prospectus. I’m pleased you recognize my efforts.”

Dismissing compliments offhandedly. “Oh, that prospectus was nothing really, anyone could have done it.”

*Adapted from http://www.mindtools.com/selfconf.html Remind yourself: You’ve seen people like yourself succeed in different situations. You’ve mastered difficult/challenging experiences before. You can do it again.


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HAVE CONFIDENCE IN YOURSELF AND ALL THAT YOU CAN DO!

To your success and a confident new you!

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