Pathways to Confidence with Senia Maymin
Have you ever walked into a meeting wondering, “Do I have the confidence to pull this off?” Maybe you are right on the boundary. Here are four tools you can use to put you right over the edge into having the confidence you need.
You can find the entire conversation here or play the embedded video below.
Albert Bandura is considered the greatest living social psychologist. Of all his many contributions, perhaps the biggest has been his work on self-efficacy and how to build it.
Self-efficacy is the belief that you will be able to do something. From his 1977 paper, “Efficacy expectation is your conviction that you can successfully execute a behavior required to produce certain outcomes.” How can you get that confidence, that expectation of success? Bandura describes four ways that I’ll list here and then explain.
- Mastery experiences
- Role Models
- Social persuasion
- How you interpret physiological symptoms
Let me just normalize the experience of needing a confidence boost when faced with something new. That is normal. As we go through the four approaches, think of me getting ready to present to 250 people. I’ve presented to 100 people, but this feels like a much bigger deal.
“If I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning” — Mahatma Gandhi
Mastery Experiences
The first way to become more confident is to have mastery experiences, times when you have already been successful. You can call them to mind whenever you’re faced with something similar. Maybe you’re working on a project outside of your comfort zone, but then you realize you’ve done this in a different form before.
As I prepare for my presentation, I can remember what worked when I made presentations to 100 people. Then I can think, “I got it.” After all, I did just fine in my last big presentation. When I finish the 250-person presentation, I’ll have another mastery experience to call to mind.
Role Models
Technically this one is called vicarious mastery, that is, seeing someone like me succeed. We know how effective role models can be. If we see what somebody else is doing, especially if it is not completely out of our reach, we can often imitate steps we observe. We might think, “If you can do it, so can I.”
As I get ready for my 250-person presentation, I can think of a role model with lots of experience presenting to larger groups. I can even ask her, “Is it the same? Is it different?” I can watch what she does and tell myself, “Oh, I could do that.” Notice that I use feminine pronouns here. The more like you that the role models are, the more vicarious mastery you experience.
Social Persuasion
The third approach is when other people tell you that you can do it. This could be mentors, colleagues, people who believe you can do it. They’re letting you know that they believe you can actually stand up to the challenge. All you have to do is just listen to them.
I’ll give a caveat for this one. Subsequent research has shown that the results are much higher when you ask them for additional tools. That moves you much further than just hearing their encouragement.
My friends say to me, “Senia, you’ve done 100 people. You can do 250.” I ask about their experiences, what they’ve found worked. “How do I make eye contact in a 250-person group? What do you suggest I do to get ready?” In other words, I ask,
“What do you do that might be a good tool for me to use?”
My Body Feels It
This is my name for the fourth approach. My good friend, Kathryn Britton, describes it like this. If you’re about to do a presentation, what are your body and emotions telling you? You could think, “I’m fearful and nervous.” But you could also think that the same symptoms mean, “I’m getting excited and ready to shine.”
So, I’ve got butterflies in my stomach right before I go on stage. I could think those butterflies as nervous energy, that I’m going to be too nervous to talk. Or I could think of them as excited energy, that I can’t wait to share with this audience and to hear their questions. It’s a mental shift to translate the same feelings throughout your body into an interpretation that is just as likely to be truthful and more helpful.
I can also intentionally affect the way I feel physically. Are my shoulders getting scrunched up? Do I want to relax them and feel differently? I could breathe deeply and exercise my tongue and lips, the way Shannon Polly suggested in an earlier talk.
Summary
Take at least one of these four approaches, and put it in your pocket like a tool to use when you need a confidence boost.
In my experience, that two approaches that people most often pick up are mastery experiences and my-body-feels-it. When I coach people on confidence, they often go, “I have had similar experiences. Let me not discount all the experiences I’ve had.” Then they think about what the body feels and think, “What else could that mean besides being nervous?”
You could use these four approaches to boost the confidence of other people, maybe your children or co-workers. How could you help them see that they’ve had relevant experiences? How could you help them find effective role models? How could you explain to them what you’ve already seen them do well so that they understand that you believe they have it covered? What questions could you ask that would help them interpret the way they feel as excitement and getting ready to shine?
Photo by Mor Shani on Unsplash
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Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.