Self Confidence

In our Executive Coaching practice we often work with clients who are seeking to build their self confidence.

 What is Self Confidence?

There are all sorts of theories about how self confidence should be defined. In practice for our Executive Coaching clients two things have a strong influence on their level of self confidence. It can be either of these two things or a combination of both. The first is a perceived sense of competence or skill. The second is a sense of self worth or how valued the client feels.

Coaching Self Confidence

Once you know the two main influences of your level of self confidence it starts to become easier to see what it is that is causing difficulty. The role of the Executive Coach is to ask you questions that get you to think through the cause of your lack of self confidence and then to explore with you how to strengthen you self confidence.

Times When We Might Lack Self Confidence

If we are honest there are occasions where we all lack a bit of self confidence. This is normal, entirely natural and probably helps us. However where a lack of self confidence continues to hold you back you have two choices. Decide to live your life avoiding the areas of low self confidence, or deal with it and ensure you meet your full potential.

In our Executive Coaching practice we have found our clients have decided to build their self confidence in some of the following situations

• Starting a new role where they are concerned they might fail
• Where new responsibilities have been added to a job
• Being given people management responsibilities having never managed people
• Having to do an important presentation to the board
• Having to do an important presentation at a conference
• Dealing with other managers who are particularly assertive

Causes of a Lack of Self Confidence

As we said earlier there are two main things that influence levels of self confidence. They are a perceived lack of competence or a low sense of self worth. These in turn are created by the way we see, think and feel about the world around us. So the causes could be things like:

• The standards of performance we set ourselves
• The way we expect to be treated by others
• The way we were raised, recognised and disciplined by parents and teachers
• Our culture – in some cultures you are always expected to outperform everyone else
• Bad memories of where something went wrong e.g. a presentation
• Our perceptions of what is expected of us
• A tendency to focus on the negatives of a situation and ignore all the positives

 Building Self Confidence

In executive coaching the approach to building self confidence is always tailored to the needs of the individual client and their circumstances. In broad terms the start point is to identify those situations in which a lack of self confidence occurs. Then to work with the client to develop a greater awareness of the possible causes. Once these have been identified it is possible for the client to work with the coach to adopt approaches to build self confidence on a permanent basis.

If you would like to discuss any concerns you have about self confidence and whether or not coaching can help, please contact us by email or phone using the details in the side bar.

Tony Goddard

Keywords: building confidence, causes of low self confidence, Coaching self confidence, executive coaching, self worth, self-confidence