Week 9 - How to Be Confident

"Confidence... that feeling you have before you fully understand the situation"

Confidence increases with experience. 

On a scale of 1 - 10 (low - high) the first time you ride a bike, confidence is probably below 3. After riding to work everyday for a year, it's probably at 9 - 10 and so high that you don't even need to think about it. 

As most of our young participants have never had paid jobs or been to an interview it is perfectly normal for their confidence to be low. 

To find out where confidence levels were everyone was given a note with another persons name on it. They were asked to stick it (face down) onto a confidence scale from 1 - 10 of how confident they believe this person is. They were then asked to write their own name on a sticky note and place it on the scale of how confident they felt. 

A green tick represents outward confidence sticky note

The first note represents outward confidence, or how confident a person appears to others. 

The second note represents inward confidence, how confident a person feels inside. 

When the first stick notes were turned around, everyone realised that their outward confidence (average = 7) was higher than their inner confidence (average = 5) i.e. everyone appears more confident that they feel. Seems everyones been practicing how to look more confident than they feel. 

Our plan for today was to raise their inner confidence levels as there is almost no situation where it would be useful to have low confidence. I write almost as Rahima helpfully pointed out the following dilemma:

"...but what if you're actor playing a role of somebody who has low confidence?"

The 3 things we chose to concentrate on when talking confidently are:

1. Volume
2. Speed
3. Breathing

We split the group into pairs and had them talk one at a time for a full minute on any subject they felt strongly about. They then took turns telling their story to the whole group who would then rate them on their volume, speed and breathing. Everybody found it very difficult to have the spotlight on them and there were frequent fits of giggles or pleads to stop and sit down, which were promptly ignored by myself and my fellow trainer. 

On the whole, everyone improved by their second or third turn and were given individual feedback on what to work on including:

• Breathing between sentences
• Eye contact to the whole group
• Open body language (no leg twisting or hand ringing)

At the end, they were once again asked to rate their confidence level which had (wonderfully) improved now that they had a little more practice on speaking to a group!