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!

Week 8 - How to speak to an Interviewer / Manager

"There is a very big difference between being professional and being a professional"

Anhar

Our young people have a good internal understanding of professionalism and are able to recognise it in people (i.e. workers slouching, chewing gum, talking inappropriately). But they find it hard to define what exactly being professional is. 

Anhar defines it as:

"performing the role that you've been hired to do to the best of your ability"

It's difficult to define since there are so many ways of being unprofessional, but far fewer examples of being professional. We started by improving one part of them to quickly boost their professionalism: language. Every time somebody used slang or a swear word they word receive a point against their name. As a prize, everyone with 0 points would get an extra 30 mins of help with their CV. The game went on for the full 2 hour session, and ended with only three people on 0 points. Some of the really high scorers had as many as 10 points to their names.

At the end, each person was given a work based scenario and asked how they would deal with it professionally. Some of the scenarios and approaches include:

You see a close friend at work stealing from the shop...

Bobby and Shahina both (independently from each other) decided they would approach their friend and try to reason with him/her to give the item back, one going so far as to threaten to go to the manager.

Both gave great performances and did exactly what we would want them to do when confronted with this situation within a working environment!

Week 5-7 - CV Building from scratch

"Never lie on a CV... just tell the right version of the truth"

Peter

Many of our group are creating CV's from scratch. Most experienced trouble getting their ideas down onto their CV's in a professional way, but also in a simple enough way that they can understand and elaborate on in an interview. The toughest part is getting the words to come from them, which is taking longer than expected as they have never created CV's and are unfamiliar with the language and layout needed. 


A lot of our group are relying on mine and Anhar's expert input and although it's tempting to take charge and show them how it's done, we had to insist on them learning to create it themselves. They will all need to continuously update and change their CV's throughout their life and so need to learn as soon as possible. Some of the key points include:

• Using the right words
• Keeping to one page
• Using an easy to read font and format
• Having good use of white space
• Keeping it all relevant to the job

Psychometric Test
We performed a psychometric test to discover the type of learner each of our participants are. We purposely kept the language in its original (and complex) language to test how our participants would deal with a situation which was out of their comfort zone. Only one person really shone and tried her best to understand the words using the context of the sentence. Others had an extremely difficult time and made no effort to hide how they felt about what we were putting them through. Some wanted to stop midway and had to be encouraged to finish, while others asked about what words meant after literally EVERY question. 


The results of the test displayed what kind of learner they were. But their approach to completing the questionnaire said MUCH more about their personality and ability to cope with a situation where they are out of their depth. 


We finished up with a quick game of "the tired robot" to de-stress afterwards. It's very interesting to see how quickly they flipped from stressed out to giddy with excitement after such a simple game.