How to protect your confidence in tricky times
On Friday, 24th June 2016, I woke up and switched on my phone to discover that the UK had voted for Brexit.
Stunned, I dropped my head into my hands and thought: “This is going to go on for years and will hit confidence badly.”
Over the next few hours my head was all over the place worrying about what was going to happen and what I was going to do. What could I do?
I kept thinking that we were only just recovering from the 2008 crash, which was bad enough. This could be worse.
As the day went on I gathered my thoughts. I knew how to protect my confidence, as I have been working on it for years. Maybe I could share my approach with others, people who are interested, and my customers.
“Time to step up Dave!” I said, and I went on tour.
Two weeks later I was in front of 25 executives in London. Most said it was very useful. Mabey chief executive Juliette Stacey said that the session was: “Very good and practical. Useful to step out of fast lane and consider these things. I figure that if I apply even a part of Dave’s approach, I will see improvement.”
That was over four years ago. Now we have coronavirus. This time it’s both global and very local. It’s a massive hit on our individual and collective confidence. We need to build resilience and protect our confidence, but how?
Confidence is not static, it goes up and down all the time.
When you achieve something, you feel more confident. When we hear bad news, our confidence takes a hit.
There is a lot of bad news about at this time. Confidence is fragile.
We are more effective when we feel confident; I get more stuff done and feel good about myself.
When my confidence is down I procrastinate and ask myself “is this thing I am doing any good?” and my productivity goes down and I doubt myself.
How do you protect your confidence?
I am not a naturally confident person so I developed my own confidence-building system, which I’ve used daily for many years.
Back in 2016 I shared this system with executives and in sessions with the leadership teams I coach.
People seem to get it. Confidence is the lifeblood of business, we need to protect our confidence and the confidence of our people. I show them how I protect mine and they work it out for themselves and their people.
Now I am going back on tour. I think it’s needed.
This time, though, I’m doing it on Zoom, once a week until end of March at least and maybe longer depending on how things are in Spring.
In this one hour long session I am going to explain why we lose confidence, how it’s a normal human condition, and will show you my confidence system so you can develop yours and keep your confidence topped up in these tricky times.
If you would like to find out more, or to register, click here.
Hope to see you on Zoom. If we all protect our confidence, we will work our way through this.
And, here’s wishing you well for 2021.