I seem to work with quite a few folks for whom ‘confidence’ or more accurately lack of it, seems to be a root cause. Its not unusual therefore to get into a conversation with someone about how they are held back  by their self-esteem and confidence ‘issues’.

A common theme I often hear is a contingent one – ‘I’ll be confident when… x, y, z is true’.  Confidence will only become available to them some time in the future, and guess what, that time is always some way away. This theme is often allied with unrealistic self-expectations, and confidence seems to be associated with the need to be perfect … ‘I’ll be confident when I’m perfect’.  And of course that time will never arrive for any of us.

Confidence only comes in the ‘now’ by accepting that you are never going to be perfect but that you are probably (already) good enough. That means taking responsibility for your state everyday and not postponing or procrastinating. As Susan Jeffers says ‘Feel the fear – and do it anyway!’

I often have a tricky time explaining to novice coaches that advice giving, especially on a personal matter, is, by and large, a perilous activity. “But, I’ ve been through something similar – surely they would benefit from my advice!” they say to me. Well yes and no.

The point is that we are not the same, and while our experiences may be similar, they are rarely directly equivalent. What works for one person in one situation may very well not be helpful for another person in another situation. Blindly copying another’s actions robs us of our resourcefulness and keeps us from trusting ourselves fully.

However, my reservations about advice giving goes beyond this . So often for me the hidden message in advice is “Be like me”. I heard someone tell a colleague recently to “be more confident” – unspecific advice at the best of times but also loaded with a judgement about the relative superiority of the speaker.- “Just be like me and you’ll be fine” was the implied message. Surely our job as coaches is to help people be fully themselves, rather than poor copies of other people?

As Oscar Wilde so aptly put it “Be yourself, everyone else is taken !”

At some point along the way, I remember being told by a very sage person that “Ultimately, charismatic leaders are disempowering”. I remember this being quite a shocking thought – I’d had a few charismatic bosses I’d happily have walked on hot coals for, and the idea of them being disempowering was at the time something I wasn’t ready to take on board.

When people tell me they are not confident I’m never quite sure how to take it. It strikes me that people use this phrase in two very different ways – situationally or personally.

For some it is seems to be simply a shorthand expression that they are moving into new territory in which they can’t reliably predict the result – e.g.  “I’ve never done tight rope walking before so I’ve no idea whether I’m going to fall or not”. Used in this way lack of confidence is a prediction of an uncertain outcome in a new situation, but not of a unwillingness to give it a go anyway. Coaching this group of ‘unconfidents’ can often be a joy as they expand what they can do by exploring into what they’ve never done before.

For others, “I’m not confident” is a more blanket assessment which seems to be much more personal and final – e.g. “Don’t ask me to tight rope walk – I’m not the sort of person who would ever succeed at that”. Used in this way “lack of confidence” is often a defence against tackling things outside the norm, and a prediction of likely failure – self-fulfilling you might argue. Coaching this group can therefore be much more challenging as the badge/label that clients have placed on themselves has first to be dislodged. Much more challenging.

I was recently reminded of Tim Gallwey’s  ** performance equation : Performance equals Potential minus Interference. 

Although a tad pseudo-scientific, Gallwey’s equation succinctly expresses the notion that most of our battles are not ‘out there’ but in our own heads – how we play our ‘Inner Game’. The issue is not what we can do, so much as what we talk ourselves out of doing. Just listen to your own self-talk next time you face a difficult or challenging task and you will probably hear self-doubt, negative forecasting and other forms of self-limiting beliefs – all examples of  ‘mental interference’ in Gallwey’s terms.

This simple equation has spawned a whole approach to coaching. Rather than building skills or knowledge (ie maximising the potential component of the equation), the ‘Inner Game’ coach works on ‘interference’ element by finding causes of low self-confidence, challenges self-limiting beliefs and assumptions and recasting self-defeating or destructive patterns of behaviour. This means the coach is more likely to ask questions and listen, rather than tell, instruct or teach.

“It’s not what they can do, it’s what they tell themselves they can’t do, that brings them to coaching” said an old colleague of mine. Too true!

Here’s a short clip of Tim Gallwey talking about how he stumbled on the ‘Inner Game’ approach. 

**Gallwey, T. (2000) The Inner Game of Work: overcoming mental obstacles for maximum performance. London: Orion Books, pp17

So I’m sitting in a workshop and one of my delegates leans over and says “You give me confidence!” My first reaction is to blush  and my second is puzzlement – how on earth could I do that? I understand that positive encouragement and support from others bolsters people but does it build self-confidence? What happens when nobody is around to encourage us or affirm our actions — what do we draw on then? Surely self-confidence is exactly that – our positive belief in our own efficacy — and not someone else’s good opinion.

We only grow our confidence by taking risks in life – having a go at the things we find a tad scary or uncomfortable. “Feel the fear and do it anyway” as Susan Jeffers used to say. That’s why great coaches include an element of experimentation and graduated risk taking in their work with clients. Only by doing more do we learn to become more.

Self-confidence by definition is a positive belief we form about ourselves. While we expect others to ‘give us confidence’ we are going to have to wait a long time to feel good about ourselves. Dependency on outside sources, including well meaning coaches, does us no good in the long run.