Let me share with you, if I may, a blow-by-blow account of the highs and lows of my self-confidence at work last week. I could probably draw it as a graph. It would look like a rollercoaster.
Monday, blessedly, went without a hitch. The rollercoaster started on Tuesday. I happily embarked on my usual start-of-the-day admin stack. (I was feeling good. I'd had a great sleep and the before-school routine was fight-free.) Email - fine. Calendar - all still do-able. Website inbox - no replies needed. LinkedIn - oh my goodness! She replied to me?
The day before, I'd posted about a delightful new book I'd been reading to recommend it to others. I'd tagged the author and, unexpectedly, she wrote back. Let's just say my general level of wellbeing and self-confidence about work soared.
And stayed high right into Wednesday, when it then fell back to earth with a thump.
I had opened feedback on a piece of writing and it wasn't as good as I was expecting. My confidence ebbed. What if the whole thing is rubbish and they were too polite to say? I thought. What if this is a sign that, actually, I shouldn't be doing this whole business thing at all? (Catastrophising, clearly.) I took a quick break, made another cup of tea, and dragged myself through the rest of the day.
Thursday came, and I'd recovered my business sang-froid. I made some good progress on some new webpage architecture, and ended the day feeling good. I can do this… My self-confidence was back.
Then on Friday, a post popped up in my LinkedIn feed that sent my self-confidence heading for the door. The poster was doing more, saying more, and she had a more awesome website. It was a textbook case of comparisonitis, with all the negative chatter that follows.
Does this rollercoaster ever happen to you at work? Or is it just me?
Why self-confidence at work goes up and down
Conversations I've had with others - friends, colleagues, clients - suggest that the feeling of needing more self-confidence at work is definitely a thing. That self-confidence and its opposite, self-doubt, come and go. It depends on what’s happening – whether things are going well in your team, whether there is job stability, or job insecurity. It depends on what you’re working on, whether it’s a task in the ‘flow’ sweet spot, or something you’re having to learn. And it depends who’s around you, whether they’re collegial and supportive, or demanding, or unpredictable. I wish for all your sakes that I had a monopoly on the self-doubt/self-confidence rollercoaster, but it seems it may be universal. So, I'm writing this post for all of us.
And even if those around you at your work seem perpetually self-confident and self-assured, there's no way of knowing whether their confidence and self-assurance is as rock-solid as it appears. Because in our culture, we often keep a lid on it when we’re feeling challenged by something.
You mentioned your internal 'chatter' - what's that?
Yes, my internal ‘chatter’ ran amok on Friday when I was myself keeping a lid on something challenging. (Ahem.)
Ethan Kross is a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, and he refers to 'chatter' as the stream of thoughts of our inner critic. He has researched the internal conversations we all have with ourselves for years, and writes in his very interesting book Chatter: The Voice in Our Head (and How to Harness It) that chatter is the cycle of negative thoughts and emotions that turns our capacity for introspection against us, becoming a curse rather than a blessing.
This chatter in our heads matters in the workplace (as elsewhere) because it takes down our self-confidence and ups our self-doubt. That in turn affects how we perform, what new challenges we put our hands up for, and what jobs or promotions we apply for.
You'll probably recognise your chatter when I tell you some of the ways it can show up. With repeated thoughts that go round and round in circles, it can sabotage our executive functioning and ability to think flexibly and creatively on the challenge in front of us. As a fixation on one unpleasant aspect of an issue, we lose the big picture and get paralysed, unable to take action. As an angsty, anxiety-on-the-loose imagining of what could go wrong in the future, it not only torments us but can make us avoidant, or at least make us take extreme measures. Sound at all familiar? (For me as a parent, that last version of the chatter has shown up a lot.)
So, what can you do to quiet the chatter and get your confidence back?
It turns out there are a lot of effective, evidence-based tricks you can employ to restore your self-confidence after a tussle with your inner critic at work. We're not always able to call on colleagues, friends or loved ones during our workdays, so I'll focus on three of Kross' suggestions for things we can do on our own.
The first one is 'performing a ritual'. Which sounds like I mean sacrificing a goat or something, but it’s more like making tea, as I did in my 'This-calls-for-tea moment!' on Wednesday. Just a fixed sequence of actions that you know will provide you comfort. It can be the sort of ritual that's handed down to you culturally, or by your family, or something you create for yourself.
Using 'distanced self-talk' is the second one. In short, it means to use the second person pronoun "you" to address yourself, when you're talking yourself through a challenge or difficult experience - making your inner voice into another person who has some distance from your problems. When you've been ruminating, this can help calm you and restore your ability to perform.
The third tool is to 'broaden your perspective'. Can you compare the situation in front of you to other difficult situations you've experienced in the past? I first read about this trick in New Zealand clinical psychologist Gwendoline Smith's book The Book of Overthinking. It's a little bit like creating your own personal scale of difficult experiences. For example, how does less-good-than-expected feedback on some writing compare to, say, a family member being gravely ill? As it's completely fixable and temporary, maybe a 2 out of 10? And just like that, the panic eases and your chatter quietens. Brilliant. (Note to self to actually remember this one next time!)
Self-confidence as practice, rather than state
Another way to gain more - or perhaps to reconnect with your - self-confidence, is to completely shift the way you view it. To see it as something that comes through practice (the practice of whatever it is you do), rather than as something you have or don't have. I could discuss the work of psychologist Albert Bandura here, who developed the theory of 'self-efficacy', but instead I'm going to take us briefly into the world of philosophy.
Contemporary French philosopher Charles Pépin proposes that it's in the doing, in the making, in the getting our hands dirty, that we grow our self-confidence.
In his lovely and very readable book, Self-Confidence: 10 Lessons for Life in the Age of Anxiety, I was really struck by a medieval proverb he uses in his 'Go into training' chapter: "It's by blacksmithing that you become a blacksmith." It so neatly expresses the idea that to be confident and skilled at a task, in a role, or in your chosen profession, you just need to start doing it. And then build from there.
It's an idea that transfers easily to modern employment and careers. If you'll forgive me: it's by analysing data that we become a data analyst, it's by designing websites we become a web designer, and so on. Can you apply it to your job, or a job you've been wanting to move into? Of course there is a place for relevant education and training, but nothing can replace the self-assurance you develop when you've grown, and honed, and tested your skills in real situations, on real projects.
The hard moments of work are building our self-confidence
Pépin ends his book by saying, "To have confidence in oneself is not to be sure of oneself. It's to have the courage to confront uncertainty rather than avoid it. To find in doubt a point to push off from and the strength to go forth." Which does sound quite philosophical. But I've got an analogy for you.
What if we chose to think of all our hard moments at work - the ones that send our feelings of competence plummeting, like in my rollercoaster story at the beginning of this post - as being like the wall at the end of a swimming pool that we push off from?
As a slow (but determined) breast-stroker, I couldn't do without the wall to give me some velocity at the start of each lap, and even the best Olympic swimmers use the wall to gain forward momentum after they've tumble-turned.
So, maybe we can make more progress at work and feel more consistently positive about it, if we do both of the things we've been discussing here? If we take the rough edges off the difficult moments at work by taking steps to manage the chatter that comes with them, and if we think of them as something hard from which we get extra propulsion, both in our skills and our self-confidence. What do you reckon?
I help professionals make more progress in their work, reduce their work stress and avoid burnout, and feel more satisfied at the end of the day. I include 2-3 helpful research evidence gems in every blog post, that you can try out for yourself at work. I've just launched a new 1:1 online coaching workshop focusing on tackling your work overwhelm, and offer completely personalised coaching too. Do you get in touch, I'd love to hear from you.