About Confidence and Competence

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• Fostering and Confidence Mindset
• Background: When Katharina and I designed our Women in Leadership group coaching offered by Blinkist, we dedicated one session on the topic of Fostering a Confidence Mindset. And it is based on the observation that women are often super competent in a topic but more often than men lack the confidence to leverage that competence to gain the benefits from their high competence, like increasing salary, growing reach and expanding in their career.
• Mention the Confidence Code
• It’s crucial to distinguish between confidence, the belief in our abilities in general, and competence, the knowledge of our qualifications in a certain field. (from the Confidence Code by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman)
• Great questions to reflect on both fields:
  • When do you feel most confident?
  • Identify 3 areas where you feel competent but at the same time lack confidence.
  • What can you transfer from when you feel most confident to the areas with high competence but low confidence to increase your confidence?
• I feel very confident when it comes to facilitation of workshops. My confidence it build on more than 20 years of experience facilitating several hundreds of workshops and learning though so many different situations.
  • So confidence is build on: experience, high level of knowledge, inner piece of mind to also have recipes for handling difficult situations. I failed often to and improved from my mistakes. My growth mindset and deep experience that especially mistakes are great learning opportunities is fundamental.
• And area where I already have a high competence compared to myself 5 years ago and to many peers I’m talking to is the topic of strategy and especially Wardley Mapping. I learned much about it. My thinking is already build around it. But I’m not yet highly confident to use it to drive strategy in my environment.
• Now transferring confidence can for me work this way:
  • I need to practice Wardley Mapping again and again. I can use them in strategy exchanges with peers and actively invite for strategy exchanges. And tune my communication and approach of leveraging Wardley Maps. Put the communication in the center and provide my assumption and work with the diverse perspective and don’t put the method to much in the center.
  • When sessions might not yet work, learn from what worked and analyze what to further tune.
  • In summary - increase confidence in driving strategy through more application of my knowledge and leveraging each session to further tune my approach.
• What really helps is too change our narratives from:
  • “I lack confidence” to “I am growing more confident” (see my example)
  • “Fake it till you make it” to “Face it till you make it”
• You can use the following formula to boost your confidence
  • The negative thought I have is … And I know that is not true! My new empowering thought is …

So what about the promotion you deserve - let’s apply the formula:

The negative thought I have is that I feel I don’t deserve this promotion.

And I know this is NOT true.

My new empowering thought is that I know I worked hard, achieved a lot and am the best candidate for this position.

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Posted on LINKEDIN on 2024-02-07_Wed

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