Are you always worried about what people think
and has that been preventing you from carving
the career and forging the career path that you really desire? If so,
it can be a lack of confidence.
So what is confidence? I'm going to offer a very
simple definition of confidence. It's not going to come from the dictionary,
but it's a word, it's a
definition of confidence that will help you to overcome it.
Confidence is the stuff that turns thoughts into actions.
So courage might be needed to first take the
initial actions and a strong will is needed to persist.
But confidence really is the most important factor
because it first turns our thoughts into judgments about our own capabilities.
And then it transforms into actions.
Confidence is the belief in your own success,
which then turns your thoughts into actions. And then when you take action,
you have more confidence when you succeed.
So it really is a cumulative process, a cycle that you go through with hard work,
with success and failure. Confidence occurs when
the perception you have about yourself that you're
unable to do something is trumped by your achievements.
So confidence is very linked to action. It's linked to doing,
it's linked to having the courage to initiate action
and the strong will to persist. So one of the essential
ingredients to confidence is action. It is the belief that
you will be successful at doing something.
It is not letting your doubts consume you.
It is getting outside of your comfort zone and
taking action that you wouldn't normally take.
It's about hard work and consistency. It's about not giving up.
Confidence is just a memory, it is a memory of
all of your successes having exceeded your failures.
So the secret is to take action and to observe your
successes and to observe your failures and take enough
action so that the memory of the successes far exceeds
the memory of your failure. To me, all the issues of
confidence really breaks down into three broad categories.
The first one is how others see us,
and the second one is how we see others.
And the third one is how we see ourselves.
In the first category in terms of how others see us,
when I first started my career, I was in academia
and I was always in the life sciences department in the Faculty of Science,
in that field. And as my career progressed and as I was going
further into academia, into my Master's and my PhD,
I was always involved in events and I was always
invited to panel discussions and events for other graduate students as well.
And it was always around women in STEM fields. And STEM stands for science,
technology, engineering and mathematics.
So women in STEM was a really hot topic because it's
always been well known that the STEM fields in
academia have historically been dominated by men.
And the conversation around women in science,
women in STEM, was always around how it was always more competitive for women,
how women had
faced a lot more lack of confidence compared to men.
How it was harder for women to have equal pay,
how men regarded women in terms of whether or
not they were promoted and the conditions
around their promotion and whether or not they
were successful at gaining faculty or tenure track positions.
There was always a conversation around confidence.
There was always a conversation around how women
navigated around a male dominated world,
especially if women were practicing science or thought about going into science.
And so the conversation was always about
how can we raise our profile as women?
How can we make sure that we can be competitive
compared to men? How can we level the playing field?
Those were always the conversations.
So it comes back to this category of how we see
others and oftentimes because of the conversations we've been having,
the language we'd been using about women having a disadvantage,
women needing to
group or band together to ensure that we have the support
we need because we lacked that support compared to our male counterparts.
And oftentimes when you really look at the truth of that situation,
it comes down to the way we see other people and sometimes when we lack
confidence it's because we make an assumption that other
people think of us a certain way.
The example I'm giving is about women in science.
But take another example where
if it's you in a situation where you feel like you're worried
about how other people think of you or you're in a
situation where you feel that you lack confidence and
because you lack confidence, you have to always be
concerned about how others see you.
The thing is to get to the truth of that, is your assumption true?
Are they really seeing you the way you think that they're seeing?
So onto the second broad category of how we see others,
and this isn't about our judgments about other people,
it's not about how we judge other people in terms of their successes.
Oftentimes when we lack confidence, it's because
we see other people and we choose the people we
look at and they are the ideal versions of who we
quote-unquote should be if we were to go down that career trajectory.
Let give you an example. And going back to my example of women in science,
women in STEM fields.
When women in academia,
they find themselves lacking confidence,
they find themselves worrying about how the powers
that be think about them, often what happens is the
comparison is to the founding fathers of science,
for example like Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein,
and the comparison is like how they see others is
the successful ideal scientists out there.
The ones who are having all the publications,
the ones that are having all the successes, all the promotions given to them,
all the academic opportunities.
The way that we see others is that they are the image
of the ideal scientist.
So look at the way you're looking at it.
Look at who are you comparing yourself to?
Is it the ideal version of who you feel you should be if
you were to have success going down your current career path?
And is that a fair comparison? Because if you're comparing
your beginnings to someone else's middle, or you're comparing
your beginnings to someone else's end, then it's not an
apples to apples comparison. So how we see others really
affects our confidence. And it's not about you're passing
judgment on other people, but you want to create
and to have a productive view on other people,
one that will empower you, one that will inspire you,
not one that's intimidating or causes fear in yourself
in terms of taking that next career step.
The last category, and this is perhaps the most important one,
is how we see ourselves. So when I was going through
academia and I was going through my Master's degree and then finally to my PhD,
I made a decision that this
was going to be the last step of my academic route.
I didn't want to have another degree beyond on my PhD.
So I knew this was going to be my last degree,
but during the whole time I was in my PhD and they
say that the PhD is the highest degree that any university college can grant.
So I knew that I was like in the top 5% or the top 1% in terms of
education in the academic world. But the whole time
I always felt that I didn't belong here. I always felt this imposter syndrome.
Like someday someone's going to discover me
and they're going to discover that I don't belong
here and then I'm just going to be exposed.
And this was an underlying fear of mine that even though I was in a PhD program,
if I looked at other people, I felt like I wasn't competitive enough.
I wasn't publishing enough, I wasn't publishing in the best journals out there.
And so I was always worried that some authority
who had the power to determine my career
or my next promotion or my next step was going to
expose me and say that I really don't belong here.
And that was always this fear I had. So how we see
ourselves is really the fundamental piece in terms of gaining confidence.
Because how we see ourselves really
is determined by the stories that you believe about yourself.
So we are meaning making machines. We're always
assigning meanings to our achievements.
We assign meanings to our failures as well.
So this is something that you have to get clear on is,
what are the stories that you've been believing about your career path so far?
What are the stories that you've been believing
about your achievements and what are the stories
that you've been believing about your failures? And are they true?
Are they really true? The stories that you've been believing, if they're not true,
if they're not true, then what else could be true?
If you find that they are true, then find evidence.
If you're feeling that they are true then find evidence
to say how true are they, and is everything you
believe about your story really a fact of it?
Or is it just the way you're seeing yourself?
Right? So be the scientist and look for proof.
Look for evidence of your career path that
shows whether or not what you've been believing is true.
And ask yourself what else can be true? What else is true about myself?
So getting the facts and getting real about how you see yourself
and finding better ways, finding inspiring ways,
more productive ways of how you see yourself
could be the breakthrough of having the confidence
you need to move forward in your career. Have you
been searching for that next step in your career
and you want it to be a huge success? Have you been
searching for what that next career, or that first career is for you,
and you're not finding quite what you're looking for.
I have good news for you. A career is not something that
you can just find or that you've just fallen to.
A career is built. It is built with intention.
So if you want to find out more what that means. I have an intensive for you.
It is a career makeover. It is going to give you the step by step guidelines
on building your career with intention and if you to find out more,
go to careerrevisionist.com/intensive.
That's careerrevisionists.com/intensive and I'll include the link below as well.
So just click on that link and watch the video.
I have a video there for you where I will tell you the secret to
building that fulfilling career with intention. I'll tell you the
secret ingredient that it takes to build a career that you've been looking for.
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