18. How to Be Confident at Work
One of the things I get asked about all the time is how to feel more confident at work, so this week, I’m here to give you the answers. It’s really no surprise that confidence is something that womxn especially struggle with, and the solution is actually super simple, but I’m showing you why it’s not easy work to do and why we have to make it a practice.
I’ve been doing some deep work around intersectional feminism with my coach, and I’m so excited to share what I’ve been learning with you here on the podcast. Having an understanding of the facets of social conditioning we are given as womxn will illuminate why it’s not as easy as we might think to just feel confident, and what won’t help you build it.
Join me today to discover the 2 things that will help you feel more confident at work, and why, without the understanding of our social conditioning, the ways we try to earn a sense of confidence never work. We’re often mistaken about where confidence comes from, and I’m showing you why building confidence will help you show up the way you want in your life and career.
If you love the podcast and want to take this work deeper, I have great news! I have space for new one-to-one coaching clients starting this month, so click here to schedule a call with me and we’ll see if we’re a good fit to start working together!
If you want guidance in walking yourself through my deep dive strategy sessions, subscribe, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts! Make sure to follow the instructions here to receive an email from me with the PDF document!
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
The 2 things that will help you feel more confident at work.
Why we don’t all just have great thoughts that make us feel confident all the time.
How womxn are given the perfect recipe for not having confidence at work.
Why the ways we try to earn a sense of confidence never work and why these often backfire on us.
Where we think confidence comes from and where it actually comes from.
Why confidence and arrogance are not the same things.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
FEATURED ON THE SHOW:
Leave me a rating and review on Apple Podcasts to receive an email from me with my deep-dive strategy session PDF document so you can walk yourself through it!
Feel free to ask me any questions over on Instagram!
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week, we are talking about how to feel more confident at work.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving womxn who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y’all. This week, we are talking about how to feel more confident at work and I’m so excited to talk about this with you because it’s something that I get asked about all of the time. How do I feel more confident at work? How do I feel more confident in my role? How do I feel more confident in salary negotiations?
There’s so many different things we do at work, like the work itself, but all of the other little intricacies of having a career also where I know y’all want to feel more confident. And I am here this week to teach you how to do it. But before I get started, I just want to tell y’all about I am getting an advanced coaching certification from my coach and teacher Kara Loewentheil.
And the coaching certification is an advanced certification in feminist coaching. And specifically, it’s in intersectional feminism and I think we’re in week three out of a three-month course and it is so good. Y’all, we are learning so much about all these different kinds of social conditioning that we receive, not just as womxn but the kinds of social conditioning we receive about size, about race, about class, about religion, all the different various social conditioning we receive that leads to things like prejudice and biases.
And specifically, we’re learning how to coach people who have marginalized identities or wear multiple marginalized identities to help them understand what the social conditioning that they have is doing. But we’re also getting all this teaching about how to coach people who are in experiences where other people have the social conditioning.
Where they’re experiencing discrimination, where they’re experiencing things like sexism. And it is so good, and it’s going to be so informative for my coaching and for how I show up to this podcast.
And I’m so excited to share what I’m learning with you, and it’s relevant to today’s topic as well, which we’ll get into in a minute. But before we get on to the main attraction here, I just want to take a minute to read a review that I received recently. This review is from Light Energy by Jamie. And the review says, “I love how Kori’s podcasts are in bite sized pieces. I can tell she wants us to be able to understand and use her content and she has mastered this. I enjoy her fun upbeat voice and real-life attitude. A must listen for perfectionists like me.”
Thank you so much. This review is so great. It means so much to me. I do work hard to try to create content that is quick and to the point but still highly valuable, and I love it so much when y’all leave me reviews. So if you haven’t reviewed the podcast yet and you’re enjoying it, go over there and leave me a review. Come on, please. I will be really appreciative, and I might even read it on a future episode.
Okay, now let’s get on to what I know y’all came here to learn about, which is how do I feel more confident at work? That is the million-dollar question, right? And there are two answers to this and they’re going to seem too simple, but I promise you, this is what is true and I will explain it all in the rest of the podcast.
The two things that will help you feel more confident at work are how you think about yourself and how you think about your work, your job, your career, et cetera. Now, if it’s this simple, why don’t we all just have great thoughts that make us feel confident all the time?
I have an answer for that. Like I was saying in my intro, I’m in this advanced certification in feminist coaching and it’s very much intersectional feminist coaching, and one of the things we’re learning about is all the social conditioning we receive.
And depending on which groups you identify with, you receive different kinds of social conditioning, but I’m going to speak today about the social conditioning that womxn receive and that we receive about work. This is actually what we studied in the curriculum this week for the certification.
And when I was reading the material, I felt so much recognition. I saw so much of myself in what my coach was teaching us. I saw so many of my old behaviors back when I was at corporate. I was like, oh, this is why I did that. This actually makes total sense.
And what it comes down to is this; womxn are socialized to think a lot of things. And some of them are that the way to tell if we’re doing a good job comes down to how other people think about us, that the way to tell if we’re doing a good job comes down to how many hours we spend, how productive we were.
And there’s also this other element where womxn are socialized to do emotional caretaking and so in that case, it’s like, the way to tell if we’re doing a good job has nothing to do with the job itself and everything to do with do people like us. So there’s the angle where we’re thinking about what do other people think about our work, but there’s also the angle where we’re thinking of like, does my boss like me as a person? And both of those will come into play.
And then the other two pieces I talked about, which is how much work am I producing and how much time am I spending producing work. On top of all that, if you’re listening to this podcast, there’s a pretty good chance that you have maybe some perfectionist tendencies. A lot of us before we come to coaching call this just having really high standards.
Maybe you’re familiar with it. I for sure thought I just had really high standards. No, I’m a recovering perfectionist, my friends, and it’s possible that you are too. So when we combine all this together, when we combine the social conditioning we receive as womxn with this perfectionism and these having high standards, we take all that, which is a lot already, and then we add a few things.
We add the brain’s tendency to look for the negative and we have a recipe for not having confidence at work. Here’s why. If we have these super high standards and we have a criticism about ourselves, then our brain goes to work looking for evidence for that criticism. It gets very invested in the criticism, which may or may not be something our brain just made up about us, by the way.
And it starts thinking that that’s the whole reality. And I’m sure you’ve experienced this. I talk about this all the time. If you get feedback that you’re doing 28 things really well and one thing you could be better at, your brain will hyper-focus on that. And this plays into whether we feel confident at work or we feel like shit basically. That’s what I think the opposite of feeling confident is. Just feeling like shit.
So our brain gets hyper-focused on the negative and it’s like, doing all this stuff with our social conditioning where it’s looking to like, how many hours did I work? How much did I produce? But it’s looking at all of that through the lens of the negative. It’s looking at all of that through the lens of like, this fear that we have that we’re not good enough somehow or that even if people say they really like our work, maybe they don’t.
So basically, all of this is kind of like a perfect storm to rob you of confidence and to make you always kind of question and doubt yourself and always worry that what you’re doing isn’t good enough. And on top of that, we’re not just socialized with the things we’re socialized with as womxn.
A lot of us also have been socialized with kind of this puritanical work ethic where we think that work is what creates value. And I talk a little bit about this in podcast episode six about overworking. When we think what creates our worthiness is our work product, is how much time we spend, is how pleased our boss is with us, we’re always hustling for that.
To use the Brené Brown quote, we’re always hustling for our worthiness, we’re always trying to earn it and claw our way there. And doing that is going to be the opposite of having this intrinsic, solid confidence that’s what we all want.
So this backfires so badly because what we do is we try to earn this sense of confidence by working, by overworking, by people-pleasing, by manipulating other people into being really happy with us, and it’s exhausting and then we get burned out and we’re really fucking tired.
And it never works because that’s not how confidence happens. Confidence is never going to come from how much time you spend working, it’s never going to come from how many deliverables you produce, it’s never going to come from what your boss thinks about you or what your employees think about you. It’s never going to come from skipping all your PTO days and just letting those pile up for the end of the year.
None of those things are going to create confidence for you. And that’s why it goes back to what I first said, which is confidence comes down to how we think about ourselves and how we think about our work. And I want to offer you some of the thoughts that I’ve seen that work really well to create confidence.
And they’re really simple, y’all. They’re things like I’m good at my job, I’ve got this, I can figure this out, I know how to solve this problem. So for any industry you’re in, I’ve seen this again and again where people are like, “Well, I don’t know how to solve this specific problem,” but it’s not your job necessarily to know how to solve every specific thing that ever gets presented to you. It’s your job to know how to think through it and figure out how to solve it.
So when I worked in corporate tech, I did communications. It wasn’t my job to know every single thing about communications or how to write a sentence even. It was my job to be able to figure out communications problems. So I got presented with stuff all the time that like, did I know already how to do it? No, but that was not where the confidence was going to come from.
If your confidence has to come from have you done it before, you can only ever be confident about things you’ve already done. And you can choose that if you want to, but I don’t recommend it. I am personally much more of a proponent of being able to sort of transplant confidence from one area to another.
So I use this thought all the time of like, I’ll figure it out. I’ve figured out tons of stuff before, I figured out communications problems before. Just ask your brain, what is relevant that I’ve figured out before or been successful at and sort of pull that confidence over from that other area.
It’s like borrowing confidence but you’re borrowing it from yourself. So just do this right now. Think about something in your life you feel really confident about. It doesn’t even have to be work. You can be like, I’m a really awesome tennis player, I crush at tennis. How did you become a person who crushed at tennis? How do you know you crush at tennis and how can you wrap that into being confident about something at work?
Let’s just say at work, what you want to do is learn a new coding language. How is that the same as learning tennis? There was a time when you didn’t know tennis, but over time you learned it, you got better at it, you practiced it. That can also come in handy and come in play with the coding if you’re thinking like, I know how to learn things, then everything is available for you to be confident about. Okay, so let’s review. The key to feeling more confident at work is literally just changing how you think about yourself and how you think about your work and it’s bringing your focus back as I’m always talking about, to what’s going well, what you can do well, what you’ve done well, and your capacity to continue to do well at things you haven’t even tried yet.
And it’s not your fault that that’s not where your brain naturally goes because the brain has that natural negativity bias, which we talk about all the time. And also because the social conditioning we have brings our attention back to other places and sort of invites us to question ourselves.
But once we’re aware of that social conditioning, we have a lot more choices about it. Before we’re aware of it, it just sounds basically like our own voice inside our own head telling us the news. But once you’re in the know, you’ll realize, oh yeah, this is just the thing where I question myself and I worry and I wonder if I’m doing enough, and I don’t have to buy into those beliefs and I can bring my attention instead back to those questions, like what am I doing well? What do I already know how to do well? How can I apply what I already know how to do well to this situation where I want to feel confident? And listen, we can also upscale of course. But I’m not focusing on that because I don’t believe you need to be any better or know any more skills in order to feel confident because that’s not what creates confidence either. Don’t get me wrong, I love new skills, love to learn them, love to get new tools that I can use.
But if the way we think about our work still focuses on being worried we’re not good enough, or being worried about what other people think, or being worried that we just need to know one more thing or get one more degree or one more certification, it’s not going to help.
You have to start with the thoughts about yourself and your work, no matter what other learning you still want to do. That’s the basis. And actually, when you do that first and then do other learning, the other learning will be much more effective, much more satisfying, and you’ll be able to feel confident in it, even when it’s a new skill.
Okay, now let’s talk about the common objections I get, which are if I spend all my time thinking about how great I am and how good I am at stuff and how good I am at my job, won’t I just be arrogant? And my short answer to that is no, and my longer answer to that is I don’t think arrogance is the same as confidence at all and here’s why.
I think arrogance has to do with thinking that we’re better than. I think it’s comparative, I think it’s competitive, and I understand why you might have that worry and that fear, and I also think this is part of our social conditioning, that we’re encouraged not to get too big for our britches and not to think we’re too great because then, what? Because maybe we’ll do amazing work? I don’t even know what the other half of that is.
But I think that the way it’s worded to us when we’re little girls is then people won’t like you, which really just shows how much our social conditioning is about being liked versus being confident in ourselves and doing really good work and celebrating our capacity to do amazing things.
I’d like us to be doing more of that, more of the celebrating, more of that. But I get that maybe you’ve met somebody that you thought was arrogant and that’s not how you want to show up, and so to that I would say I don’t think focusing on your thoughts about yourself and your work and focusing on what you’re doing well leads to arrogance.
And if anything, I actually think it can make us show up with more grace even for when we want to learn things. Because it’s not about being better than, it’s not about being the best, it’s not about being too awesome that we never make mistakes.
Confidence is actually about trusting in our capacity to figure things out, to be good at things, and to keep going. It’s not ever about us being better than other people. It’s not about us having to be perfect. And I think arrogance is about thinking we’re better.
So if you’re worried about that, I would just say don’t worry about that. And if anything, just look at the thoughts you’re now choosing to think about yourself and about your work and make sure that they’re really just about you and you. Not about you and other people.
So that is a good thing that you can check in with yourself if you’re like, yeah, I’m good at my job, I’m awesome at this, I’m learning, I learned how to do that other thing so I can totally learn how to do this thing too. None of that is about other people. None of that is about being better than anyone.
And none of it is about being perfect, which brings me to my next point, which I already touched on a little bit, which is what about mistakes? Y’all know I am not about perfection or perfectionism around here. I think we should expect mistakes.
I think that they are just part of life, they’re part of growth, they’re part of learning. What if they’re also part of confidence? What if we don’t just have confidence in our skills but we also have confidence in our ability to make a mistake and bounce back from it? What if confidence is not about being perfect, just like it’s not about being better than, and instead, it’s actually more like we’re going to figure it out, we’re going to keep going, like yes, I can even make a mistake and still do really good work?
Because if the only way that we’re able to do good work and be confident about ourselves is if we’re being perfect, then we’re all fucked. Did you hear that? My girlfriend’s in the room while I record this podcast and she just laughed at that because I am funny, y’all.
But it’s true. Think about it. We’re human beings. We’re going to make mistakes, even when we’re really fucking good at what we do. And if the only way we get to be confident is that we don't make mistakes, it’s not on the table for any of us.
So I’m like, let’s go the opposite direction. Let’s be confident, let’s be confident in our work, let’s be confident when we make mistakes that we can fix them, that we can figure it out, that we can keep going, and then we can still add value and do a really good job.
So to wrap this up, I just want to say as I’ve already said, I’m saying it again, you don’t need to be any better than you already are to be confident because how good you are at your job does not actually create your confidence.
Yes, I still recommend you practice thinking a thought like I’m good at my job and look for evidence of that because I believe you already are good at your job and I believe there’s evidence that your brain has been hiding from you due to thinks like negativity bias and confirmation bias.
But even if you’re still learning how to be good at your job, you can still be confident, and I love the idea that confidence isn’t just in the skills we already have but it’s in our ability to grow. It’s in our ability to look around and assess and say like, okay, I can already be confident and maybe I’d also like to learn this new coding language, or I can already be confident but actually, maybe I would like to study up on the psychology of salary negotiations.
Confidence doesn’t mean I’m good, I’m all set, I’ve got nothing left to learn here. That’s not what it’s about at all. I think so much more, it’s about trusting in ourselves to be able to show up and create the life and the career that we want to have. And I really cannot stress enough that this comes down to how you think about yourself and you have to do that work on purpose or you will constantly be looking outside of yourself to try to decide if you get to be confident or not.
You get to be confident. But you also have to choose it and you got to build it yourself. It’s an inside job, my friends. Alright, I think that’s what I’ve got to teach you. I’m so excited for how you go out and apply this and come find me on Instagram and report back. Let me know how you are developing your confidence and what doing that is making available for you in your career and in your life.
And if you love what I teach and you want some help taking things a little bit deeper and figuring out how this all applies to your own life, I’ve got good news for you.
I’ve got space for a few new one-on-one coaching clients starting this month, so let’s hop on a call. I’ll give you some coaching right away to help you get going and if it seems like a good fit, I will share with you how we can work together. Just head on over to my website and click on the Work With Me button and get started there. Also bonus, my coaching offering is totally virtual so as to better serve my global audience, and yes, I do work with people who are not native English speakers and we’ve had great success doing that.
There’s even a testimonial on my website with someone in that category so you can check that out on the testimonials page. Alright y’all, have a lovely week and I will talk to you next time. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving womxn who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y’all. This week, we are talking about how to feel more confident at work and I’m so excited to talk about this with you because it’s something that I get asked about all of the time. How do I feel more confident at work? How do I feel more confident in my role? How do I feel more confident in salary negotiations?
There’s so many different things we do at work, like the work itself, but all of the other little intricacies of having a career also where I know y’all want to feel more confident. And I am here this week to teach you how to do it. But before I get started, I just want to tell y’all about I am getting an advanced coaching certification from my coach and teacher Kara Loewentheil.
And the coaching certification is an advanced certification in feminist coaching. And specifically, it’s in intersectional feminism and I think we’re in week three out of a three-month course and it is so good. Y’all, we are learning so much about all these different kinds of social conditioning that we receive, not just as womxn but the kinds of social conditioning we receive about size, about race, about class, about religion, all the different various social conditioning we receive that leads to things like prejudice and biases.
And specifically, we’re learning how to coach people who have marginalized identities or wear multiple marginalized identities to help them understand what the social conditioning that they have is doing. But we’re also getting all this teaching about how to coach people who are in experiences where other people have the social conditioning.
Where they’re experiencing discrimination, where they’re experiencing things like sexism. And it is so good, and it’s going to be so informative for my coaching and for how I show up to this podcast.
And I’m so excited to share what I’m learning with you, and it’s relevant to today’s topic as well, which we’ll get into in a minute. But before we get on to the main attraction here, I just want to take a minute to read a review that I received recently. This review is from Light Energy by Jamie. And the review says, “I love how Kori’s podcasts are in bite sized pieces. I can tell she wants us to be able to understand and use her content and she has mastered this. I enjoy her fun upbeat voice and real-life attitude. A must listen for perfectionists like me.”
Thank you so much. This review is so great. It means so much to me. I do work hard to try to create content that is quick and to the point but still highly valuable, and I love it so much when y’all leave me reviews. So if you haven’t reviewed the podcast yet and you’re enjoying it, go over there and leave me a review. Come on, please. I will be really appreciative, and I might even read it on a future episode.
Okay, now let’s get on to what I know y’all came here to learn about, which is how do I feel more confident at work? That is the million-dollar question, right? And there are two answers to this and they’re going to seem too simple, but I promise you, this is what is true and I will explain it all in the rest of the podcast.
The two things that will help you feel more confident at work are how you think about yourself and how you think about your work, your job, your career, et cetera. Now, if it’s this simple, why don’t we all just have great thoughts that make us feel confident all the time?
I have an answer for that. Like I was saying in my intro, I’m in this advanced certification in feminist coaching and it’s very much intersectional feminist coaching, and one of the things we’re learning about is all the social conditioning we receive.
And depending on which groups you identify with, you receive different kinds of social conditioning, but I’m going to speak today about the social conditioning that womxn receive and that we receive about work. This is actually what we studied in the curriculum this week for the certification.
And when I was reading the material, I felt so much recognition. I saw so much of myself in what my coach was teaching us. I saw so many of my old behaviors back when I was at corporate. I was like, oh, this is why I did that. This actually makes total sense.
And what it comes down to is this; womxn are socialized to think a lot of things. And some of them are that the way to tell if we’re doing a good job comes down to how other people think about us, that the way to tell if we’re doing a good job comes down to how many hours we spend, how productive we were.
And there’s also this other element where womxn are socialized to do emotional caretaking and so in that case, it’s like, the way to tell if we’re doing a good job has nothing to do with the job itself and everything to do with do people like us. So there’s the angle where we’re thinking about what do other people think about our work, but there’s also the angle where we’re thinking of like, does my boss like me as a person? And both of those will come into play.
And then the other two pieces I talked about, which is how much work am I producing and how much time am I spending producing work. On top of all that, if you’re listening to this podcast, there’s a pretty good chance that you have maybe some perfectionist tendencies. A lot of us before we come to coaching call this just having really high standards.
Maybe you’re familiar with it. I for sure thought I just had really high standards. No, I’m a recovering perfectionist, my friends, and it’s possible that you are too. So when we combine all this together, when we combine the social conditioning we receive as womxn with this perfectionism and these having high standards, we take all that, which is a lot already, and then we add a few things.
We add the brain’s tendency to look for the negative and we have a recipe for not having confidence at work. Here’s why. If we have these super high standards and we have a criticism about ourselves, then our brain goes to work looking for evidence for that criticism. It gets very invested in the criticism, which may or may not be something our brain just made up about us, by the way.
And it starts thinking that that’s the whole reality. And I’m sure you’ve experienced this. I talk about this all the time. If you get feedback that you’re doing 28 things really well and one thing you could be better at, your brain will hyper-focus on that. And this plays into whether we feel confident at work or we feel like shit basically. That’s what I think the opposite of feeling confident is. Just feeling like shit.
So our brain gets hyper-focused on the negative and it’s like, doing all this stuff with our social conditioning where it’s looking to like, how many hours did I work? How much did I produce? But it’s looking at all of that through the lens of the negative. It’s looking at all of that through the lens of like, this fear that we have that we’re not good enough somehow or that even if people say they really like our work, maybe they don’t.
So basically, all of this is kind of like a perfect storm to rob you of confidence and to make you always kind of question and doubt yourself and always worry that what you’re doing isn’t good enough. And on top of that, we’re not just socialized with the things we’re socialized with as womxn.
A lot of us also have been socialized with kind of this puritanical work ethic where we think that work is what creates value. And I talk a little bit about this in podcast episode six about overworking. When we think what creates our worthiness is our work product, is how much time we spend, is how pleased our boss is with us, we’re always hustling for that.
To use the Brené Brown quote, we’re always hustling for our worthiness, we’re always trying to earn it and claw our way there. And doing that is going to be the opposite of having this intrinsic, solid confidence that’s what we all want.
So this backfires so badly because what we do is we try to earn this sense of confidence by working, by overworking, by people-pleasing, by manipulating other people into being really happy with us, and it’s exhausting and then we get burned out and we’re really fucking tired.
And it never works because that’s not how confidence happens. Confidence is never going to come from how much time you spend working, it’s never going to come from how many deliverables you produce, it’s never going to come from what your boss thinks about you or what your employees think about you. It’s never going to come from skipping all your PTO days and just letting those pile up for the end of the year.
None of those things are going to create confidence for you. And that’s why it goes back to what I first said, which is confidence comes down to how we think about ourselves and how we think about our work. And I want to offer you some of the thoughts that I’ve seen that work really well to create confidence.
And they’re really simple, y’all. They’re things like I’m good at my job, I’ve got this, I can figure this out, I know how to solve this problem. So for any industry you’re in, I’ve seen this again and again where people are like, “Well, I don’t know how to solve this specific problem,” but it’s not your job necessarily to know how to solve every specific thing that ever gets presented to you. It’s your job to know how to think through it and figure out how to solve it.
So when I worked in corporate tech, I did communications. It wasn’t my job to know every single thing about communications or how to write a sentence even. It was my job to be able to figure out communications problems. So I got presented with stuff all the time that like, did I know already how to do it? No, but that was not where the confidence was going to come from.
If your confidence has to come from have you done it before, you can only ever be confident about things you’ve already done. And you can choose that if you want to, but I don’t recommend it. I am personally much more of a proponent of being able to sort of transplant confidence from one area to another.
So I use this thought all the time of like, I’ll figure it out. I’ve figured out tons of stuff before, I figured out communications problems before. Just ask your brain, what is relevant that I’ve figured out before or been successful at and sort of pull that confidence over from that other area.
It’s like borrowing confidence but you’re borrowing it from yourself. So just do this right now. Think about something in your life you feel really confident about. It doesn’t even have to be work. You can be like, I’m a really awesome tennis player, I crush at tennis. How did you become a person who crushed at tennis? How do you know you crush at tennis and how can you wrap that into being confident about something at work?
Let’s just say at work, what you want to do is learn a new coding language. How is that the same as learning tennis? There was a time when you didn’t know tennis, but over time you learned it, you got better at it, you practiced it. That can also come in handy and come in play with the coding if you’re thinking like, I know how to learn things, then everything is available for you to be confident about. Okay, so let’s review. The key to feeling more confident at work is literally just changing how you think about yourself and how you think about your work and it’s bringing your focus back as I’m always talking about, to what’s going well, what you can do well, what you’ve done well, and your capacity to continue to do well at things you haven’t even tried yet.
And it’s not your fault that that’s not where your brain naturally goes because the brain has that natural negativity bias, which we talk about all the time. And also because the social conditioning we have brings our attention back to other places and sort of invites us to question ourselves.
But once we’re aware of that social conditioning, we have a lot more choices about it. Before we’re aware of it, it just sounds basically like our own voice inside our own head telling us the news. But once you’re in the know, you’ll realize, oh yeah, this is just the thing where I question myself and I worry and I wonder if I’m doing enough, and I don’t have to buy into those beliefs and I can bring my attention instead back to those questions, like what am I doing well? What do I already know how to do well? How can I apply what I already know how to do well to this situation where I want to feel confident? And listen, we can also upscale of course. But I’m not focusing on that because I don’t believe you need to be any better or know any more skills in order to feel confident because that’s not what creates confidence either. Don’t get me wrong, I love new skills, love to learn them, love to get new tools that I can use.
But if the way we think about our work still focuses on being worried we’re not good enough, or being worried about what other people think, or being worried that we just need to know one more thing or get one more degree or one more certification, it’s not going to help.
You have to start with the thoughts about yourself and your work, no matter what other learning you still want to do. That’s the basis. And actually, when you do that first and then do other learning, the other learning will be much more effective, much more satisfying, and you’ll be able to feel confident in it, even when it’s a new skill.
Okay, now let’s talk about the common objections I get, which are if I spend all my time thinking about how great I am and how good I am at stuff and how good I am at my job, won’t I just be arrogant? And my short answer to that is no, and my longer answer to that is I don’t think arrogance is the same as confidence at all and here’s why.
I think arrogance has to do with thinking that we’re better than. I think it’s comparative, I think it’s competitive, and I understand why you might have that worry and that fear, and I also think this is part of our social conditioning, that we’re encouraged not to get too big for our britches and not to think we’re too great because then, what? Because maybe we’ll do amazing work? I don’t even know what the other half of that is.
But I think that the way it’s worded to us when we’re little girls is then people won’t like you, which really just shows how much our social conditioning is about being liked versus being confident in ourselves and doing really good work and celebrating our capacity to do amazing things.
I’d like us to be doing more of that, more of the celebrating, more of that. But I get that maybe you’ve met somebody that you thought was arrogant and that’s not how you want to show up, and so to that I would say I don’t think focusing on your thoughts about yourself and your work and focusing on what you’re doing well leads to arrogance.
And if anything, I actually think it can make us show up with more grace even for when we want to learn things. Because it’s not about being better than, it’s not about being the best, it’s not about being too awesome that we never make mistakes.
Confidence is actually about trusting in our capacity to figure things out, to be good at things, and to keep going. It’s not ever about us being better than other people. It’s not about us having to be perfect. And I think arrogance is about thinking we’re better.
So if you’re worried about that, I would just say don’t worry about that. And if anything, just look at the thoughts you’re now choosing to think about yourself and about your work and make sure that they’re really just about you and you. Not about you and other people.
So that is a good thing that you can check in with yourself if you’re like, yeah, I’m good at my job, I’m awesome at this, I’m learning, I learned how to do that other thing so I can totally learn how to do this thing too. None of that is about other people. None of that is about being better than anyone.
And none of it is about being perfect, which brings me to my next point, which I already touched on a little bit, which is what about mistakes? Y’all know I am not about perfection or perfectionism around here. I think we should expect mistakes.
I think that they are just part of life, they’re part of growth, they’re part of learning. What if they’re also part of confidence? What if we don’t just have confidence in our skills but we also have confidence in our ability to make a mistake and bounce back from it? What if confidence is not about being perfect, just like it’s not about being better than, and instead, it’s actually more like we’re going to figure it out, we’re going to keep going, like yes, I can even make a mistake and still do really good work?
Because if the only way that we’re able to do good work and be confident about ourselves is if we’re being perfect, then we’re all fucked. Did you hear that? My girlfriend’s in the room while I record this podcast and she just laughed at that because I am funny, y’all.
But it’s true. Think about it. We’re human beings. We’re going to make mistakes, even when we’re really fucking good at what we do. And if the only way we get to be confident is that we don't make mistakes, it’s not on the table for any of us.
So I’m like, let’s go the opposite direction. Let’s be confident, let’s be confident in our work, let’s be confident when we make mistakes that we can fix them, that we can figure it out, that we can keep going, and then we can still add value and do a really good job.
So to wrap this up, I just want to say as I’ve already said, I’m saying it again, you don’t need to be any better than you already are to be confident because how good you are at your job does not actually create your confidence.
Yes, I still recommend you practice thinking a thought like I’m good at my job and look for evidence of that because I believe you already are good at your job and I believe there’s evidence that your brain has been hiding from you due to thinks like negativity bias and confirmation bias.
But even if you’re still learning how to be good at your job, you can still be confident, and I love the idea that confidence isn’t just in the skills we already have but it’s in our ability to grow. It’s in our ability to look around and assess and say like, okay, I can already be confident and maybe I’d also like to learn this new coding language, or I can already be confident but actually, maybe I would like to study up on the psychology of salary negotiations.
Confidence doesn’t mean I’m good, I’m all set, I’ve got nothing left to learn here. That’s not what it’s about at all. I think so much more, it’s about trusting in ourselves to be able to show up and create the life and the career that we want to have. And I really cannot stress enough that this comes down to how you think about yourself and you have to do that work on purpose or you will constantly be looking outside of yourself to try to decide if you get to be confident or not.
You get to be confident. But you also have to choose it and you got to build it yourself. It’s an inside job, my friends. Alright, I think that’s what I’ve got to teach you. I’m so excited for how you go out and apply this and come find me on Instagram and report back. Let me know how you are developing your confidence and what doing that is making available for you in your career and in your life.
And if you love what I teach and you want some help taking things a little bit deeper and figuring out how this all applies to your own life, I’ve got good news for you.
I’ve got space for a few new one-on-one coaching clients starting this month, so let’s hop on a call. I’ll give you some coaching right away to help you get going and if it seems like a good fit, I will share with you how we can work together. Just head on over to my website and click on the Work With Me button and get started there. Also bonus, my coaching offering is totally virtual so as to better serve my global audience, and yes, I do work with people who are not native English speakers and we’ve had great success doing that.
There’s even a testimonial on my website with someone in that category so you can check that out on the testimonials page. Alright y’all, have a lovely week and I will talk to you next time. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
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