Building self-confidence

This tutorial gives you advice on how to deal with the early stages of redundancy and suggests where to focus your efforts.

Tutorial

Maintaining confidence whilst job seeking is important as it will make a difference to your approach and to how you appear to potential employers, so, if your confidence has been knocked you need to work on restoring it.

Self-confident people inspire confidence in others: their audience, their peers, their bosses, their customers, and their friends. And gaining the confidence of others is one of the key ways in which a self-confident person finds success.

The good news is that self-confidence really can be learned and built on, so long as you have the focus and determination to see things through. The bad news is that there’s no quick fix, or 5-minute solution.

There are a number of ways in which you can help boost your own confidence. Here is a trusted methodology:

*Look at what you’ve already achieved. Document the best points. Perhaps you came top of an exam, were an important part of a successful team, produced the best sales figures in a period or made a big impact on somebody else.

*Think about your strengths. Put yourself in your friend’s shoes and write down what you think they would say are your strengths and weaknesses. When your list is written, think about what this means but most importantly, understand how you can use your strengths in a particular job or career.

*Think about what you value and what you want to achieve. Set yourself a goal and work out the first small step towards achieving it. This may sound unimportant but achieving tasks, no matter what size, is an important step to building confidence and feeling as though you are on a journey.

*Focus on the basics. Don’t try to be clever or to be perfect – just practice doing simple things well.

*Build your knowledge of the area you are interested in and set several small goals and stick to them. Get used to celebrating achievements!

*Look for a role model. What makes that person confident? Is it the way they dress? The way they speak? Take a while to consider how they act and then copy the appropriate behaviours.

*Think about why your friends like you. If you are stuck, ask your friends or a relative to use three positive words to describe you.