Career Tips - Issue # 30 (May 2006)

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The Equation of Self-confidence

What is self-confidence and how to get it back after losing it? My daughter, who is in kindergarten, taught me a lesson on this recently. Couple of days back, when she returned from school, we noticed she was not speaking and not even looking into our eyes. It turned out she had got 0 out of 5 in spellings. We told her not to worry and gave her some hugs. Next day, she returned again with her head down. Her eyes were wet. We knew it was spellings again. We told her: "You can do it. Please try." But the next day, she came back crying (with a 0, of course). This time she was saying, "I can't write. I don't know how to write. I can't do spellings." Clearly, she had lost her self-confidence.

My wife was first to realise we needed to help her. So we (basically my wife) started to make her practice writing spellings every evening. To our pleasant surprise, the results started changing. First, she got 1 out of 5, which was like a breakthrough. Then 2 and soon it was 5 out of 5. And now, before going to school, she says, "I can do spellings." Her self-confidence is back.

There is nothing extraordinary about this episode. It happens everywhere with all children and parents. But ironically, as parents, we often forget about it when we lose our own self-confidence at work.

First of all, how we do we lose self-confidence at work? There are many ways. For example:

a. When we face some significant failure (like losing an important order).
b. When we get bad reviews for our performance from superiors.
c. When we get trapped in a comfort zone.

Let me elaborate on the last reason, which appears to be common among those who have long working experience.

Often, after we stay long enough with an organisation, the work becomes a routine. And slowly, we create a comfort zone. The chief characteristic of a comfort zone is under-utilisation: quantitative and qualitative.

Quantitative under-utilisation happens when we don't have enough work to do. And qualitative under-utilisation happens when the work we do is well below our capabilities.

Under-utilisation at work is similar to having a 100 hp motor but running it at 50 hp load.

When we get into a situation like this, we face a real paradox. On one side, we feel comfortable as things are practically quite easy. Not much work and no problems or complex situations to handle. But on the other hand, we feel uneasy and demotivated. More importantly, we realise we're losing self-confidence--day by day.

Whatever be the reason, what should you do if you want to get back your self-confidence at work?

>>CAREER TIP:The word confidence comes from Latin word "confidere" which means "to trust fully." When we lose self-confidence, we basically stop trusting our own capabilities. That's what happened with my daughter.

But she got it back, thanks to two elements: 1. The effort she put in at home, and 2. The results she started producing in school. So the equation is:

Self-confidence = Effort x Result

Now, if you consider situations like interviews and exams, you would realise our confidence is directly proportional to the effort we put in to prepare and also the results we get. Similarly, if you consider performers like dancers, singers, gymnasts, athletes, tennis players, etc., you would find the above equation seems to fit well.

And so it should fit well at work, too. If you want to validate it, just recall the times when you felt highly self-confident. It is likely to be those times when you put in some great effort that matched your capabilities and when you produced solid results that you were (maybe still) proud of.

The other way to validate it is to do the opposite. If you want to shatter someone's confidence (please never do it), don't give him any work to do or give him something trivial. Obviously, he will produce insignificant or no results. In a matter of days that person's self-confidence will melt away.

So, self-confidence = Effort x Result

Please note the multiplication sign. If we put in a lot of useless effort which doesn't produce any tangible results, the self-confidence remains low. At the same time, if we don't do much work but take credit for the results produced by others, self-confidence still remains low.

Now we know what we've to do if we ever feel lack of self-confidence:

1. We have to honestly assess our own effort and try to improve it in terms of both quantity and quality.
2. We need to produce more and better results.

I feel, with this issue of Career Tips, which I am writing after a gap of two months, my own self-confidence about writing newsletters has returned--to some extent!

Atul Mathur

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***Copyright 2006 Atul Mathur***

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