22 October 2008
Valuing the difference you make to People?
I love the piece on Mental Toughness but mostly the thought about choosing to see your confidence as valuing the difference you can make to people. I have never chosen to think about my confidence in this way, I think I've always chosen to shy away from the view of being seen as confident and resilient and preferring to just think of having a 'Positive' 'Can do' attitude. But it is so much more than that when I reflect on when I feel most motivated and performing at my best it's when I am adding value for my team. It's when I know my performance has made a real difference for a particular individual or team. Recognising and appreciating your own attributes in this way, I think I've always worried could be seen by some as over confidence or even arrogance. Now I just think I've been letting myself and others down by not choosing to see my value in this way. I may have been adding value quite unconsciously but now how much better am I going to be!
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2 comments:
Donna, great comment. I don't think that the mentally tough performers ever see this attitude as arrogance or over-confidence. It's just a very, evidence-based, factual view of themselves - and as you say, one that inevitably makes a very positive difference to how they perform and what they expect of themselves.
Hi Donna. Knowing this strength about yourself allows you now to choose to exploit it more fully on a day to day basis. Not in an arrogant way, just in a way that says "hey, I'm pretty good at this stuff and the more I practice it, the better I get at it and the better I, and others around me, perform." Arrogance would result in saying something like "hey, I'm bloody awesome at this, so I don't need to work at it anymore".
Elite performers are never concerned by being too confident. Imagine going into a performance environment thinking "I've got too much believe in my ability to succeed today, I need to drain some confidence off." I suspect for most folks that would be a really nice problem to have, which is really easy to solve (put a call in to your K2 coach and I'm sure they'll be able to help drain some away - curiously, it's something we've never been asked to do!). Only when confidence results in complacency does it become of detriment to performance.
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