One of the inspiring issues to learn about confidence is that it’s not a persona trait; it’s a ability you construct. There are such a lot of methods you possibly can be taught to turn out to be extra assured and strengthen that muscle, and lots of the instruments we share are designed to just do that. One technique that lots of our members discover transformative is to give attention to their strengths.
In terms of constructing confidence, Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, authors of the New York Occasions best-selling e book The Confidence Code: The Science and Artwork of Self-Assurance, lay out a useful roadmap: Be extra genuine, suppose much less, and take motion. The primary a part of that roadmap is to be extra genuine, which is the place focusing in your strengths comes into the image.
How Strengths Gas Confidence
Your strengths, when utilized in the appropriate approach, can supercharge your confidence and success. Whenever you’re utilizing your strengths, you might be wired to thrive. It’s necessary to notice right here that your strengths aren’t simply stuff you’re good at; they’re additionally stuff you take pleasure in doing, which take you right into a circulate state and depart you feeling energised. You may need explicit abilities that you just’ve mastered, but when they aren’t very gratifying they usually don’t affect your power in a optimistic approach, then likelihood is, they’re precisely that: abilities, not strengths.
Your strengths characterize these patterns of the way you suppose, really feel, and act that make you excited, energised, and engaged in your work and life. They’re additionally the patterns of behaviour that lead you to carry out at your greatest, which after all fuels your confidence. And it’s not solely your confidence that will increase: There’s been a big quantity of analysis over the previous 30 years exhibiting how your strengths assist with all the things from elevated happiness to much less stress, extra that means, a way of extra life satisfaction and better efficiency, and higher bottom-line outcomes for our companies.
A strengths focus works—particularly in terms of being extra genuine and constructing your confidence. This doesn’t imply you eternally ignore your weaknesses, but it surely does imply that you could flip your focus from that negativity bias in your mind that’s at all times looking for out points to a strengths focus during which you prepare your self to search for extra of what’s working, and do extra of what you want doing and are good at—and really feel extra like your self within the course of.
Do You Know Your Strengths?
One of many issues that will get in our approach is that many people are challenged to recognise what our strengths truly are. In actual fact, analysis exhibits that two-thirds of us are unaware of our strengths. That is not shocking once we’ve been conditioned and biologically wired to at all times search for our weaknesses. The excellent news is that there at the moment are unbelievable instruments that may enable you determine your strengths, from many various angles.
For the previous 15 years, I’ve been utilizing the VIA Character Strengths survey in my work educating strengths in workplaces and in my applications. (You possibly can take the free survey right here, which is able to rank your character strengths from one to twenty-four.)
The good thing about understanding your character strengths is that as a result of they’re values and methods of exhibiting up, they’re not depending on the function you’re in, so that they’re relevant throughout all points of your profession and life. Researchers advocate you give attention to cultivating your high 5 strengths, usually known as your signature strengths, as these are the strengths that may really feel most like your genuine self and are your quick monitor for extra confidence and flourishing at work.
Utilizing Your Strengths
Whenever you’ve taken the take a look at and you realize your top-5 signature strengths, the following step is to mirror on methods you possibly can faucet into these strengths and use them every single day, as a result of that’s what’s going to gasoline your confidence. Choose one among your top-5 strengths and use it each day for 3 weeks. It will possibly simply be for 5 or 10 minutes, however it’ll enable you to construct a strengths behavior that lets you flourish over time. If gratitude is one among your high 5, spend 5 minutes a day thanking a buddy or colleague for serving to you. Ship them an e mail, write a fast textual content, name them, and even make a put up on social media. Simply 5 minutes utilizing a energy is sufficient to really feel extra like your self and construct your confidence.
In case your strengths don’t really feel in any respect such as you, don’t panic. Verify in with a trusted colleague, mentor, supervisor, or buddy. Ask for his or her opinion on whether or not they see your high strengths at play in the way you present up, and for examples of how and the place. You could be stunned by what you find out about what others see that maybe you don’t.
