One of the key areas we focused on at our recent event, Welcome Back – Inspiring HR, was closing the confidence gap and our belief that if we can improve this it will have an impact on closing the pay gap! You can check out the presentation Vanessa delivered and the top tips for being confident our attendees came up with here .
Thank you for attending today,
My session will be run with my business partner Anna and together we will help facilitate and support discussion and insight on confidence, especially for women at work. We would really like this part of the session to be interactive and a moment for talking and reflection so please feel free to voice and interrupt, add debate and discussion.
Around the room are flipcharts please feel free to keep adding details on those throughout the day. In the final session of employment law Andrew is willing to be put on the hot spot so any current ER cases you have or points of law you wish to clarify please pop them up on the board and I will collate it in time for the next session.
So today the session is on confidence building, I won’t commit to you leaving this half of the session today feeling the confidence of Michelle Obama or Gigi Hadid, but what I aim to do is give you some tools and thoughts to start the journey of improving confidence.
So If this is about confidence, why on earth am I talking about equal pay and the gender pay gap? Well because I think the lack of one is fuelling the strength of the other.
Let’s look at the statistics
This is what's printed, but what's really happening?
These are real examples that have happened in our organisation and examples from surveys with HP from their organisations and feedback from studies of business school students. We have a high number of senior female talent and this is a true reflection of what's happening.
Has anyone got examples of where this has happened in their organisation?
Women are so good at seeing it in others but not in themselves.
Growing evidence from various sources show how damaging a lack of confidence can be. Success is a derivative of competence and confidence, whether we like it or not over confidence can get you far in life and I am sure you all have some examples of someone you know whether through work or professionally where this rings true. Having talent and reaching your desired levels of success personally and professionally is not only about competence, to truly achieve this success confidence must be part of your talent make up, you need it to excel.
So let’s start the journey of building more confidence, to start this we must set ourselves a goal.
People who regularly achieve their goals do it because they actually know what their goals are. I mean explicitly know, how it feels, how it looks what it sounds like. They imagine it now which steers their brain in the right course of direction.
Now that you have your individual goals, let’s work together as groups to feed each other ideas, advice and tips to implement those goals.
Talk through top tips to support confidence building.
Women are excellent at giving others advice, if I took half the advice myself of what I give to Anna I would probably have retired by now on a fortune, perhaps it’s natural instinct, perhaps it’s down to confidence to do it yourself, but what ever it is we are great at advising each other so.
How many of you wrote that for yourself, could you have written that for yourself?
5 mins and 5 mins feedback.
Thoughts of the attendees of Welcome Back – HR inspiring events on March 22, 2017
Ok great.
So we know why we are not confident,
We know now that we need to be more so,
We have discussed and fed back to each other top tips, so off you go just be more confident, but its not that simple. This takes practice, it doesn’t happen overnight, it’s learned ability that you will need to review, repeat and do regularly. So until then “fake it”, do everything you can to get your mindset into growth by practicing what you preach using these quick fixes, even if you still don’t truly believe it yet………
Tip 1 -Do something that puts you in the confident mind frame, could be music, something you wear to help you feel confident, it could be talking to a certain individual or remembering your why - But visualise the successful outcome.
Tip 2 –For a long term change you must consider how you think of your abilities and talents. Abilities are not fixed at birth, they can be developed. Get a growth mindset, this belief matters as it could dictate how you deal with this. A challenge is an opportunity to learn and grow. People with a growth mindset are more successful
Tip 3 – you will fail sometimes, JK Rowling (net worth £600 million – joint 197th richest person in the UK) was rejected 12 times, yes it’s ok to fail just keeping trying with different strategies and perseverance this will make you better equipped to deal with setbacks and challenges.
Tip 4 – Build the cheering team around you to get you through. You need a support team, your own safety net of trusted individuals who you can count on to advise you, teach you and catch you before you fall. Take a list of everyone you've ever known or met personally who might be of assistance. Relatives, old college buddies and even friends of friends may have the perspective you need. Remember, objectivity is personality-based, not relationship-based. If a person is mature, experienced and knowledgeable, they will be of value to you.
So we have focused on the top tips of confidence building and reviewed some quick fixes to fake your way through it as you start your journey and this is all useful, but its also essential to measure your own progress. We need to establish where you are now so that you can see growth as it happens. We all need to be able to review and reflect and take stock of where we are now and building your own personal confidence wheel should help. On your tables, there is a blank confidence wheel that I will need you to complete. The purpose of this exercise it to measure yourself and see how you measure up in someone else's eyes. This is risky as I have only delivered this with colleagues however my gut instinct is telling me it will work, so I am going to be confident.
Please take two pieces of paper, the inner circle would depict your least confidence level (1) and the outer line on the circle is most confident (10), score yourself and how confident you feel in each segment, take a minute or two to yourself and really think about how confident you feel.
Home and family/ Career/ personal interests/
Questions:-
Now that you have completed your own wheel keep it to the side and turned over and pair up with someone else. You now need to spend 5 minutes interviewing each other to establish your own profile on the individual, so thinking of the wheel these are the types of questions you could ask your paired connection. Once you have interviewed the individual, score them on the wheel based on how you see them from the little insight you have of them.
What do you do in your spare time?
Describe your home life?
Summarise your career to date?