Professional self confidence and how to build it

Bhumika Zhaveri, company founder and entrepreneur in her first piece for The Digital Transformation People looks at self-confidence and how you can measure it.

I have been eagerly waiting to talk about this topic which is key to understanding the actual self-confidence level in an individual. In this day and age, this is becoming a huge conversation of topic especially due to the effects of social media on us all and the younger generations.

So, as I got busy with my technology business, I decided to talk about confidence and similar professional support conversations once a month on live session where I take questions and answer them to my best ability. These sessions are recorded for anyone to access at a later point.

Check it out here and follow the channel for future videos and updates.

Over my 12 years of total career, I have spent around 10 years in Recruitment & HR, Change and Transformation working with people, numbers and technologies. At the same time, I have worked with numerous individuals mentoring and supporting career conversations including confidence and change once I qualified as a licensed career counsellor and personal coach.

Over the years I have noticed there is a key difference in life itself, and life that is all about career and professional success. We have misinterpreted largely the definition of success, true confidence and empathy into a variety of nonsensical and impractical survival loops often driven to satisfy the status quo.

The first session last month was about an individual’s confidence level considering these days we misunderstand confidence with professional success and clarity of thoughts with social media likes, for what is the contrary of both in the reality.

Our perceptions are powerful and so our life around us, despite all the confidence and success “professionally” why do people find themselves so unhappy and dissatisfied? There is always something missing, isn’t it? What if I told you that you are lacking a lot of personal oomph in my words, but more practically we have forgotten what life really is meant to be all about. It is not about survival at all, it is about the evolution and progress of mind, body and soul.

Personal oomph is made up of a few things and the most important one is “you”. Who are you? What do you like? Etc. Every time I ask someone “who are you?” the response I get is “I am a blah blah blah in a xyz company”. Well, that is precisely the problem, because that is not who you are, that is what you do. Are you getting my point? Your work doesn’t define you, your family doesn’t define you, your status doesn’t define you and your social media following definitely doesn’t define you.

Confidence that does only exists in the presence of the above, is no confidence at all. Real confidence is that which truly just makes you feel at peace and joy within you despite all your surrounding circumstances because you know within yourself nothing is permanent, including your problems. Are you confused? Let me clarify what I mean by showing the factors that build “Real confidence” of our being in this 3d physical and material world.

1. Personal / Individual / Me and my confidence <you as a person>
2. Family and friends support and relationships <your immediate surrounding>
3. Financials i.e. professional and money success <you only!>
4. Professional i.e. a part of your confidence not the heart of your being and existence.

Now for a balanced person with actual real confidence, you will have 25% or equal points for each of the above 4 factors of joy/being in your life. And the way to gauge this is to conduct a simple exercise explained in my video. (Session 1 recap)

To understand this exercise better, go through my video in the first 20 mins where I discuss this topic in detail and explain how you can understand your current confidence level.

Following this, in the video there are some QnAs from the questions received in advance and from the attendees on the day summarized here very briefly: From the challenge of accepting achievements as a female senior manager, to struggling with saying “no” as a graduate, challenges that creep up when one partner is super ambitious and the other doesn’t feel that they are there and finally the challenge of not being satisfied and always wanting to do better for your business and clients which is commendable.

My answers and the comments of the attendees of the session will help if you or someone you know may be going through the same situations and challenges, so I hope you find it useful.

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