5 things that will kill your confidence - and how to beat them
Confidence doesn’t always come easily and many of us are secretly battling imposter syndrome, colleagues that just don’t have our backs and managers that don’t know when to give us space.
These things can all drain your confidence faster than a dodgy sink - which can effect your performance, but also your happiness and well-being. After all, confidence isn’t just important for your performance - it also makes speaking up about problems and advocating for yourself a lot easier.
Here, we take a look at the five things that will chip away at your confidence without mercy, and more importantly, how to handle them.
Starting with…
Perfectionism
“A lot of perfectionistic tendencies are rooted in fear and insecurity,” says Matt Plummer, founder of Zarvana, an online coaching service that helps workers become more productive.
“Many perfectionists worry that if they let go of their meticulousness and conscientiousness, it will hurt their performance and standing.”
Unfortunately, it takes some level of self-awareness to realise perfectionism is causing issues for you.
While there’s no doubt that people succeed by holding themselves to a high bar, pursuit of perfection wastes valuable time and energy.
Leading effectively means constantly toggling between seeing and understanding the big picture and zooming-in to focus on execution.
As you continue to pay closer attention to your responses to day-to-day work tasks, expectations of others, and so on, you'll be able to make different choices in how you respond to getting your work done and getting to a point that good enough is good enough.
“It’s time to get rid of the micromanagement style. Develop microencouragement. It’s our role to innovate in how we lead the people our organisation.”
Micromanager bosses
When you’re being micromanaged, one of the worst things is the drain of self-confidence. Employees become apathetic and are no longer emotionally invested in the company because they feel that they aren't trusted and their ideas aren't valued.
The thing to remember about micromanagers is their behaviour is partly based on their own anxiety. In most cases, it’s not even about you or your performance.
The way to deal with an overbearing boss is to manage them.
This could mean being proactive about status updates, check-ins, and communicating regularly with your manager about your workload.
Or it could mean presenting evidence of your progress by showing your work at various stages. In other words, the goal is to reassure your manager that you’re on top of things before they ask to review your work.
Disengagement at work
If you feel disengaged at work, it might be because you’re being asked to do work that doesn’t take advantage of your strengths or perhaps you never received the proper training.
This can cause your confidence to drop. To stop this from happening, try talking to your manager about taking on projects that would play to your strengths.
And if possible, try to get additional training, which would really help to boost your skills and confidence.
“Have no fear of perfection - you’ll never reach it.”
Fear of failure
If you are afraid of failure, you might be uncomfortable setting goals . But goals help us define where we want to go in life.
Start by setting a few small goals. These should be goals that are slightly, but not overwhelmingly, challenging - easy wins to help boost your confidence.
For example, if you've been too afraid to talk to the new department head, then make that your first goal. Plan to stop by her office during the next week to introduce yourself.
Try to make your goals tiny steps on the route to much bigger goals. Taking one small step at a time will help build your confidence, keep you moving forward, and prevent you from getting overwhelmed with visions of your final goal.
Uncooperative or critical colleagues
“Problems caused by difficult people at work can create enormous disturbances and disruptions in our lives,” writes Alan A. Cavaiola, Ph.D., author of Toxic Coworkers and a professor in the Department of Psychological Counseling at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, N.J.
When it comes to dealing with hostile coworkers, it's important to remember that “fighting fire with fire” is never a good idea.
Often it just causes even more work stress.
Instead, employing a professional and polite approach will present you on more neutral ground, allowing your coworkers to take their time to get to know you better, so you can get on with your job.