The confidence map

Knowing your finish point can save you a lot of time, money and effort when it comes to the confidence in getting what you actually want for your life.

Does that sound like a weird way to introduce what’s meant to make you feel confident, especially when all you know is you want to be confident?

It’s very common to come from a place where you say in your head “I just want to have more confidence”. But, does that sound vague even reading that? Perhaps it’s familiar even?

Focusing on what confidence means to you can help shift your perspective, giving you a clearer idea of what you want to achieve and how you can start moving towards it.

This is a great self-question when it comes to confidence because it places you into possibility of what confidence looks, sounds and feels like to you.

Confident-self visualisation activity

I want you now to take that imagined future and start to play around with it. Try to think of it as your true reality that you’re shaping, and start to ask yourself a few questions about the possibilities. Some examples I commonly suggest to clients in my coaching sessions include:

• Where will I be when I have confidence?
• What will I be doing when I am confident?
• How will I be thinking when I am confident?
• How will I be talking to myself confidently?
• Who will I be surrounded by when I am confident?
• How will I be physically feeling when I do all of this and where does that confident feeling live in my body?

A cautionary word here – avoid statements covering “I don’t want". These can take you off route and into a thought chain of negative possibilities. The idea of this exercise is to focus on what it is that you do want. What will you feel, how will you act and widely - what does the confident you look like?

Above all else, enjoy yourself when you do this. I bet most of your best ideas came when you were relaxed, smiling and thinking calmly.

Reverse-engineering your confidence

So, now you can see and picture what the 'confident you' looks like - I want you to take that as your starting point. I know, how can you start from the end? Let me explain. 

Reverse-engineering is a theory used across many modalities in life. Perhaps it's something that you use in your day job, without even realising it. In simple terms, it's essentially working backwards from a pre-determined end goal. 

Once you have a clearer picture of what confidence looks like for you, you can start working backwards from that destination.

Think of it like planning a journey. If you know where you want to end up, it becomes much easier to work out the route you could take to get there. Instead of starting with the big and potentially overwhelming question, “How do I become more confident?”, you can look at the specific things your confident future self would be doing, thinking or approaching differently.

For example, perhaps being more confident means contributing your ideas in meetings, meeting new people or putting yourself forward for opportunities. Your next question becomes: what smaller steps could move you towards that?

This can make building confidence feel much more manageable, particularly if you haven't known where to start. You don't need to change everything at once or suddenly become a completely different person. Your confidence map gives you a destination to work towards, and you can focus on one small step at a time.

Look at where you are now, where you'd like to be and what sits between the two. Then ask yourself: What's one step I could take today that would move me a little closer?

You don't need to know the whole route before you begin. Having a clearer destination can be enough to help you identify your first step.