Confidence is made up of several parts and one of those parts is control.
When you feel more in control, you have more confidence.
There are things you can control (your thoughts, actions and reactions) and things you can try to influence (other people’s thoughts, actions and reactions) and the rest of the universe that you have no control or influence over, despite your hardest efforts or wishes (the weather, keeping the cat off the kitchen counter, etc).
In psychology speak, this is called ‘locus of control’ and is used to describe how we feel about the control of a situation. An internal locus of control is when we feel we have a strong effect on what is happening. An external locus of control is when we perceive that other people or factors are controlling that situation.
This idea of how we feel about control (and where it is/who has it) has a strong relationship with confidence. Our confidence understandably grows when we perceive we have control over what is happening. Conversely, that confidence shrinks when we feel like things are happening beyond our control and, even worse, get ‘out of control’.
You feel more confident when you have control based on experience, like travelling somewhere new. Once you’ve done it the first time, your confidence grows and the negative naysayers in your head get less air time. You can’t control the weather or if the train shows up on time, but you can control many other aspects of the journey and feel confident about it.
We feel more confident when we are in control because we know what we are doing and what is expected, we know we have the knowledge/skills/resources required by the situation.
With different and evolving situations in the workplace, control is something that we may or may not always completely have – or even be close to having. As our confidence is strongly linked to how much we might feel in control of a situation, this locus of control can have a large impact on our approach to a situation and how we feel about it.
When we feel that we are capable of changing a situation we brim with confidence, set a goal and a plan for achieving it, develop strategies, trust ourselves and our methods and remove the doubt that can get in the way of our aims and action. The mental naysayers get zero air time. But when we place too much emphasis on what we cannot control we push that locus of control away from us, lose confidence and create a more difficult environment for us to succeed in. We lose belief, we second guess and we procrastinate. And the naysayers in our head win.
Even if we cannot control all aspects of a situation, we can control our reactions to it.
“My boss is making me have sleepless nights,” said a client last week. No, they aren’t, thought I. They aren’t at your house poking you with a stick whilst you wriggle about under the duvet. You (client) are allowing your boss to have control over the situation. You are giving up your control because you don’t feel or think you have any choice. And when we probed further it became clear that part of the wider situation causing the sleepless nights is that the client felt their confidence was being eroded by this person they had handed their control over to.
So, how do they take it back? They choose to. If we decide to stop reacting and handing over control, quite simply, we have more control. Give less away = keep more. And that will impact how we see a situation and reframe what is happening.
Your confidence can be raised by taking more control. (And limiting air time for the naysayers).
Confidence can be changed and working on locus of control is one aspect that I focus on with my clients. The aim is to guide you to see more clearly where are in the workplace structure and culture so you can identify and ask for what you want and control the direction that your career is taking.
You can’t always change things, but you can change how you react to them – and how you feel and think about them. Shifting your perception of who has control – and taking more control – enables you to feel stronger and increase your confidence, positively impacting your workplace situation and helping you feel happier and more capable at work. It’s work I do with my clients every week and they say it gets results.
A session of Career Therapy with me as your coach can help you take control and see where the opportunities are to think, feel and act differently about what is going on around you. Let's explore how with a free intro chat.
Click on 'Book a call' anywhere on the website or email me: louise@careertherapy.co.uk And don't forget to check out other posts and Career Therapy on Instagram for more impactful confidence-boosting tips and tools.
What's stopping you? Think how having just a little more control would feel...
Photo by Önder Örtel on Unsplash
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