Would you like self confidence that lasts?
Would your clients?
The Map Of You is something I created for you AND your clients.
I’m a huge believer in the need for coaches to have great self awareness – because it helps you to:
- Not get tangled up in your own ‘stuff’ when working with your clients.
- Understand how you work at your best and where you can add real value (your unique genius)
- Create confidence in your abilities that lasts.
And while we’re on the subject, just why IS it so difficult for us to really own our skills and accomplishments? Why do so many people (especially women) struggle to feel positive and confident about themselves?
I think this is partly due the messages we get as we’re growing up. “Don’t get too big for your boots…who do you think you are?…know your place…”
But there’s another reason too.
Our brains have a habit of tuning down our achievements, skills and successes and focusing in on mistakes, ‘failures’ and anything it perceives as a ‘threat’ (this can be to us physically, socially or emotionally.)
The thing you’ve got to realize is that the primary function of our brains is to keep us alive – NOT to make us happy, confident and successful. All of those things are a mighty poor second in the pecking order of keeping us alive and breathing.
So our brains are rigged with a negativity bias – in short, for every 1 good thing that happens, our brains will notice and remember between 3 and 5 ‘negative’ things.
So yes, there’s a reason it’s always easier to focus on the negative and remember the ‘development points’ over the achievements – your brain is set up that way.
Neuropsychologist and all round very clever person, Rick Hanson, Ph.D. explains it like this:
“As the brain evolved, it was critically important to learn from negative experiences – if one survived them! “Once burned, twice shy.” So the brain has specialized circuits that register negative experiences immediately in emotional memory. On the other hand, positive experiences – unless they are very novel or intense – have standard issue memory systems, and these require that something be held in awareness for many seconds in a row to transfer from short-term memory buffers to long-term storage. Since we rarely do this, most positive experiences flow through the brain like water through a sieve, while negative ones are caught every time.”
Creating Self Confidence That Lasts
So in order to move those positive things to our long-term memories, they need to be held in our awareness for a time.
That’s what The Map helps you to do – consciously focus on the positive attributes of yourself and holds them in your attention.
It’s a great way to turn your own confidence around, especially if you use it as an on-going tool. Add to it, review it, share it, get your favourite colleagues, clients and loved one’s to contribute to it too.
Get Creative With It
In a workshop setting I get participants to draw their Map’s on giant pieces of paper. There’s glue, stickers and usually glitter involved.
Pictures often express in ways that words can only touch on so don’t limit yourself to language.
Get as creative and expressive as you like – this is YOUR map and the more enjoyable, intense and conscious an experience you make it, the more you will be able to lock those positive things about yourself into your long term memory so that when you’re having the inevitable ‘why did I ever think I could do this?’ moment – you’ll have your answer ready and waiting.
