Why It Helps To Start Building Up Your Confidence Before Changing Careers

Episode 9: In this episode, Career Change Coach Dana Stevens talks about one of her favourite topics - Confidence. And why it’s essential to start building it before you make your next move.

If you’ve ever told yourself, “I’ll feel more confident once I get the new job,” this episode will offer you a different perspective.  I’ll explain why waiting for external validation can actually keep you stuck, and how taking ownership of your confidence now will make your transition smoother, more intentional, and far more empowering.

You’ll also learn my Confidence Fire analogy, a simple but powerful way to understand why you need to be the one fueling your own confidence, rather than relying on others to light that spark for you.

Whether you’re thinking about a career pivot or already planning your next step, this episode will help you take back control of your confidence and use it as the foundation for your next chapter.

Connect with Dana:

Website: https://www.danastevens.com/workwithme
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dana_stevens_coach/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danastevens1/
Free Coaching Consultation: https://calendly.com/danastevens/initial-coaching-chat

If this episode resonated, follow The Career Change Studio and share it with someone who’s feeling stuck in their career.

And if you’re ready to design a working life that truly fits your needs and lifestyle, book a free clarity call at https://calendly.com/danastevens/initial-coaching-chat

Special thanks to @Lou_Greenaway_Music for the piano composition and performance.

Transcript

Today I want to talk to you about a subject I am very passionate about. Let’s talk about Confidence. One reason I spend so much time working on this with my clients is that a lack of confidence, a lack of self-belief can be one of the biggest blockers to making changes or moving forward in your career.

And wherever I’ve worked I’ve had the pleasure of working alongside some really incredible women and so often they didn’t progress how they wanted to - and not because they weren’t good enough, it was so often because they didn’t have the self confidence. In my experience both in the workplace and with my clients - it is hardly ever that a woman isn’t competent enough to progress or change - she’s just not confident enough. And honestly it’s one of the biggest tragedies and I wish people talked more about the importance of confidence and how to take control of your own confidence. So in this episode, I’m going to be explaining why it is so important that you take control of your confidence right now. Doing so will not only help you be more open to more potential options, it will also help you make decisions about what to do next in your career. 

Now you might be thinking, like lots of people do, when I get this new job or change careers then I will feel more confident. But it’s a mistake to think that a new job will give that to you - you are the person that can give yourself more confidence. And that’s great news, right?

Because it means that you don’t have to rely on others or external factors before you start feeling better about yourself.

It can be so helpful to learn how to do that, how to take control of your confidence,  sooner rather than later because it will make your career change journey so much easier. When you can recognise yourself and build up self belief you’ll be more open to more options and opportunities and you’re more likely to start taking action to create meaningful change

And will also help you experience your next role in a much more enjoyable way. And the tools you will learn as you work on rebuilding your confidence will help you to  continue to grow and progress even when you start your new path - whatever it ends up being.  

So let’s just take a minute to explore what confidence really is. The Oxford English Dictionary defines confidence as “ a feeling of self-assurance or trust in one's own abilities, qualities, or future success” 

But confidence is formed from a combination of how you think about yourself, what you believe, your experiences, goals you’ve accomplished, skills you’ve mastered and what you’ve learned from others or seen modelled to you.

And one of the things I’ve noticed over years of coaching people is that most people don’t see confidence as something they can control. They often think that other people “just have it” or that their lack of confidence isn’t something they can do anything about. 

This tends to happen when people are reliant on others for approval - when you are looking for other people to tell you you are good enough, seeking external validation from a manager or friends or family. This often goes hand in hand with low confidence.

And if that is something that you are experiencing - there’s no need to judge yourself for it - you just want to notice it. Notice if your confidence is built on the opinions of others.

Lots of very successful people struggle with this - they are high achieving but reliant on others for validation. 

CONFIDENCE FIRE

I came up with this analogy a few years ago to explain this to my clients -The Confidence Fire. I want you to think about your confidence as a fire. 

A fire that glows within you - it fuels pretty much everything - how you feel about yourself, how you show up, how you interact with others and the world. 

And if you are reliant on others for your confidence or self esteem or self worth,  then that is what keeps your fire burning; your boss giving you praise for your latest project - that’s them throwing a log in the fire, your manager giving you positive feedback in your appraisal - another log on the fire, your colleague telling you that you did a great job with that difficult client - another log on the fire

But the problem with this is that when those people leave or change their behaviour or don’t give you that validation or you move to a different organisation - the fuel for your Confidence Fire disappears. And it happens - you have a manager who gets promoted and your new manager isn’t great at feedback, or you get promoted and in a more senior role you don’t have the amount of feedback or support you used to - or there’s a reorganisation at your company and you don’t have that constructive input from others. Or you go on maternity leave and there’s no one around to tell you anything about how you are doing.

And if your Confidence Fires is built off and only kept going by the logs of validation from others. Your confidence will either be massively reduced or even go out.

This is why it is so important that YOU are the one in charge of your Confidence Fire. You want to be the one that is putting those logs on there regularly. When you work on a project you want to be telling yourself that you worked really hard at it, you want to be reminding yourself of how well you handled a client and well done for staying calm if they were being difficult, You want to be telling yourself that you learnt loads while upskilling in a new areas. You want to be the one acknowledging yourself and celebrating yourself and each time throwing a fresh log on your Confidence Fire. You need to be the one keeping it burning.

You want to be in control of your confidence.

Then if someone gives you great feedback - then brilliant, you can add that to the fire - but it's an added bonus - it’s not the only thing keeping it going. And look, we're human so of course we’re going to welcome that praise from others but the key is that we don’t want to be RELIANT on it to have confidence in ourselves. We don’t want it to be the only fuel for the fire. 

If you are the one keeping that fire burning then if either that feedback from others isn;t there or we get some negative feedback - it’s not going to put the fire out.

So I’d love you to really think about this and commit to either igniting your own Confidence Fire if you really feel like it’s missing, or taking back control and making sure that you are the one stoking the fire and keeping it burning.

This will mean taking time regularly to acknowledge yourself. This isn’t a passive thing - you have to be intentional about spending time and effort keeping that fire burning.

It will be worth it. And just an extra tip, you don’t want to only acknowledge yourself when you have achieved a certain marker of success. By that I mean, don’t wait until you have hit a goal that other people see as success - whether that's a job title, amount of money or whatever. Set your own goals for what you view as success in your life now - at this age and stage.

And make sure you are acknowledging the process, if you only acknowledge the outcome you are missing out on a whole aspect of your effort and learning and knowledge that you can be celebrating.

Here’s an example, let’s say your boss has asked you to do a presentation at work. So you could spend a few weeks on it, be in constant anxiety about whether it is going to be received well, spend so much energy on it - then you present it and the person in the senior leadership team in the room says, ‘no this isn’t right’, lots of things have changed since last month so the solutions you are presenting just won’t work.

Now if you were only reliant on external validation - that could be crushing. You would start questioning yourself - blaming yourself, oh this was me. I got this wrong. How could I have been so stupid? Why didn’t I know things had changed? I’m rubbish at my job. They must all think I’m stupid etc etc… You assume the fault is yours when the confidence is low and you haven't been acknowledging your progress along the way.

But let’s say you are not reliant on external validation - your experience might be different. Over the weeks you are preparing the presentation, you might be noticing along the way how you have been using your great relationships that you’ve built up at work to find information you need to add. Then you can acknowledge yourself that you’ve found a really clear way to communicate the problem and the solution. 

You might notice that you’ve created a great narrative in your presentation and acknowledged how far your skills have come since two years ago when you used to hate doing powerpoint.

Then in the meeting, you might feel a bit nervous beforehand but then manage to get yourself to a place where you feel OK about presenting to a room full of people - remembering all the times you’ve done it before and it went well.

Then when that Senior Leader in the room drops the bombshell that actually the goal posts on the project have changed and the solutions you have come up aren’t right and with won’t work now. You won’t start blaming yourself anf telling yourself you’ve got it all wrong. Because you will have been acknowledging yourself and building up your confidence along the way - you won’t immediately assume it;s all your fault - this is a key sign of low confidence when we blame ourselves straight away.

Instead you can still feel proud of the work you’ve put into the presentation, you can still feel grateful that you got to present to the senior leadership team, you might feel good about your presentation skills and how they are getting better all the time - and when you are in the frame of mind - you’ll be able to see this for what it is  - the goal posts being changed on the project - Just something that happens at work quite a lot, things change, priorities change, decisions change - and we can adapt and regroup and go again.

Hopefully you can see that in the first version if you are reliant on other people’s feedback or an output to prove how good or worthy you are - it rarely goes that way.

But if you take control of your confidence on an ongoing basis you can stay in a place of self belief all along the process and be the one in control of your own Confidence Fire.

So let’s come all the way back to the beginning and why this is something to think about and work on now. Why we don’t want to wait until we get that new job to expect that feeling of confidence to appear

The reality is that if you can start practising this now - being in control of your own confidence, feeding the fire this will help you start feeling better about yourself now.

You’ll start believing more in your capabilities and that will leave you more open to the various options you could pursue next.

So when I work with my clients in Career Change Coaching, I always try to work with them on their self-belief and confidence BEFORE we start looking at different career paths and options.

It really will make the process so much easier for you. Obviously in personal coaching we can go much deeper and work on what has dented your confidence or maybe why you’ve never felt confident and I teach lots of tools you can use to start building your your own confidence - be in charge of your own confidence fire so that you can become someone who creates change in their own life.

It is possible for you.  

Increased confidence Isn’t just something you find after you change careers - It really  can be what gets you there

Bye for now