Goldberg, A. (2015) Self-confidence. Competitive Edge. Retrieved from https://www.competitivedge.com/self-confidence
Confidence is a difficult thing to build. It takes time and effort. Particularly effort. And lots of it. As a participant, there are many things you can do to build confidence and many credos surrounding it.
- Nothing replaces hard work
- Remind yourself of yourself
- Don’t compare yourself to others – Focus on you
- Focus on what you can control
- Dwell on the positive
- Catch yourself doing things right
- Be a good coach to yourself
As an educator, something that has become increasingly obvious to me is the notion of no matter what you do, you’re impacting a student’s confidence. Every single interaction influences confidence; whether it’s a look, tone, comment, or your body language, the students are watching and they care what you do. This is so important to keep in mind in a classroom and isn’t limited to just competitive activities. Students self confidence can be extremely fragile and as the adult in the room, it lies on your shoulder to model how to have self confidence. This is a very difficult task as we as educators aren’t handed bag of self-confidence as a resource and told “go forth and spread the good worth of self-efficacy”, handing out confidence from our confidence bag to those in need. Tough as it is though to bring confidence into the classroom, it is necessary thing and I will refer back to the credos at the beginning for inspiration. They are solid principles to build self-confidence from and if you can, you will set your student sup for success in self-confidence as well. To relate this back to competition though, these credos are the definitions of a good competitor. Self-confidence will feed to positive elements of competition and thus will support further growth of confidence. It is a cycle that, if possible to implement, can have a tremendous influence on an individual’s life.