Confidence empowers us, aids communication and facilitates relationships.
For our workplace contributions to be meaningful they must survive obstacles: changes of mood, aggression, indifference, manipulation, people pulling rank, different modes of argument, divergence of fundamental values, and many more.
In this workshop I aim to equip participants with both the composure and the tools needed to carry out their work tasks in ways that are engaging and purposeful.
This workshop is practical and most of our time is spent actually doing things. The ideal group is between 4 and 15 participants.
What the workshop covers
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What is your starting point? When and where are you confident? When do you lack confidence?
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What support do you need in feeling confident? What behaviour are you aspiring to?
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Where is your attention when struggling with confidence?
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Dealing with self-consciousness or nerves; focusing on others’ needs
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Being more expressive both in voice and body language; eye contact; being adaptable, practising a wide range of different behaviours to feel confident in body and voice
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Identifying and understanding the styles, needs and values of others
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Bridging the gap; including your own needs; asserting your preferences
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Making challenging contributions with confidence; expressing a minority view
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Dealing with difficult questions, challenges, aggression, manipulation
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What happens when unfavourably comparing yourself with others? Or when there’s an expert in your subject in the room?
A broader overview of the workshop
Confidence is often taken to mean the ability to talk clearly and with ease when faced with a group of people or a demanding task, sometimes with a bold, upright but relaxed body. But it can mean much more than this, and it can also serve us ill when misused or misplaced. Take, for example, the confident speaker who assumes everyone understands them but who is in fact barely comprehensible because of a strong accent or speech impediment; or the bold, blustering speaker who freely dominates the conversation and is flowing with ideas, but who unwittingly crushes contributions from quieter people present.
On this workshop I aim to cover as many aspects of confidence as possible. This includes voice and body work to develop the tools of communication – a broad range of expression can only enhance our ability to communicate; an awareness of the effects of different uses of voice and body will sensitise us to others’ styles of communication too.
I am an actor, so my approach is derived from acting techniques. On stage we aim to pursue objectives to drive the drama – so we do in the workplace when forging an argument or following an idea through to completion; we also, as actors, aim to be as sensitive as possible to exactly what our fellow performers are doing. Likewise, much of this workshop aims to focus us on others’ needs, their styles of communication, their preferences and values; in this way we stand a better chance of aligning our intentions and ideas with theirs, coming to a mutual understanding and communicating more clearly what needs to be said. All of this is, to my mind, a more fruitful approach to the idea of confidence than imposing a set of behaviours. It means our confidence has a chance of stemming from robust understanding between people; from ideas that have been fully shared and clarified; from a sense that everyone who has a stake in the situation has contributed and that we are therefore not leaving ourselves open to contradiction at a later stage, or deals done behind our backs by people who said nothing at the time but who nevertheless had strong opinions.
This work touches on behaviours you might consider central to your personality, your presence in a room, your humanity in the workplace. This means what we will undertake is sensitive and personal. It offers the possibility of change and growth. This is both exciting and, for some, challenging – we are rightly attached to our sense of self and working in ways which introduce changes to habits of a lifetime can sometimes provoke quite profound shifts.
Practice is central to the workshop. Theorising is interesting but we proceed quickly to experiment, freedom to explore, to fail, to look a fool for a moment; we try things out in a non-judgemental environment where everyone is engaged in the same work.
Feedback from peers is also central to the workshop, as a tool for encouragement and support. Sometimes the reality of our contributions at work is highly pressured, with a lot at stake. Other members of the workshop will provide close scrutiny as a replication of some of that pressure. A trusting workshop is of no use if it all falls to pieces back in the workplace.
The work begins with relatively straightforward exercises and situations; over the course of our time together we engage in progressively more demanding situations, from making a contribution you know to be unpopular to an exercise in dealing with behaviours that in some way undermine our confidence: aggression, manipulation, people pulling rank or being patronising, people’s lazy over-compliance or enthusiastic but irrelevant contribution.
Finally, a collective re-cap of the day’s work: what you learned about yourselves that you already did rather well without knowing it; what you learned that is surprising and that you want to change; what you have learned that will equip you to do it.
