Mental Toughness & Wellbeing – Confidence

Much has been written about how Mental Toughness contributes to increased performance; however, even more fundamentally, Mental Toughness has a significant impact on Wellbeing.

In fact, wellbeing is almost a “precursor” to high performance – it is difficult to perform well if your Wellbeing is low.

In this short series of four posts, I will look at how each of the “4C’s” of Mental Toughness can contribute your Wellbeing.

In this final post I will look at Confidence.

Confidence has, as do all of the C’s, two sub-dimensions; Confidence in Abilities and Interpersonal Confidence

Confidence is about self-belief and describes to what extent you believe you have the ability to deal with what you will face.

Confidence in Abilities can be described as a measure of self-esteem and whether you feel worthwhile or require external “recognition” in terms of your knowledge and skills.

Those with high Confidence in Abilities are happy to engage in discussions even when they take them into the unknown. They are not afraid to share their opinions even with others who are clearly more knowledgeable.

Those with low Confidence in Abilities tend to be “missing” this inner self-belief; which can lead to them being reluctant to share their views or opinions in a discussion or debate and kind of “self-exclude” in social situations – they often think that others know more or are more skilled, even when that isn’t the case.

Those with low Confidence in Abilities often know as much (or even more) than anybody else they however they think they are still missing something.

Interpersonal Confidence is about the ability to do deal confidently with challenges and, particularly, with others – they believe they can influence others at least as much as they can be influenced by others.

Those with high Interpersonal Confidence tend to be assertive and able to deal with “difficult” people – they deal positively with people. They are able to argue their corner, ask questions to check understanding and they won’t allow others to orally dominate discussions and conversations – they are usually comfortable in social settings.

On the downside, they also have a tendance to want to get their own way and can come across as aggressive with their gift of the gab turning them into verbal bullies

Those with low Interpersonal Confidence are often reluctant to engage with others, are relatively easily intimidated and will allow others to dominate – backing down even when they know what they are talking about.

Our self-confidence and self-belief are essential in social settings; be it at work, with friends or within informal groups. It’s our confidence that allows us to “connect” with others and develop positive relationships. Both, being “overconfident” and “underconfident” can lead to us becoming marginalised.

Check regularly that you are neither perceived as being overly uncertain nor overly opinionated with regards to your ideas and neither overly passive nor overly aggressive with regards to your behaviour.

If you would like to explore your Mental Toughness and how you can increase your Wellbeing and performance do not hesitate to contact me: boblarcher@boblarcher.com