The Confidence Coach Answers Your Questions
Martin - How Did You Become A Confidence Coach?
It began in 1994 when I worked on one of the toughest housing estates in South London. My job was to try to help the disaffected young people on the estate get into the world of work. They lived a life of crime...getting up late, stealing a car, then living off the proceeds of their crime. As you can imagine it wasn't a straightforward task!
However, once they began to see the value of holding down a job, (which incidentally is another story altogether), the challenge was to prepare them for interview. Most of them had never encountered a job interview before. Added to that they had no previous work experience. So in preparing them for interview, I worked from the motto,'To have supreme confidence in what you can do; to not worry about what you can't do, but be willing to learn'.
This meant helping them to see that they had some skills that were transferable even if it was having a good presence of mind in thinking on your feet when you steal a car! Once they recognised they had something, a skill or quality or attitude that was of value, their confidence in themselves soared. They could see that they had something within themselves that an employer would want.
But for me, the revelation was that this was something I did well. As if my gift was being liberated. I could see the strengths and qualities the young people had and was able to communicate my belief in them in such a way, that strengthened and empowered them. My belief transfered to them, which transfered to the employer and many of them got jobs.
It was not long after this that I read the weekly column in the Times, 'Dear Coach', in which a Coach University trained coach, coached a Times reader through a personal or professional situation. I decided that this was the perfect job for me, so enrolled on the Coach University training programme.
It was then I decided to focus on a niche and decided on confidence. I recognised that having or not having confidence made a significant difference in what a person was able to do with their life.
So I dedicated myself to learning as much about confidence as possible. What is it? What is it for? Where does it go when we lose it? What are the negative influences that impact on it? How do we get it back? I immersed myself in the study of confidence.
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