News & Insights
Coaching and Confidence
2nd March 2022
Changes in our environment can make a significant difference to how well we perform if our mood, happiness, or ability to concentrate has been negatively affected.
Our personality also contributes to how we adapt to specific changes in our lives, such as those wrought by the pandemic.
In this bite-size session, Jude Thorpe and Zia Savel touch on how coaching can help reframe your thinking, to consider how feeling at your best manifests itself so you can draw on this mindset during times of challenge.
Video Transcript
Jude: As we emerge from the pandemic and we're still a little bit in that limbo where people are returning to the office but we're seeing that blended work and home working, there's an increased emphasis on, or focus on, coaching, self-awareness, and self-care. Can you share a couple of approaches that you found to be effective?
Zia: Definitely. So, during lockdowns, I can think of some people I've worked with who simply couldn't perform their normal ways of working from home. And it was down to things like people being around, bandwidth, dogs barking, deliveries, all sorts of things. And those elements have got in the way of how they prefer it to work in lockdown then made them notice things, their performance, their mood, their happiness, their ability to concentrate, all these things, and they then quickly made the decision that they needed to do something different. That's one example during lockdown.
There's now time to plan and be at our best for going back to the office. And coaching is a great way to do that.
And I think playing that forward, we may notice similar things going back into the office. So, the patterns of how we start our day, how we commute to work, how does the pattern of our week now fall into shape. All of these topics are coachable because everyone's situation will be slightly different. We might have caring responsibilities of children or elderly parents or dogs. I think a lot of people now have dogs. So how does this dynamic fall into the future way?
An alternative is thinking about how we separate work from home, and so many people spoke about that. But equally, how do we then make that transition going back into the office. So, while it was kind of thrown upon us last March there's now time to plan and be at our best for going back to the office. And coaching is a great way to do that.
When you're at your best, how does it feel?
Jude: Do you think that people's self-confidence diminished during lockdown because especially for those individuals who are more extrovert, perhaps losing that social interaction is hard and I speak personally, that would apply to me because I love to be surrounded by people and I thrive on meeting new people. I thrive on networking. So, to have that taken away and to have that sort of myopic approach to life and work, I found very challenging.
How would you support somebody whose confidence had perhaps decreased as a result of the situation we found ourselves in over the past 15 months?
Zia: Yeah. And confidence can impact absolutely all areas of our life, professional and personal. And it's a really common topic to talk about in coaching. So with that, with coaching, there are so many processes and tools that we can operate. Each client would have a different approach. But we could look at things about feeling at your best. When you're feeling at your best, how does it feel? How does it look? What would others say about you? These sorts of things so that you get that feeling of how it feels to feel good or to feel good about yourself and then play that forward into taking it from this point forward how can you feel like that again?
