Confidence Questions

When teaching about confidence, it is important to go beyond simply asking "what will make you confident?" Instead, ask what actions will help you prepare and build confidence through repetition. Another helpful question is to rate your confidence on a scale of one to six and identify what needs to be done to move towards a higher rating. The key to building confidence is practicing, repeating, and reinforcing positive experiences. Now, often when we teach questions, we talk about using the word what, and we still will deploy that philosophy here. Yet, remember there are things underneath this thing called confidence, such as repetition and practice. So, the questions aren't, what are you going to do to be confident, which is still a good question. We would encourage you to dig deeper and say, what are you going to do to ultimately prepare that will instill more confidence? What repetitions have you put into practice that will build your confidence? Now, another question we would encourage you to use is a rating question. So, John, in terms of that speech on the scale of one to six, six, you're ultimately confident, no butterflies, no hesitation, absolute confidence because you're fully prepared, or one, you feel a little bit inhibited, maybe a little bit of squeamish of doing the speech or maybe even a little bit apprehensive. Where would you rate yourself and why? Typically, they go in the middle. When they go in the middle, you say, well, what do you need to do to fill that gap to move towards a six in the next 30 days? And what that does is it moves them in the right direction. Again, the foundation of confidence is practice repetition and positive reinforcement.