If you’re a teenage girl there are lots of challenges to navigate. You can face new or difficult situations with faith in yourself or you can stay in a state of fear and anxiety. What makes the difference? Confidence!
A group of 13 – 15-year-old club girls at DHEF centre Hazelwood in Glasgow took part in a workshop on confidence with Dovile Blindaruk-Vile. Dovile is a fully qualified coach who showed the girls what confidence is and how to find it.
We want to be confident, says Dovile, because it’s so much better to feel good when we’re doing something than to feel we’re making a mess of things.
Dovile starts with a strong message: If we’re going to move forward we need to do things that scare us, otherwise we just stay where we are.
“Be a learner and a doer” is Dovile’s message. This means you have to expect and accept mistakes. Courage is when you’re scared, but you do it anyway. And what can give us the strength is precisely focusing our own strengths and achievements. Dovile calls this “positive self-talk”. The opposite is “negative self-talk” which can hold you back.
Train your brain, says Dovile, to prepare for success. Visualise success before you start. Think of athletes who close their eyes before they start to compete. Their brain is already looking at success. If we draw on our strengths, even in a new situation, we can tell ourselves “I’m good at this!” By contrast, if we let ourselves reminisce about our past failures, things are very likely to go wrong.
Eleanor Roosevelt said: “You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. Do the thing you think you cannot do.” Dovile points out that we usually stop when we think we cannot do something. The way to overcome this is by taking tiny steps. For example, if we freeze at the idea of talking to strangers, start by saying a few words to the person at the checkout in the supermarket.
The girls in the workshop are asked to think about where they would like more confidence and what small step could help. One girl says she needs more confidence with making a presentation at school. “Give the presentation to us first!” say the other girls.
There are also “rules of mind” which can help us. Imagination is more powerful than knowledge or logic. Your brain doesn’t check what you actually know, so you need to use your imagination to focus on your skills. In addition, the mind learns by repetition and loves familiarity. This means that what you say all the time becomes true for you. So say encouraging things to yourself!
Dovile winds up the workshop with an inspirational quotation from wellbeing expert Charlie Wardle:
“A bird sitting in a tree is never afraid of the branch breaking, because its trust is not on the branch but on its own wings.”
For all of us, confidence means using our gifts and talents in better ways.
