Self-confidence for resilience in research

Developing a growth mindset

It is often easy to spot confident people who appear to be more resilient than us. They know what to do in difficult situations, they take the lead to resolve problems, create laughter at tense times and always know the right thing to say in the right situation.

Too often you can assume that the outward appearance of confidence is something that others naturally possess, and you don’t have it and that it can’t be learned.

Can you learn to be more confident and can you become more resilient in the process? The research in this area suggests that you can learn the tools, techniques and skills of being confident in a variety of situation through:

experience of taking on new activities
growing your repertoire of handling different situations
dealing with different people
reflecting on what went well and what you could do better and
listening to and responding to feedback on your performance

Tom Stocky of Facebook writes about becoming more confident

How do I find out what my strengths are?

In an environment where you are constantly and critically evaluating research, asking questions and looking for gaps, you equally apply some of the same thinking to yourself – daily, you need to develop some skills further, do things better than you did them in the first version and constantly look for novel ways of approaching things.

The ongoing requirement to improve can often be delivered in a deluge of critical evaluation which you can sometimes interpret as personal criticism rather than criticism of your work.

The StrengthsFinder book is useful to give a language of strengths to add to your lexicon to balance out the ‘critical voice’ inside you. The book has an access code in the back to take an online assessment generating a personalised report and it may be something you’d find useful to articulate some of your strengths – particularly if you can translate them to the research environment and use them to strengthen the story of your CV or job/fellowship/ promotion applications.

You don’t need to use or read the StrengthsFinder book to think about articulating your strengths – 10 minutes with this resource and a pen, together with some space to think may be sufficient to get you started.

The nerves that come with doing something new

Having the right amount of challenge helps to underpin our resilience. It is difficult to be confident in challenging situations, as by their very nature, they can expose a lack of certainty or expertise.

So, what does self-confidence look like?

It often looks like drawing on and playing to your strengths however you can be confidently ‘new to something’ by admitting that this is not your area of expertise or experience but that you’ve come to learn and contribute where you can.

It can help to strengthen your resolve to try new and different things to build both confidence and ability to respond to challenges with resilience, particularly when you get the perspective of someone so accomplished and experienced encouraging you to try it.

This blog post from Dame Professor Athene Donald of Cambridge University is from someone very successful in her professional life.

Finding and using a mentor

Finding and using a mentor can help in the process of resilience building. A mentor is someone (often more senior than you) who has had more, sometimes different, sometimes similar, experiences and can help you set your own experiences and views in a different perspective as well as helping you to develop your confidence by talking through aspirations and tackling different challenges. Often they are part of your supportive community of people you trust and who believe in you in the research environment.

Mentoring in academia can work particularly well to help you think through things like determining your future plans, applying for promotion, thinking about how you come up with a writing strategy or how you manage particular situations or people.

The University of Dundee has created an e-book about mentoring that contains lots of good tips and guidance on making the most of having a mentor.

Creating my own personal board of directors

In her book It’s Not a Glass Ceiling, It’s a Sticky Floor, Rebecca Shambaugh suggests that you create a virtual board of directors of people who support you and help to develop you. This concept translates well to the research environment and into helping you maintain your resilience by having some key points of reference, help and support.

Building a personal advisory board doesn’t involve creating a committee, the members don’t actually meet each other and people may not know that they are on your advisory board – only you know. Some people will occupy a seat on that board for a long time, others for shorter periods and some may fulfil more than one role.

Your advisory board might include:

Someone who is hugely supportive of you personally and professionally and encourages you to take opportunities
Someone who shares a working life with you and understands the joys and pressures of being at this stage in your working life
Someone who has some accumulated wisdom that can help you to get things in perspective

Knowing myself and knowing how I work and fit best with other people

This is the final page. Hopefully by now you’ve done some thinking, looked at a few of the links and the read around the most pertinent topics for you and your resilience.

Which topics hit the mark as far as your own resilience management is concerned?
What do you need to work (even) harder on to develop and maintain your resilience?
Who or what can help you to be more resilient?

From the perspective of the authors we know that we have a handful of daily control and confidence priorities that help us manage our day-to-day resilience. Additionally, for more complex or situational priorities we need to mentally prepare in advance to generate the right mindset of challenge and commitment to be resilient.

Being more self-aware doesn’t make us perfect at any of this (far from it, in fact!). It does, however, make us feel more able to more effectively manage our own resilience. We are all a work in progress.

Watch Dr Brenee Brown’s TEDx talk on her research on vulnerability