Building Self-Confidence Video
Video Transcript
Learn how to become more self-confident, with this video.
Do you wish you had more self-confidence? Many people do, and there are several reasons why.
When you have self-confidence, you trust your abilities, even when others don't. It means you do the right thing, even when it's hard, or when you have to go against the view of your group. Having self-confidence also means you're not afraid to admit when you've made a mistake. And you're not afraid to learn from those mistakes.
People with a high degree of self-confidence often have greater success than those who don't. Confidence can enhance your reputation, get you the projects you want, and open up all kinds of opportunities in your career.
The good news is that self-confidence can be learned, just like any other skill. And there's a lot you can do to build it up.
First, learn to think positively. Whenever you find yourself slipping into self-defeating thoughts, force yourself to stop and think of something more empowering such as, "I can do this!"
If you start to have doubts about what you're doing, take a minute and write these down on paper. Then, calmly and rationally challenge them. You might find that many of these doubts seem silly when you look at them up close. But others might be valid. If this is the case, come up with a plan to deal with these issues.
Next, set yourself meaningful goals. Then build on the knowledge and skills you need to achieve them. This might mean doing some studying, finding a mentor, or going on a training course.
Try to get into the habit of setting and achieving small goals for yourself. Your confidence will start to build as you gain additional knowledge and skills, and reach your objectives.
Another way of building your self-confidence is to look at what you've already done in your life. Write down the ten best things you've achieved, and put them in a smartly formatted document.
Then, spend a few minutes a week enjoying the success you've already had. You can do the same with your strengths. Use a SWOT Analysis to identify them.
Then, think about what your friends and family would consider your strengths to be, and spend a few minutes reflecting on these.
These are just some of the ways you can build self-confidence. To find out more, see the article that accompanies this video.
What is your motivation to do programming?
Is this because you have good math and you could use this skill with programming?
There other ways to use math like accountancy or audit and engineering.
However if you mean the math element is a strength and you want to quickly add extra items to your skill set then math and programming do fit together.
Programing does need team interaction skills but if you want to fit in the team and have a manager or leader to develop your team skills or improve your own personal or team skills this will need you to use your strengths to develop these skills while doing something that interests you.
You can develop not only your math skills but use these strengths to develop your other skills although you see these at present as a skill to be developed and not a skill that is immediately available or useable by you in a team setting.
If this is not one of your motivations or is useable in the work setting, you might want to find a way to become confident and position your skills to improve what you feel about team work.
A team lead might want to use your math or programming skills but will still want to find ways to use your team interaction skills and use of your valuable team member skills but will want to understand what or why you feel you feel you have no team or self interaction skills to use with the other team members.
A team needs it's members to interact together, software development is no different although the specialist skills required to develop software might need social and interaction skills rather than just technical skills, to be useful to each other you will need to become more confident about positioning your team member skills to be able to interact with other team members.
Remember you need to find ways to develop these skills although your main efforts might be towards developing the programming skills to do the job.
Is there a particular issue you feel you need more development with interacting or is this a question about confidence or the positioning of your technical or social skills?
If this is the people or team skills you want to develop further while being able to focus mostly on the technical skills needed to develop software, you will need to consider how you position these skills to the work area?
Happy to offer more help if I can do so...
Bigk
I have done my own SWOT analysis.
One of my strengths is math, and my weakness is social interaction and copywriting.
So I think could software building or programming be the "right brand" and "righ career" for me?
I have (of course) used computer, but I have no experience or education in software building or programming. (And of course this is the reason why I ask this question).
You've obviously got a good grasp already of how the results of a SWOT analysis can provide their own solution - as you say:
How do we use the strengths with the opportunities, strengths to beat the threats etc..?
A good way to start figuring this out is to use TOWS analysis which will show you how to figure this out. Our article on TOWS analysis is here: http://mindtools.com/community/pages/ar ... STR_89.php
Best wishes
Helena