A practitioner explains why new graduates and early-career workers shouldn't expect to feel confident yet. Social media distorts how confident everyone else appears, and building real confidence takes time and deliberate work, not just positive thinking.
Today's video, this isn't going to be for everybody. This is for a particular type of practitioner. But I thought I'd share it because those of you who don't need this may be able to share it with someone else, you know, and this is for somebody who is fairly recently into practice. If you are, you're a newer graduate in the last couple of years, you know, you're still kind of building your confidence or it's for you, if you've recently made a change, if you've started to learn a new technique system or you've moved practice practice or something like that, you may find this helpful as well. So I want to talk a little bit about confidence and I'm thinking about this because I've been working on a course recently. It's going to be upcoming course out in the next month or two. I'm just getting the recording finished at the minute. And it's all about how to improve your confidence and your mental resilience, how to go from feeling unconfident and nervous and imposter syndrome to feeling confident, feeling like you know what you're doing, getting that bulletproof healthcare mindset and actually just enjoying practice. This relates a little bit to my video a few weeks ago about the lonely chapter, which you might have seen. If you missed that, go to my YouTube channel, which is YouTube.com@patientcentered. You can see it there. But I wanted to share this. This was actually came from a seminar I was at a few years ago and there was a coach there who's a sports psychologist, and she was talking about essentially things that we could do as practitioners to improve our confidence. And there's one thing she said that really stood out. And my two new associate graduates who were there with me on the day as well, both grabbed onto this as well. And she said, look, here's what confidence is like. We need a definition of it if we're going to talk about it. And she said confidence is essentially the feeling of knowing what to do before you do it. Like, if you think of like an Olympic athlete, they turn up, they've got that confidence. They're nervous on the day, but they're confident they know what they're going to do. You know, musician who's practiced a song over and over and over, they're confident in playing it because they know what to do. You've been in practice for a number of years, you've seen loads of patients. Somebody comes in and. And it's with a similar issue. You've seen before you can feel confident because you know what to do. That doesn't mean you know exactly what's going to happen. It's not about predicting the future, but it's that sense of feeling of, okay, I know what to do next. And she pointed this out and this is the bit that really, really resonated with them. And this, this will with you if you are fairly new at something as well. And she said, you know, when you are starting out at something, you're new to it, you haven't built the skills yet. So how on earth can could you feel confident? It is literally impossible because you don't know what to do yet because you haven't done it. That doesn't mean that you're messing up. It doesn't mean that you're failing. Unfortunately, with social media and everything these days, everybody puts out their wins. We're very good at telling the rest of the world we're confident about something, but a lot of us are using that to either make up for the fact we're not or to kind of hide it, or some of us just don't realize that that's the impact it can have on the rest of us. So, wanted to share that with you because I thought it's really important to know that, that, you know, confidence, it does come through practice. Now there's a number of specific strategies you can use to improve that as well. And that's why I'm packing this course out with all the different strategies I can. Because it's not a cookie cutter thing. It's not. I did this. You have to do it as well. I'm putting strategies in there that didn't work that well for me, but have worked for other people and a way that you can approach it. So you can, you can kind of choose your own adventure, work out the bits that are going to work best for you. You. But I thought I'd share that now for anyone who needed to hear that, that it's okay if you don't feel confident at the start. Like, that's, that's normal. I tell every new graduate who comes to work with me now. Like, if you felt confident right now, that is a red flag to me that tells me you do not know what you don't know. And I've only met one person who was like that, and it was a bit of a train wreck, to be honest. So if that's you, fine. If it's not you and you feel confident, just make sure to share that a bit more. I've been guilty of not talking about that enough in the past. Like, I didn't talk about the lonely chapter. I didn't think it was that relevant. I've now learned how useful that can be for others. So if you're watching this and thinking you've built your confidence now, great. But make sure to tell others who are fairly new to whatever it is you're doing that that can happen as well. Because when we do that, we normalize it. The worst thing if you don't feel confident is to feel unconfident and alone. That's way, way scarier. So just know that you're not alone. That's not the case. It's perfectly normal. Just because the rest of us who are more experienced don't talk about it so much now, it doesn't mean we didn't go through it. So I hope that was helpful. If you'd like some help building that confidence even more, building that resilience, keep an eye out the next month or so. I'll have more details on that course coming very soon. I'm going to price it at a level that is low enough for new graduates as well. The value in there is huge. I could charge way more than I plan to, but I want to keep it nice and low so it's accessible for everybody. Because often the people who need it most are the ones early in the career. I know you don't have a massive disposable income for that, so keep an eye out for that if that's useful. If you've got any questions, as always, just shoot me a message. I'm always happy to chat. I'll see you soon.
