Hey, how are you doing? I told you in The Last Quarter that I'll be posting on the 10th, 20th and 30th of each month. So, in the name of accountability, I'm two days late because I focused all of my time and energy in my financial advisor training in the past week. But don't worry, I haven't forgotten about all of you and somehow it got to me that this experience I had in the training felt like a perfect fit to what I'm about to share with you today.
The rest of the trainees and I had to memorize a script that will serve as our guide when we do field work later on. The said script was considerably long and we were only given three days to memorize it. The training lasted for 8 hours per day and the commute took about 4 hours of my time. Every commuter in Cebu knows just how energy-draining the ride back home is, so you probably know that at this point I'm going to tell you that this is my excuse for not memorizing the script religiously. I just didn't have enough time.
So, the day of the assessment finally came. We were to be scored according to a rubric. In a nutshell, the more important lines we were able to say, the greater our scores will be. The instructions also included points for 'impact' in the delivery.
It was finally my turn, I was literally shaking. This is not an exaggeration. I was actually scared that I would forget all of the lines and I would get a mental block. I asked the assessor for a few seconds to compose myself and I took deep breaths. After I said the first few lines, ooops, I forgot the next. The assessor kindly helped me remember the line that I had to say next. So I continued on with the spiel, looked intently at my partner, and made sure that I was addressing her concerns as her advisor. I got through with the whole sequence and I could still feel my insides shaking.
I was so sure that I missed out on a lot of lines and I was ready to receive an average or a low score. The assessor told me that I got 92 out of 96. I couldn't believe it. This is not me being humble, this is me actually having no clue how I could've gotten a score that high when I knew that I missed out on a lot of lines. He then went on to say that he didn't even notice that I was nervous. My partner also echoed on this thought.
On the way home I started to think about what happened. Maybe the assessor was just kind or maybe I was just being too meticulous about my mistakes. I wasn't really sure of anything but this - I got 92/96.
I thought about it for a few days and then it hit me - I was equipped with the skill of talking to clients because of the nature of my part-time job as an ESL teacher. One year of teaching experience enabled the assessor and my partner to see a non-nervous me.
Now here is the idea that I want to share with all of you today - confidence can be learned. Well, that was a no-brainer, you may have probably known of that. But did you know that you can learn this through relevant practice? Of course you did. But do you do it? Well, I couldn't answer this one for you.
At this point, I would like to establish the relationship between confidence and self-improvement. In this blog, I define self-improvement as the process of taking the steps necessary for you to achieve a level of confidence in an area that you would like to be involved in. Confidence, in this sense, is the ability to display and assess one's skills accurately. So it makes sense that the more you practice, the better you will be at assessing your skill level, the better you will be at displaying confidence.
This idea isn't a band-aid fix, obviously. This approach takes time but the effects will be more fulfilling in the long run. I will be posting an in-depth article about confidence soon, so I hope you'll stay tuned for that.
Let me just go back to my story a bit before you go. I would like to share that I was among the top 3 who got a high rating for that activity. My performance wasn't perfect, there were a lot of things that I could've done better, but I learned. And my efforts were recognized.
I'm looking forward to hearing your stories of self-improvement and confidence, too! Wishing all of you a great week ahead :)
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