Confidence Grows Slowly (With Kendra Patterson)

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What does the word ‘confidence’ bring to mind for you?

Maybe it’s something you wish you had more of. Perhaps a certain person or type of person pops into your head. Someone you associate with having confidence (or a particular perception of confidence).

I caught up with Kendra and we had a chat about our own perceptions of confidence. We talked about the role it plays in our creativity and how we share our work with the world.

Confidence is such a huge topic. Most people will say that could use a little more of it to face their challenges and achieve goals. But as we discuss in our conversation, there is often so much more to confidence than meets the eye.

We chat about:

• Ways the story we believed about our natural temperament growing up informs and reinforces our relationship with self-confidence (or a lack thereof) – especially when introversion and sensitivity are judged as social deficiencies
• The differences between a perception of confidence and genuine deep inner confidence
• Different types of confidence and how confidence in people, things, and processes, might be a way towards more self-confidence
• How a sign of deep self-confidence is seen in the ability to share insecurities and aspects of life about which you are not confident (a paradox?)
• Why self-confidence is not something we possess, but rather something that develops and grows over time (and what we might do to nurture the conditions for this to happen)
• Why discomfort with self-promotion is NOT a lack of confidence, but a preference that we can become aware of when engaging with others (why do we recoil?)
• The difference between being confident in your creative work and confident in your right to do creative work (and why you only need the latter to get going)
• The impact of feedback on confidence when it comes to building a creative practice (and how receiving bad feedback is far more damaging than receiving none at all)
• What constitutes good feedback, and how we can develop the confidence to ask for it (and give it to others)
• How feedback is a partnership and the ways we receive, process, and mine/release solicited criticism
• The importance of “sleeping on it” when it comes to processing feedback with implications
• And many other things…

Links:

Notes on Your Notes (The Hannah Episodes)