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Article
17 Oct 2023
by John Scarrott

Find your confidence: as a Chair, Presenter or Speaker

If you were asked to name your biggest opportunity for growth, whether as a chair, presenter or speaker what would you say?

An article in the Changing Your Conversations: Changing Your Outcomes programme.

If I asked you to name your biggest opportunity for growth, whether as a chair, presenter or speaker what would you say? Here are four places where it could sit. Have a look. Where’s your work?

Personal Confidence    Practise
Preparation    Performance

Often, when I ask this question, Personal Confidence attracts the most votes. 

JohnScarrottConfidencepic.jpg

Which makes sense. When your confidence grows, you can do more. You can handle presentations with ease, speak to bigger audiences with energy, chair important meetings calmly and be more successful.

 

 

Image credit: John Scarrott

And the best chairs, presenters, speakers, they seem to exude confidence. Which is all good. And yet...

A question lurks at the back of the room. A hand goes up. 


Q: ‘Where will my personal confidence come from?’

A: “Is it something that some are just born with? Do I wait for it to find me?”

It’s a good question. And neither of these responses seem particularly useful when it comes to your growth. They rely on confidence finding you. Which is a bit hit and miss. It would be much better to seek it out.

Where do you look? For the answer, let’s return to your opportunity for growth.

What if I now arrange the earlier options into a sequence of steps as follows:


1. Preparation
2. Practise
3. Performance
4. Personal Confidence


What do you see now? Here are some possibilities.

You can work on confidence directly. And that’s useful. But it’s only a fraction of what’s available to you. And on its own, it’s not strong enough to do all your lifting. To elevate your chairing, presenting, speaking, you need to engage the other elements.

This involves more obvious work. Sometimes that’s why we shy away from them, cross our fingers and hope out confidence arrives. It may do. But it may not.

Working on the other elements can lead you to your Personal Confidence. This is because you have evidence for it. You’ve done the work. Therefore, you have some reasons to believe you can be successful. 

They’re a stronger basis for confidence. Confidence emerges from your work. It’s your reward. Your personal confidence is something that can be worked towards. Discovered. Quite literally, found. By you.
To learn more about all of these elements and how you can harness this approach to become a more confident chair, presenter or speaker, come along to one of my forthcoming masterclasses. 

Thanks for reading. 

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