Confidence is like riding a bike
When we feel confident in ourselves, we feel safe, we feel stable, we feel secure and strong.
We have an inner belief that whatever happens, we are ok and we can cope.
Imagine your child before they learned to ride a bike or before they learned to swim. Remember how wobbly, uncertain, scared, apprehensive they were, remember how they may have been reluctant to carry on especially if they’d fallen off their bike or gone under the water and come back up coughing and spluttering.
Our Personal Safety Mechanism
Avoiding something that’s unpleasant or has the potential to hurt us is a normal and natural response we all have as humans. It’s our personal safety mechanism switching on to protect us from danger and keep us out of harm's way. This is known as the sympathetic nervous system and its main roles are to keep us alive and out of danger. However, if our children had listened to that mechanism, they would have given up, they wouldn’t have got back on their bike or back into the swimming pool to try again.
Support, Encouragement & Practice
With encouragement, support and an understanding adult demonstrating how to do it, they managed to keep going and they mastered the skill through determination and practice. They calmed their sympathetic nervous system enough to be able to dial it down and therefore achieved their goal; to ride a bike or swim.
Imagine them now, getting on their bike and cycling or jumping into a pool and swimming without a care in the world or a second thought. Without even realising it, they have trained their sympathetic nervous system to know that whilst they still have to be careful, they now have the confidence in their ability to do it. They have become so confident and comfortable with it, it has become ‘second nature’ and they don’t think twice about it. They have listened to the warnings given by the sympathetic nervous system, assessed the level of danger and decided that they are ok to keep going.
Learning Skills for Confidence
In the same way, we can help our children build confidence in all areas of their lives. It’s about supporting and encouraging them and taking small, patient steps. As with learning to ride a bike or to swim, we don’t expect them to be able to do it straight away. It takes practice over time and various skills are learned along the way such as setting off, looking where you’re going, pedalling, steering, braking and stopping, when learning to ride a bike.
Similarly, when growing confidence in all other areas, it’s about practising a combination of skills and techniques, encouraging, cheerleading and supporting them through the wobbles, the splutters, the doubts and the fears knowing that they absolutely will get there just like they did now they’re razzing around on their bikes and doing bombs into the pool!