Stage one: self-knowledge

As always, we should start with ourselves. We should begin looking within and building from where we are at. Sometimes, we are at low self-esteem, lack of confidence, social anxiety, or fear of speaking in public or in a foreign language, and that is ok.

It doesn’t really matter where our starting point is or if our path to fluent and confident expression seems to be carpeted with blocks, obstacles and challenges. Nobody has the same starting line.

What is essential, though, is knowing what your starting point looks like, accepting and embracing your roadblocks so that you can shamelessly seek the tools and practices that will eventually allow you to move past them.

Self-knowledge is the foundation upon which confidence can exist.

Start by exploring the thoughts that cross your mind when you feel self-conscious and pay attention to the situations that lead you to feel that way. 

• What’s the context?
• What are your thoughts?
• What are your feelings, and how do they manifest in your body?
• What is the ultimate response/reaction to that situation?

These are good questions to start with. Think of a situation where you felt self-conscious, awkward, nervous, and ill at ease. Play back all the details and write about them. The answers are your signposts to stop, breathe and implement the tools you will learn to shift self-consciousness into confidence, your discomfort into ease.

Stage two: relational knowledge

However, self-confidence doesn’t exist in a vacuum, which is why we need to have relational knowledge. Relational knowledge refers to the ability to identify how concepts are related to each other. 

Once you have armed yourself with a deep understanding of the situations that erode your confidence, it’s time to look at how these situations are connected and what meaning you infer from them. 

For example, why does being asked to repeat what you said makes you nervous? What meaning you are giving to that question? What kind of connection are you making in your mind?

Or, why does being corrected makes you feel self-conscious? Why does making mistakes make you go into a panic? Or why when someone doesn’t understand your perfectly correct sentence, you feel like you are the only one to blame because your accent or communication skills are (or must be) poor?

All these situations are relational. They exist because there is a relationship between:

• the other person’s reaction and your interpretation of it. 
• your verbal expression and the other person’s interpretation of it.
• interpretations and life experiences, personal and cultural beliefs, biases, etc.

Also, there is a connection that happens at a more subtle level.

For example, the person you talk to makes you feel nervous, maybe their stance or tone of voice. Perhaps the place you are in feels uncomfortable: there is too much noise or is too quiet, or the lightening… Perhaps the events of the day chipped away at your energetic levels, maybe you had an argument earlier in the day and you are still tense, or maybe you are simply incubating a cold and you feel low. 

Look, all those are just examples. The point is that a myriad of circumstances impact every situation and need to be acknowledged and welcomed into the conversation. 

Confidence is accepting and trusting yourself and having a sense of control in those different situations. How can you trust yourself in those challenging situations? By having your back, that is, by bringing radical honesty into the conversation. 

Stage three: intercultural knowledge

Finally, the third stage in building confidence comes from intercultural knowledge. This phase is twofold. 

On the one hand, you are going to look within again, but with the social, and cultural lens. How do your values, views of the world, and traditions impact your words and how you interpret other persons’ words? 

On the other hand, you have to allow space for empathy and unknowing. Why? Empathy to put yourself in the other person’s shoes and try to understand where this person is reacting the way they do in this situation. Now, bring the spotlight on them, what do you know about their culture and how that culture may impact their words and the way they interpret yours?

CASE STUDY

For example, let’s say that you are a native English speaker speaking in Spanish to a group of native Spanish speakers in a country whose official language is English. You don’t know each other yet. Maybe you strike up a conversation with one of these native Spanish speakers in Spanish, and they respond to you in English. Or they look surprised and say “Oh, you speak Spanish?”.

You interpret that as that your Spanish isn’t very good, or that they don’t want to speak in Spanish with you keeping an outsider. Maybe you think that their surprise masks a negative view of native English speakers and, therefore of you.

The result of your interpretations is that you feel unwelcomed and shut down a little; maybe you continue to speak in English, knowing that has created a distance between you two.

How can empathy shift things?

Maybe if you put yourself in the other person’s shoes and question why this person may have responded in the way they did? 

Let’s look at the facts: They are native Spanish speakers in an English speaking country. 

Now, time to question what may be going on for them:

Maybe they have been told to not speak in Spanish, that their Spanish is not welcome in the country. Perhaps they feel resentment, frustration, or deep sadness at losing their Spanish since they came into the English speaking country many years ago and were only allowed to speak in English.

So, how would you feel in those circumstances? What would you like that the other person did? This is empathy.

Now, what do I mean by allowing space for unknowing? Well, maybe you can’t figure out the reason behind their response. Perhaps you don’t know much about their culture, or nothing at all. Allowing space for not knowing begets questioning. And questioning cannot be judgmental. 

Maybe this space of not knowing why this person responded in that way, means that you don’t make any interpretations or, at least, not negative ones, or don’t take it personally. Maybe you ask more questions: “why did you switch to English?“, “do you prefer to speak in English or Spanish?“,  or “why are you surprised that I speak Spanish?” Keeps asking questions in a non-threatening way! Know more about the other person.