SDS 246: Boost Your Self-Confidence

Welcome back to the SuperDataScience Podcast, ladies and gentlemen, super excited to have you back here on the show. And today we’ve got another FiveMinuteFriday episode and we’re talking about self-confidence.

So lately I’ve been listening to quite a few interesting podcasts on self-development and one of them is called Therapist Uncensored. It’s quite an exciting podcast. It’s two ladies who are professionals in the space of psychology. They get together and discuss different issues from attachment styles to self-confidence to lots and lots of various topics that affect our personalities. And in this specific one episode I was, they were talking about self-confidence and ways you can boost it. And I found that very relevant. And I think that confidence is actually very important in the profession of data science. See, as data scientists and analysts, what we tend to do is we tend to really overthink things and get in our heads a lot.

And we have very rich internal worlds and that’s, that’s totally normal. That’s totally a great way of how we use our intuition and how we use our creativity to come up with solutions to challenging business problems and research projects and other challenges that might come across the way. However, in all of that, what happens is that we might lose some of our confidence or we might neglect the need to be confident. And how that can negatively affect our profession is that when you’re presenting your findings, you might not be confident enough or you might not come across as persuasive enough or people might not really believe in your findings, in your insights simply because of the way you present them, not the insights themselves, but the way you communicate them. And on the flip side as well, collecting data, interrogating different people in the business who are working with this data to get more information about it. 

So all of those aspects at the beginning of a project also require confidence and even agreeing to deadlines and following through deadlines, allowing scope creep. There’s a lot of areas where communication is absolutely essential in the data science profession. And therefore confidence is an important component of that. And so in this specific episode, what are we going to do is we’re going to talk about a few tips. In fact, there’s going to be five actionable tips that you can take to increase your self-confidence because not only will that benefit you in your life, in your personal life in your, interpersonal connections with other people, but you can actually really boost you in your profession. Because if you know what you’re talking about, if you really believe in your insights and they’re true and you’ve done all your research, you’ve done your work confidence and self-confidence, that’s another hurdle that you still have to get over. Or another advantage, let’s put it this way, another advantages you can have that can help you communicate with other people in your workplace.

So here we go. The five tips that you can do to boost your self-confidence and quite a few actually of these come from the Therapist Uncensored podcast. So make sure to check it out or check out the link that we’ll put in the show notes. All right.

So tip number one is to sit up straight and pull your shoulders back. If you’re not sitting, if you’re standing, same thing. Be straight, be as tall as you possibly can. Pull your shoulders back. Because what happens when, because like your stage, your general state, whether you’re confident or not confident directly translates into your physiology. So if you’re not confident, what you’ll find is you tend to slouch, your shoulders go forward and you like you kind of close up, right?

That’s, there’s this psychological defensive way for you to protect yourself. Whereas if you are confident, if you’re sure of the surroundings, of your intentions of everything that’s going on, then you don’t need to do that. And in fact, you will automatically open up, you’ll be tall, your shoulders would go back. And so here we are using reverse method where we’re affecting, we’re taking our physiology, we’re changing our physiology in order to affect our psychology. And there’s been lots of studies. There’s lots of Ted talks about this that it actually does work. There’s a feedback loop that works not only from psychology to physiology but also the other way around. So make sure to sit up straight, shoulders back. That’s really like 30% of the job done. You’re already going to start feeling confident and start talking confidently. These are behaving concretely. So whenever you catch yourself slouching or shoulders forward, make sure to reverse that situation. That’s number one.

Number two, eye contact. So what you’ll notice is when you sit up straight, or you stand up straight, stand up tall, you pull your shoulders back, what naturally happens is your head goes up as well, so your head lifts and your gaze lifts. So don’t let your eyes fall down to the feet. Try to maintain eye contact. Make sure you maintain eye contact when you’re talking to people. And of course, don’t let it be creepy, but at the same time don’t come off as shy. Shy people generally look down when they’re talking or look away. Try to maintain that eye contact that will significantly boost your confidence and you will feel more self-confident. The eye contact number twp. Try that out. Throughout the day, try to be the first one to initiate eye contact with people and try not to look away for as long as possible. But again, don’t let it be creepy. That’s, that’s a different story. But don’t worry about that for now. This is like eye contact is important, important step.

Number three, have an internal smile. So this is something that I’m personally working on. That’s, always think about things and approach conversations or projects or work, whatever you’re doing in your day, even if you’re making a cup of tea, try to smile internally. And this can be your anchor for if you like for the next week or so. Every time you’re making yourself a tea or coffee or pouring self some water, let’s list them in a tea or coffee. Whenever you’re making yourself a tea or coffee in the office or at home, remember this podcast and try to smile internally.

It can be even a little smile on your face. That’s totally okay as well. Again, as long as it’s not like one of those creepy smiles. But even if it’s an internal smile somewhere like in your chest, in your heart and your mind just smile and you will feel this positivity, you will feel that everything’s okay and that will boost your self-confidence. If you’ve met my friend and mentor Vitaly Dolgov, he’s been on a couple of podcast episodes. You will, you would have felt that, he’s, he actually smiles. So if you want to check out an episode just look at the most recent episode of him, 147 and there was a special episode at the very start of the podcast. It was after episode 12. If you’ll listen to this, you’ll probably even hear the smile in his voice.

So he always smiles and he’s one of the most successful consultants in the world. He works with massive projects, specifically like gold mines, not gold mines, just mines, airports, manufacturing plans and so on. And indeed, like at that level, he would have so much stress you’d think, but he just, I think he just maintains his internal smile and that helps him get through absolutely anything in his life. Very, very powerful tool. And once again, try to use that anchor when you’re making a tea or a coffee for yourself. Try remember this podcast and have that internal smile. Make it happen and see how you feel.

Number four, slow down. Talk slower, walk slower, act slower, just maybe do everything at 80% of your normal speed. And this tip actually really applies to me really well because I do everything very fast. I walk fast, I talk fast, especially when I’m presenting something and I get, I get into the state of flow.

I can just go like super-fast through a presentation and that’s not a good habit. So you need to slow down. That shows other people that you’re in control, you’re not panting. Also reduces the amount of mistakes that you make. And amount of times you need to correct yourself or even the pauses when you pause to think they are less obvious, less evident when you are, when you’ve slowed down. So slow down, don’t talk as fast and silence is not a bad thing. Silence actually allows people to think through, especially when you’re presenting take some time to drink some water or take some time to make a pause up to something important that you said so people can digest it and think it through. So you can actually probably hear me slowing down in this podcast cause I’ve noticed that started off quite quickly.

And tip number five is a really powerful tip, accept that you are not perfect. Accept your imperfection and accept that you will inevitably in life make choices and decisions that are wrong. I’m telling you right now that there’s no way that you’re going to go through life or through your profession and never make a single wrong choice or decision no matter how hard you think things through, there’s always going to be something out of your control. Something that you haven’t or couldn’t have possibly considered, something I was going to turn absolutely around 180 degrees and backfire. That is totally normal. So if you’re constantly judging yourself for making incorrect decisions, I could be sitting here judging myself for debating whether this is the correct podcast to record for this week. Should I have been recording a different topic? Like I have a couple of topics that I wanted to talk about it. Maybe I should have talked about something else.

Is the timing right for this part? Did I pick the right five tips? Maybe there are better tips. There’s a better five tips or maybe it should have been three tips or maybe I made too many mistakes all along this podcast and I got to rerecord it and things like that. So I could be sitting here judging myself. You could be judging yourself about certain projects, certain things you’ve done in your career. The point is if you allow yourself to judge yourself for mistakes and especially you are, you get into the habit of redoing things to many times and what will happen is next time you’re doing something, you will know in advance that once it’s done, you’re going to re-evaluate yourself. You’re going to judge yourself, you’re going to probably redo it. You’re going to criticize yourself and because of that you’re going to be less confident doing it in the first place.

So I hope that makes sense. So the judging and criticizing off to the fact is actually training you for the future. That next time you do something you already know that you will criticize yourself after it’s finished. So you become less confident doing it. So if you want to boost your self-confidence, you’ve got to stop that. Completely stop that very bad habit that is going to cause you a detriment. You might in the short run, in the short term, you might make some things are perfect and you know, floating quotation marks, you might make a few things better or make them, like redo them. So that they look better, or the decision is changed. You might gain, we have some short term gain, but in the long run you’re going to completely destroy your self-confidence because you’re not going to trust yourself anymore.

You’re always going to know that you’re going to criticize yourself afterwards. So why not cut that habit completely stop it and just trust your decisions and whether it’s in your personal life, professional life, whatever other life, whatever you’re doing, just trust your decisions. Don’t over think them. Put enough sufficient amount of thinking into your decisions. Maybe follow your heart sometimes when it’s appropriate. And then just trust your decisions. Don’t criticize yourself and that way you will train yourself that no matter what happens, you accept that you’re not perfect, that sometimes you’ll make mistakes and you just move on with it. Yes. You know, and you don’t criticize and judge yourself and run towards changing whatever decision, whatever action you took. You don’t run towards changing. Just accept. All right, it’s done. It’s done. Move on.

Learn from my mistakes. That’s cool. That way you get the long-term benefit of being more self-confident. Yes, you might make a bit more mistakes because you’re not redoing as much work, but you get the long-term benefit of being self-confident and and just confident and that is a massive, massive advantage that will help you not only in communication with other people also help you significantly reduce your stress levels.

Personally, this is something I’m working on, I’ve worked through my incessant thinking and analyzing things. I’ve always tried to make things perfect. I have to actually snap out of it like many times throughout the day. I have to catch myself and say, hey, no, okay. I’ve made the decision. I was, when I made the decision, I was a smart person. I was not under the influence of any kind of alcohol or anything like that and I trust myself that that decision was made by me. Why would I criticize and try to change things. Still, it’s very hard. I can tell you right now, it takes a lot of work. I’m still working through it, but something to be conscious of. If you want to trust yourself, boost your self-confidence, you gotta accept that you’re never going to be perfect. You’re just never going to be perfect and that’s it. That’s Tony Robbins says, perfect is the lowest standard a human being can have for themselves.

So there we go. Five tips. Let’s recap. Number one, sit up straight with your shoulders back or stand up straight, with shoulders back. Number two maintain eye contact. Number three internal smile. Have an internal smile. And remember this anchor when you’re making a cup of tea or coffee in the next couple of two, two or three weeks, that’ll help you get into this habit, to maintain internal smile, no matter what you’re doing. Number four, slow down. Talk slower, walk slower, act slower, communicate slower. And number five, accept that you are not perfect. Stop judging and criticizing yourself for the decisions and choices that you make. And that will train you to trust yourself more and will boost your self-confidence. 

So there we go, guys and girls. I hope you enjoyed today’s podcast and got a few takeaways and I wish you to be confident in your careers, in your personal and professional life. On that note, I’ll see you back here next time. Until then, happy analyzing.