Bridging Your Abilities
October 30th, 2008 by AndyFor years I have had a very strange confidence issue. At work I was completely confident, resourceful, and able to face nearly any situation head on. I felt almost like I was James Bond. As soon as I walked out the office door though, I felt more like Napoleon Dynamite. In my non-professional world I lacked most of the knowledge and communication skills that I had in my professional life.
Before I really got to work on myself, I had no awareness of this. To me things were just the way they were, and I didn’t see any relation. Once I started learning about myself I discovered that I had two different sets of skills. At work I had a ton of relevant knowledge, skill, and resources to pull from. At home I had a little bit of skill and few resources. Seeing this, I decided to figure out if I could bridge some of my skills from my professional life into my personal life.
One problem I had in my personal life was my speaking abilities. When I spoke, I mumbled rather than projecting. In the office, however, I was almost to loud and outspoken. In reality I could do this in my personal life, I just had never realized it because I was in the habit of being quiet. A couple days later, in the middle of a conversation with some friends, this thought crossed my mind once again. I realized I was mumbling, and started projecting. Not only were my friends surprised, but after having this happen a few times, I started to notice that I was projecting my voice all of the time. And so I managed to bridge my speaking capabilities from my professional life to my personal life.
The next thing I decided to attempt to tackle was my confidence. This one hasn’t been so easy because there are many factors that contribute to confidence. In reality many factors have contributed to my improved confidence, I did bridge some of my confidence building skills from my professional life. I discovered that when I’m not confident about something at work, I learn more about it. In my personal life when I didn’t know something, I’d just be quiet. Once again once I realized I already had the tools to use to build my confidence, it was just the matter of getting into the habit of using those tools in my personal life. Before I would just sit around and listen to other people talk about sports and movies or whatever. I was interested, but never bothered to commit any of it to memory because I previously saw no use for it. Now though I use my learning skills to commit some of this to memory and I now have more to talk about, which in turn gives me a bit of a confidence boost.
Now you may or many not have the same problems I had. The examples I have laid out are only examples of how I applied this technique to myself in my unique circumstances. You may find that you have no skills that need to be bridged between different parts of your life, or that those that should be bridged are different than mine. My whole point is that it is worth analyzing your talents in different situations, and attempting to find ways to apply them to different parts of your life.
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