How Storytelling can boost your self-confidence
Last Saturday in Barcelona, we ran one of our editions of Storytelling workshop for women entrepreneurs.
Ten women from different backgrounds, different ages, different nationalities gathered during this sunny day to clarify their message and the way to communicate it to the rest of the world.
In the process, they traveled through their life timeline, identifying their turning points, their superpowers and their deepest fears.
And for me, this was actually my own epiphany moment.
Out of 10 random and diverse participants, smart women with a solid background and a deep will to impact the world positively, almost ALL of them were sharing the same barrier: their own insecurity.
They were ALL admiting that their own lack of self-confidence, their inner judge or their recurrent doubts were actually constantly holding them back.
This was my own ahah moment. It was not an isolated phenomenon, something that happened to some extremely introspective persons who were doomed to be lost in their doubts forever.
No, it was actually a general and silent epidemic.
Having experienced these same doubts myself, I was for the first time contemplating them from the outside and realizing how incredible it was that these smart and powerful women were actually the first ones NOT TO BELIEVE IN THEMSELVES.
And I just imagined for an instant what it would mean if this contained and self-restricted potential was actually released to the world…
In this great article on the Confidence gap, Katty Kay and Claire Shipman actually state it simply:
“The natural result of low confidence is inaction. When women hesitate because they aren’t sure, they hold themselves back.”
So we watched the TED talk from Amy Cuddy on how our own gestures and body positions could actually change who we are, affecting little by little the plasticity of our brains until actually becoming what we might have needed to fake in the first place.
As Linda Babcock explains in Women don’t ask, the barriers holding women back and the social forces constraining them actually result in dramatic difference between men and women in their propensity to negotiate for what they want, would it be a promotion, a salary raise or a shift in their schedule.
We need to change the narrative. And this means changing the storytelling.
So we spent the day nailing down their actual unique message, linking it with stories and proven facts. We learnt how to occupy the stage in a confident way, express ourselves with an assertive and changing tone and how to finally come across in a clear and simple way.
And the result was extremely gratifying.
So, since our stories actually shape who we are, let’s change them. Let’s get rid of all the distracting buzz in our heads and actually unleash the power we all have to change the world! One step at a time.
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