Mark’s Story

Mark came to me having been told by his Manager that he needed to go on a Presentation Skills course. He knew he was struggling with nerves before making presentations at work, but wasn’t sure that his skills were the issue. Here’s his Confidence Map.

To fill this out, Mark thought about as many aspects of his issue as he could, he scored each aspect and then wrote it in the appropriate section on the map. When we talked in our coaching session, he added more aspects, those are the ones in italics on the map above. So now Mark has a visual of all the aspects of his confidence issue and we can now start looking at where his Confidence Journey starts

If we look at Mark’s map, we can see that all the items in the inner circle, are about his technical knowledge and skills—and everything outside it is about his communication skills. When I noticed that, I asked him to think about it and see if there was anything else he wanted to add, which is when he added the items in italics. As you can see, once we have the items in italics, the underlying issue is very different to the one he started with. Creating his own Confidence Map helped him diagnose the real issue affecting him. He had thought his issue was ‘presentation skills’ when in fact, he was unconfident about any situation where he didn’t feel in total control of the conversation. How interesting! It was a good thing we did the map otherwise Mark could have invested a lot of time and effort in fixing something that wasn’t the real (underlying) issue.

We then worked on the underlying issue by running the IDEAS process, coming up with 20 option.  One of the main options focused on gaining knowledge and skills in handling unexpected questions, so he signed up for a media training course where that was the focus.  He was happy to report that this gave him the insights and tools he needed to be confident going into presentations, which was great news.