How To Be Confident
What sometimes distinguishes fulfilled from unfulfilled lives is an ingredient that’s not part of the educational curriculum, and which can sound vague or somewhat silly: confidence.
We spend vast amounts of time acquiring technical skills in narrow professional fields, but so little time practising the one virtue that will make those skills effective in the world. We overlook the primordial need to acquire a more wide-ranging variety of confidence which can serve us across a range of tasks in our professional and personal lives.
Often, we lack confidence because we implicitly regard its possession as a matter of slightly freakish good luck. We believe we are stuck with the confidence levels we were born with, but as this class shows, the opposite is true. Confidence is not a gift from the gods, but a skill that can be learned. It is a skill founded on a set of ideas we have about the world and our natural place within it.
How to Be Confident teaches us:
- How to overcome the impostor syndrome
- How to master shyness about advancing our plans
- How to outgrow the legacy of childhood timidity
- How to remain confident that we can change things through our own agency
We leave the class equipped with a range of confidence-inducing ideas to allow us to escape the shackles of excessive hesitancy and compliance.
TIMETABLE
'Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.'
– E.E. Cummings
Facilitator
Daniel Teitelbaum is an educator and freelance producer. Previously he was Head of Content at The School of Life in Australia and prior to that made up part of the strategy team at Small Giants. Daniel spent his younger days in youth leadership and informal education, running weekly programs and seasonal camps for primary and high school children for youth-led organisations, where he learned first hand how important play is for healthy emotional and intellectual development.