LESSON FOUR

The Virtuous Circle of Competence and Confidence

Gill Rider

Director General, Leadership and People Strategy, Cabinet Office UK

ONE OF THE THINGS that I learned very early on in my career was the relationship between confidence and competence. If you’re competent in something, you feel and exude confidence. And that in itself feeds the competence, and competence feeds the confidence—it’s a wonderful, virtuous circle.

I’ve often found, when I’m helping coach or counsel people, that it’s one of the most obvious and yet hardest things to see yourself. At one point in my career, I had been working on a very big client sales initiative for a long time. We came right up to the wire and then we lost it. What happened to me was my confidence ...

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