Do you find yourself struggling to feel confident after the loss of your spouse or partner? I did! Decisions which once could have been easily made now loom before you like giant mountains. What if I told you that you could create a set of tools to help you build and evaluate your confidence levels? Borrowing a tiny bit from some statistics, I’ve come up with a five step process to help you build your confidence and make tough decisions.

What Happened To the Old Me? 

Everyone’s confidence takes a hard hit in their post-loss life, perhaps because the grief process feels much like being kidnapped, blindfolded, and dropped off in a dense jungle. Grief is disorienting. Your compass, the person who perhaps grounded you and acted as a sounding board, is gone.

Let Me Introduce You To Statistics!

I was recently traveling with a friend and he told me, “You don’t have a decision-making problem, you have a confidence problem! Your confidence interval is too low.” 

A confidence interval is a statistical term with a lot of jargon that isn’t relevant to us, except this gold nugget: it asks a person to determine how confident they are of an outcome, and to assign it a percentage or number. The goal is to be 51% (or more) confident an outcome will occur. If you’re lower than 51%, then you ask yourself what data points you can adjust to get to a higher confidence interval. 

This means…. you can create a set of rules to build your confidence! I played with this concept a lot, and came up with an exercise in five steps to help you build your confidence:

1. Assess your confidence level 
2. Identify your data point (the things you can tweak)
3. Adjust your action points
4. Reevaluate your confidence level
5. Rinse and Repeat

Step 0: Decide What It Is You Want

You begin this process with a desired outcome; a goal.  Perhaps you are considering a long term relationship, want to teach a child how to drive a car, or you want to go back to school. Anything you want to do comes with a level of confidence.

Step 1: Assess Your Confidence Level

Once you have your goal, then ask yourself on a scale of 1-100, how confident are you that this goal or outcome will happen? How confident are you that you will hit your goal or desired outcome? If you give yourself 0-50, you will benefit from this process. If your number is 51 or higher, you are technically ok, except that the close to 100 you get, the higher your confidence. So this process will still benefit you unless you are already in the 90’s. 

Step 2: Identify Your Data Points (things you can tweak)

Think of this step as constructing a flow chart. You can do this mentally or on an actual piece of paper. Each piece of data is s a point on your chart. Ask yourself, “What are the things that I have that either are helping you for hurting you? What needs to happen for you to achieve your goal or desired outcome?”  

Step 3:  Adjust Your Data Points

The list of things that were helping or hurting you in your quest to achieve your goal are now at the mercy of your imagination! These are the things your begin tweaking and adjusting. Begin the process of running different scenarios in your head, ONE AT A TIME. 

Step 4:  Revaluate Your Confidence Level

Adjust one action and see if it changes the outcome. Then, and this is important, reevaluate your confidence level! You want to do this each time to see a couple of things: are you making progress and did it get you to a confidence level that is acceptable? 

Step 5:  Rinse and Repeat

If the one adjustment did not get you to an acceptable level of confidence that you could achieve your desired outcome, then adjust another data point and reassess your confidence level. Keep running the scenarios and changing your actions until you either get the desired outcome you want or realize you can’t get to an acceptable level of confidence for you.  In that case, you get to decide, “Do I do it anyways?” “Do I need to abort the mission?” 

Your Confidence, Your Choice

Building confidence is a journey, not an instant transformation. You have the ability to customize this process for you and your needs, and you can tweak the process as many times as you want. It involves trial and error.  Be patient with yourself and be adaptable. 

You may discover that small changes can make a huge difference. You will never eliminate all doubt and uncertainty, you can increase your levels to a place where you can take action, despite those doubts. If you step out and fail, that’s ok too because failure is a part of growth in all areas of life. You will learn valuable lessons.

Remember if you need help, I’m here. 

Julie