Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert Kelsey is author of Capstone's bestselling What's Stopping You? exploring why smart people failed to reach their potential. He has gone on to sell over 64,000 copies across three What's Stopping You? titles.
Robert Kelsey is CEO of Moorgate Communications, a financial PR agency, and was previously CEO of Metrocube, a start-up incubator located in London's fashionable "City-fringes". He trained as a financial journalist before becoming an investment banker and a now an entrepreneur, running his successful PR agency.
Yet Kelsey remains and perennial outsider. From a rebellious childhood to an adulthood of pursuing a series of unsuitable careers, he has had a lifetime of failing to settle into any group activities, yet lacking the confidence, guile or know-how to profitably "rebel". Kelsey has developed an enormous insight into both the root causes of alienation and the all-encompassing negative consequences.

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Do you lack confidence or self belief?

Join the club. Millions of otherwise smart people lack the confidence to achieve their full potential – at work, in their careers and even in their personal pursuits. Yet confidence isn’t something that can be conjured from motivational exercises or via quick-fix techniques.

Confidence is something you must build for yourself. It takes planning and action, deciding where you want to gain confidence and how it must be won. It will require courage, optimism and resilience.

In this follow-up to his international bestseller What’s Stopping You? Robert Kelsey offers a deep understanding of confidence, suing extensive research analysis, as well his own experiences, to help you to:

• Identify the truth about confidence – its root causes, as well as the damaging self beliefs that generate poor confidence
• Accept who you are, while planning your path towards confidence through achievement
• Understanding the myths around confidence, such as the need to be outgoing or to have talent
• Overcome the most common barrier to strong confidence: other people
• Deal with other barriers to confidence such as shyness, anxiety, stress, prefudice and even hubris

Aus dem Klappentext

Do you lack confidence or self belief?

Join the club. Millions of otherwise smart people lack the confidence to achieve their full potential – at work, in their careers and even in their personal pursuits. Yet confidence isn’t something that can be conjured from motivational exercises or via quick-fix techniques.

Confidence is something you must build for yourself. It takes planning and action, deciding where you want to gain confidence and how it must be won. It will require courage, optimism and resilience.

In this follow-up to his international bestseller What’s Stopping You? Robert Kelsey offers a deep understanding of confidence, suing extensive research analysis, as well his own experiences, to help you to:

• Identify the truth about confidence – its root causes, as well as the damaging self beliefs that generate poor confidence
• Accept who you are, while planning your path towards confidence through achievement
• Understanding the myths around confidence, such as the need to be outgoing or to have talent
• Overcome the most common barrier to strong confidence: other people
• Deal with other barriers to confidence such as shyness, anxiety, stress, prefudice and even hubris

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What's Stopping You Being More Confident

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

No one gives you confidence. It's not a gift – perhaps bestowed by a guru or mentor, or even a higher power. And it's not innate. It's something you develop, almost from the day you're born. That said, significant others can play a major role in determining whether you develop strong confidence, or whether – like me – you become under-con dent. Impatient parents, critical siblings, inept teachers: all can turn the impressionable and mouldable young child into someone lacking the basic tools for confidence (see Part Two). Yet this doesn't condemn us. It just means we have to develop the required attributes for confidence as adults. Of course, this is a deliberate endeavour and therefore a much harder pursuit. Nonetheless, confidence can be learnt.

Of the significant others I list, all three have a role in my story. Outwardly, mine was a normal upbringing in a typical 1960s-built exurban cul-de-sac on the edge of a 'village' (in fact a series of housing estates) in a dull Essex commuter town. My parents were typical of the area: two cars, two incomes, two children – in fact, doing rather nicely a generation on from their bombed-out East End heritage. Yet my family was divided. Dad played favourites, making my sister the apple of his eye: a position of power that con rmed my status as the 'annoying little brother'.

As we shall see, such a status provides the under-con dent with their 'scripts' for life. Certainly, my script was written early on, with my mother's attempts at protecting me from both my father's and sister's disdain exaggerating the family divisions. These became a chasm when the family split, with my father and sister going to live in a different cul-de-sac in a different patchwork of housing estates.

Yet, within a year they were back. And the script (which had been temporarily converted into the 'uncontrollable tearaway') resumed, though with my crimes broadening to include relationships beyond the house. My sister's friends, local hardnuts keen to win her favours, even my peers at school, all took their cues from my family dynamic – furthering my self-doubt. Indeed, by my teens my poor confidence was deeply rooted: so deep that I failed to develop an awareness of social norms. In fact, I constantly transgressed norms – often generating poor reactions without even realizing why. I was personally inept and verbally clumsy, with each faux pas compounding my poor confidence.

Supports for poor confidence

Geography didn't help. Our cul-de-sac was away from the others in the village – a distance from the housing estates full of normal children happily playing together. I was constantly on the edge of the gang. I felt marginalized – an outsider. And this led to further problematic behaviour as I tried to ingratiate myself (including shop-lifting and minor vandalism). Soon the local mothers despised me, which meant I became defensive – rude even – and further isolated.

Yet my father remained the key figure, and the one sending the clearest signals of rejection. Doting on the eldest – especially a daughter – is perhaps an inevitable and therefore forgivable trait for a man with no siblings of his own and with a strained upbringing involving a five-year abandonment when evacuated. This may have made him resentful towards my childhood comforts, or he may have had an anachronistic view of discipline and boys (even for the 1970s). Whatever the cause, when contrasted with my sister's treatment, I look back and observe an emotional neglect that left me bewildered, paranoid and, of course, deeply lacking in confidence.

As for the teachers – they should have known better. This was not a deprived area, although my own difficulties revolved around the fact I favoured more creative pursuits and disliked formal learning, which the low-grade teachers couldn't accommodate – especially when the lessons seemed so geared towards the well-behaved girls.

In fact, as a late-July baby I was potentially two years educationally adrift from the brightest girls in the class. Constantly behind, I again developed behavioural issues that meant I became disliked by the teachers (who were also local and therefore in tune with the views of the village) – to the point where I was falsely blamed for more serious incidents of vandalism, with the inevitable results for my embattled self-esteem.

A life sentence

While a distressing story for a child, however, it hardly stacks up as a justification for a lifetime disabled by poor confidence. It even reads as a pathetic self-justification for low attainment: a grown man unable to escape the scripts of his childhood – condemned to remain a small boy that's forever trapped in a place where he's misunderstood, disliked and emotionally neglected. Where's the abuse, the violence, the war or poverty?

But normality is the narrative for most lives in Britain and other developed countries. And poor confidence is as much bred among the carpet and curtains of suburbia as the dirt and deprivation of poverty. We should all be happy and well-adjusted, shouldn't we? So if we're not – well – the fault must be ours, which only compounds the divide between the haves and have-nots when it comes to confidence: adding guilt, confusion and isolation to our fear and timidity.

While the con dent excel, the under-con dent flounder in a sea of insecurities – blamed for our misfortunes often by the very people who robbed us of our confidence. While we struggle to be understood, they fall back on platitudes such as 'get over it' or 'buck up' or 'you don't know how lucky you are': all of which add layers of self-loathing to our confirmed and deepening lack of confidence. While one group have their confidence constantly reaffirmed, the other have to suffer silently – with their doubts and uncertainty hidden or masked through avoidance tactics that can encompass a range of marginal behaviours.

We can become the swot or the giver – existing only to please others. Or we can be the rebel pretending not to care. Yet these are the better responses. Anger, depression, violence or deviant behaviour – all can mask deeply-held insecurities when it comes to confidence. Certainly, the under-con dent suffer more anxiety and stress than their con dent peers, and endure higher incidents of mental illness. They're also more likely to divorce (or never marry), be made redundant, drop out of education, become destitute, develop dependencies on drugs and alcohol, become overweight and therefore more prone to heart disease, smoke (making them more prone to cancer), have major accidents, commit suicide or be convicted of a crime. Their life is nastier – brutish even – and their life-expectancy shorter. Meanwhile, they have to live with the nagging guilt that, somehow, this is their fault and, therefore, no more than they deserve.

Being under-con dent can feel like a life (and sometimes a death) sentence – and one unlikely to find release via the strident and dismissive maxims of the con dent.

Replaying the scripts of childhood

Yet there is hope. As stated, there's nothing innate about confidence. We can change, although we first need to understand our condition. As shown by my own case, it's most likely the nuances of those early relationships that drive the gulf between those...