Awareness--Preparedness--Confidence

I've talked a lot about confidence. There is a balance between a lack of confidence and an abundance of confidence that is the point at which a person feels capable of handling a crisis, a conflict, or a situation. A lack of confidence undermines an individual's ability to address the crisis, conflict, or situation in a manner that will be beneficial or productive. Indeed, a lack of confidence almost ensures failure and reinforces the lack of confidence; you can bet the person isn't going to try that again soon. An abundance of confidence can be just as detrimental to successful resolution, for the person who has too much confidence will probably have already decided how the crisis is to be resolved, will dismiss the ideas and concerns of other people involved in the crisis because he already knows what needs to be done, and will expedite the resolution regardless.

A person has to have confidence that he can resolve the conflict, find a solution to the problem or crisis, while at the same time the person has to recognize and honor the concerns of other people involved in the conflict or crisis. Such confidence does not come naturally. Confidence has to be developed or nurtured. Through an understanding of the need to develop or nurture confidence, the individual understands that there is a process that moves him closer to true confidence. This process moves from awareness through preparedness to end in confidence.

Awareness is the key to all understanding. All learning, all understanding begins with awareness. We become aware that we are hungry, that we have a need to eat, and we move to satisfy that hunger. Consequently, the satisfying of the hunger preserves our being. When we become more aware of the relationship between satisfying our hunger and the preservation of our being, we realize that it is not simply eating that is important but what we eat. In other words, eating a large bag of chocolate covered peanuts and raisins may satisfy our hunger, but we would not be receiving the right nutrients for a healthy body; therefore, we may become overweight and lethargic. Our health might suffer in spite of our having plenty of food to eat. Becoming increasingly aware moves us to a better understanding of life, of our relationship with all that fills our world, and allows us to make better choices.

Once we have increased our awareness, we move to prepare ourselves better to meet the circumstances and situations of which we have become more aware. In the case of conflict and crisis, becoming more aware of the characteristics of conflict and crisis helps us to prepare to meet those qualities. For instance, when we understand that people become emotional when engaged in a crisis or conflict, we become aware that we need to allow people to express these emotions, we need to listen to what they are saying, and once we have identified their genuine concerns, we need to restate those concerns to them so that they will realize that we have heard their concerns and listened to them. This is a first step in conflict resolution and seems simple. However, if we are not aware that emotion is a natural part of conflict, then we may not take the time to allow people to express their emotion, we might not actually listen to them, and we tend to force our solution without taking into consideration the concerns of others. It all begins with awareness.

Once the individual has become more aware and moved to prepare himself to better meet the circumstances of the conflict or crisis, he becomes appropriately confident in his abilities. The confidence will not abandon him. He can face any conflict, no matter how angry another person might be, and rely on what he knows to move toward resolution.

It all begins with awareness that moves the individual to prepare, which gives rise to true confidence.

The Crisis of Confidence

Some years ago I sat in the cafeteria of the school I was teaching in to listen to a person present information about brain research relative to teaching. I consciously remember very little about the presentation; the concept of brain research relative to teaching was new and foreign to me. I am still barely knowledgeable about brain research as it relates to the educative process. However, I came away with one important idea that day: the crisis of competence.

As I already stated, I do not suggest that I know much about the brain, but I recall that the crisis of competence created a reaction within the amygdala, a portion of the brain responsible for the creation and storage of emotional memories. The most important emotional memories may well be those associated with fear, resulting in fear behavior. It is our memories of the things we fear that promote our survival. Certainly, when we are young and mistakenly touch a pan that has been used for cooking and receive a burn, we remember that a pan that has been on the stove may be hot and that we should use caution. But the reality is that we now fear the hot pan and that emotional memory is stored and retrieved when needed to keep us from burning ourselves over and over again. It is a survival skill.

At this point it is important to address then what the individual perceives as necessary to his or her survival, for it is not only that which threatens our physical health that may be perceived as a threat to our survival, but our emotional health is also threatened from time to time and is also important to our survival. Another way of saying this is that we have to feel good about who we are. We have to have a good sense of self worth. Those who lack a strong sense of self worth become targets for ridicule and perhaps more, making their survival tenuous on a daily basis.

Accepting that the individual needs a strong sense of self worth to survive and that the amygdala stores memories of the things that create fear--cause to be concerned about one's survival, it is reasonable to establish that an individual's self-worth may be threatened from time to time, causing the amygdala to send an alert through the brain, calling for the individual to move into survival mode. Moving into survival mode generally means that the individual resorts back to the skills that are most comfortable and most protective. During a physical attack, the body bends more toward a fetal position, protecting vital organs, and the individual may look for ways to strike out in defense. During an emotional attack, the individual again bends inward and looks to strike out. The bending inward is seeking that which is most comforting and protective, providing the stance to launch the counter-attack. These emotional attacks create in the individual the crisis of competence: sensing that the self is under attack, the individual's confidence is challenged, perhaps weakened. Therefore, the individual seeks that which is more familiar, that in which he or she has greater confidence, so that he or she may return to security, to survival.

When the teacher encounters a crisis of confidence in the classroom, he or she resorts back to the most comfortable methods of teaching or of classroom management, which tend to be those methods that were used when the teachers were students, teaching as they had been taught. And this is where teaching often falters. What the skilled educator must do is create a high degree of confidence in his teaching methods so that even when experiencing a crisis of confidence, he or she can continue to pursue the method chosen rather than resort to survival mode.

More on confidence and the crisis of confidence to come later.