360: Building Self-Confidence as a First-Generation Professional

360: Building Self-Confidence as a First-Generation Professional

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[00:00:00] You know you're first gen when you get positive feedback and your first thought is, oh, that's so sweet. Then your second thought is, oh, they're just being kind. They're being polite. And then your third thought is, this is clearly a test. I will now triple my workload to prove that I deserve that compliment.

Did that make you laugh? Tell me that made you laugh because me opening the podcast with a joke is a joke in and of itself being funny actually is something that terrifies me and makes me feel anything but confident. Back in my theater days, I remember I attempted to join a comedy troupe and I took improv classes, and being funny was not easy, but that's actually why I brought it up today because we're gonna be talking about confidence, the things that [00:01:00] boost our confidence, the things that don't help our confidence, and that little spiral that sometimes comes up after a compliment. That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you. That's your confidence when it's been running unlimited reinforcement for far too long.

So I'm gonna be unpacking that today, and actually the reason why I brought up this topic to begin with is because I was reviewing some feedback from my dozens of grad student clients that I've had over the last couple of years, and a clear pattern that has shown up is that a lot of folks say that their confidence grows through our work together, and confidence building continues to be a really big theme in my one-on-one and my group coaching spaces. In fact, I recently facilitated the first session of the second cohort of my group [00:02:00] coaching program, the grad empowerment coaching circle, and confidence building was the first topic that they chose to cover together.

So that choice is intentional, and the point of today is to let you know that confidence is not a fixed trait. It's not something that you're necessarily born with, instead, it's a skill that for many first gen professionals is something you might need a little bit more support with because you may have received limited to no support in developing it. So let's talk about it.

Welcome to the award-winning Grad School Femtoring podcast. The place for first gen BIPOCS to listen in on inclusive grad school stories and learn about personal development and productivity tips. This is Doctora Yvette [00:03:00] Martinez-Vu, a certified coach, consultant and author, and I will be serving as your femtor, providing you with insider knowledge to help you reach your personal and professional goals.

Welcome back everyone to another episode of the Grad School Femtoring podcast. This is your host, Doctora Yvette. Today we're talking about confidence building for first gen professionals, and specifically I'm gonna cover what is self-confidence, and then I'm gonna mention some other related terms.

What is self-efficacy? What is self-trust? I'm gonna talk about why confidence feels harder for first gen professionals. I'm gonna share some ways to strengthen your confidence over time, and I'll leave you with some [00:04:00] reflective prompts so that you can continue to work on your growth in this area. So let's start with the terms, and , the first one is self-confidence. When I think about self-confidence, I think about it referring to a sense of assurance in your abilities in any given context, so you feel good about yourself and your ability. Self-efficacy is similar. It's not the same, but it's similar in that it's your belief in your capacity to carry out a specific action to achieve a specific outcome. So self-efficacy, when we think about higher education and students, college and grad students, it requires you believing in being able to finish and earn that degree. And so that belief can carry you very far.

It's your belief in your ability to produce a specific outcome or to achieve a specific goal. [00:05:00] And then there's self-trust, and this is your ability to interpret internal signals, to make decisions that feel good, that feel aligned, and to make changes over time. So for self-trust, I think about your intuition and how in tune you are with it, and how much you trust yourself, your body's signals.

So these are all interrelated. I wanted to bring up self-efficacy and not just talk about self-confidence, because I remember when I was a McNair director, and I was working in that graduate school preparation program, I would attend director meetings, and there was one meeting where someone brought up some research articles in, I think it was like some sort of training meeting where they showed us that self-efficacy, strongly predicted persistence and success among McNair scholars who completed their degrees. [00:06:00] And so that has stayed with me. I no longer have access to those articles, but I distinctly remember that and it stayed with me so much so that it's a core part of the work that I do.

Promoting self-efficacy is huge for me. And then I also think it's important to learn. About yourself, about your needs, about what your body asks you. And that's why I wanted to bring in the self-trust piece of it.

So again, if you believe in your ability to carry something forward, if you feel assured about it, and if you trust yourself, that's gonna get you very, very far, and that's also going to boost your confidence for sure. Now again, going back to what I mentioned earlier, the point of all of this is to let you know that if you think that, oh, only certain people get to be confident and I don't get to be that way or that's not part of my personality, please don't view it as a personality trait.

[00:07:00] Please don't view it as something that someone is born with and start to see it as skill building, and that's what I'm going to be sharing about next, but before I do so I also wanna mention why does confidence feel harder to boost for yourself if you are first generation, especially first gen professionals?

A couple things that come to mind are: you might be someone who is navigating unclear or shifting expectations, so you're in a graduate program or you're in a work setting and you're not told clearly what to do or how to do it, or maybe you are told what your milestones are, what your goals are, but they keep changing, and so it's hard to feel grounded and to feel good about your ability to do something if you're not clear about what that something is to begin with. [00:08:00] Then comes limited access to informal guidance, so folks who are not first gen might have access to parents or community members or networks that provide them with guidance to know what to expect in certain spaces.

If you have limited guidance in that respect or in that space, then you're going to feel less comfortable and less confident than others around you. Some of us, because we are high achievers, because we are very ambitious, we finally arrive in places that are considered prestigious or noteworthy.

But with that comes higher stakes and because of the pressure that you might be feeling, that might leave you to feel like you have little room for growth or little room for making mistakes, or little room [00:09:00] for learning, little room for asking for help, and then of course, we can add all the isms. To this, we can add racism, sexism, ableism, classism, you name it, all the -isms.

And that can also harm your self-confidence, because how can you feel good about yourself if you don't see others who look and sound like you around you? Or if folks who are different than you will presume your incompetence or will just have negative assumptions about you just because of the way that you look or sound.

And just to add one more, you might also be dealing with added cognitive labor. So if you're neurodivergent or if you are someone who, maybe it's just your personality, is a little different than those around you. Maybe you're more introverted, you might find yourself [00:10:00] having to mask more, having to code switch more, having to overcompensate in spaces, and that is exhausting.

So all these things make it harder. For you to feel good about yourself and your confidence.

This is what brings me to the strategies. So acknowledging that maybe you are in an environment that makes it harder for you to build your confidence, that doesn't mean that you can't change that or that you cannot do something about it.

There are definitely some strategies that you can implement today to start to boost your confidence.

If you've been feeling stuck, scattered, or like that big project you have to get done this semester keeps getting pushed to the side. Then I wanna invite you to my next retreat. This March 20th and 21st, I'm hosting my next Compassionate Accountability [00:11:00] Retreat. It's a virtual small group space designed to help you make meaningful progress on a long-term project without any unnecessary guilt or shame.

You'll gain access to structured work time alongside other first gen grad students and professionals. Whether you're drafting a manuscript, working on a conference presentation, polishing application materials, or returning to a creative project, this retreat is about making time for the work that matters most, right now. As a podcast listener, you can take advantage of the early bird discount and receive 20% off of your registration. Just use the code early Bird 26 at checkout. This rate is available through February 21st, and the retreat is intentionally capped at 12 participants with several spots already filled.

You can learn more and register at gradschoolfemtor.com/retreats, or at the link in the show [00:12:00] notes.

There are definitely some strategies that you can implement today to start to boost your confidence.

The first one is to boost your confidence with evidence. Find the evidence. That's something that a lot of coaches say and perhaps even some therapists might say this, I'm not a therapist, but I know this comes up in conversations as a coach with my clients when someone says something negative about themselves, I will ask them: what evidence do you have to prove that that's true? Or what about the opposite? Turn that into a positive. Do you have evidence to prove that the opposite is true? So find the evidence. This is evidence of all the things that you've achieved, all the tasks that you have completed, all the difficult decisions you've made, all the challenging conversations you've navigated, basically any moment where you have persisted, where you [00:13:00] have continued to push through despite the odds.

And you've done some pretty incredible things because you have, if you're listening to this podcast, you have done some pretty amazing things. There's a reason why you're interested in advancing your education, so remind yourself of moments where you have persisted and remind yourself of how far you have come.

And don't just remind yourself, actually write them down. Have a place, keep it somewhere accessible. For some folks, it's a little jar with the little notes, little papelitos. For other people, it's a box. For some folks, it's a spreadsheet. For some folks, it's a document. You name it. But keep it somewhere where you can easily access it and update it.

So you can remind yourself just how incredible you are. The next strategy is to make sure you clarify and [00:14:00] make expectations explicit. Confidence grows when expectations are clear. Please remember that. So we don't want any vague information. You want concrete criteria, so it's okay to ask clarifying questions.

It's okay to request samples. This reminds me of a client of mine who was feeling really good about how she submitted a fellowship application, and it was not a surprise that she mentioned that I was feeling really good about it because I was able to talk to a friend who got that fellowship. She gave me some advice.

She provided me with sample materials, and so the advice helped to clarify the questions that she had. The samples helped to provide more information so that nothing was left unclear or vague. [00:15:00] And for you it might mean, what can you do to make something less unclear? Can you ask for more info? Can you ask for samples?

Can you create a checklist for yourself? All of this will reduce your cognitive load and that energy can go towards your work and feeling good about it. A third strategy is tied to systems design, so I want you to design systems that support your capacity. Why? Because I firmly believe that your capacity needs to be aligned with your outcome.

So whatever outcome you want to achieve, you wanna make sure that you have the capacity to be able to get it done. And how do you do that? You wanna set up a system for yourself, and this could look like [00:16:00] setting up predictable routines or coming up with to-do lists, task lists that are realistic for you in any given day, being more aware of your energy and where it's going, and simplifying things.

How can you simplify things for yourself? Is it through templates? Is it through checklists, et cetera? The more you can provide structure that supports you, and the more that you can be realistic about your capacity, the better off your confidence will be because you will know that you have the ability to get things done when you want to get them done.

And then the last strategy I'm gonna share is about strengthening your confidence through relationships. The relational work is so important. I can't not mention that, and confidence can develop in connection [00:17:00] with others. So this looks like peer communities, mentoring, relationships, affirming spaces, and yes, heavy emphasis on affirming spaces.

You know how far having a supportive advisor can take you knowing that you have someone who reassures you regularly can help to boost your confidence too. So making sure that you're in spaces and you surround yourself with people that believe you, that support you, that encourage you. These are all people that likely have shared language or where you offer mutual recognition, or maybe this person helps to solve problems with you, someone you can just exchange ideas off of.

You are allowed to build confidence with others, and this is not something we do alone because it is always relational. Now as I get close to wrapping up today's episode, I want you to think about the following questions. [00:18:00] Where do you have evidence of your own capability and of your own success? That can help to boost your confidence?

Where do you maybe not have enough clarity around expectations, and what can you do to gain that clarity? I also want you to think about which systems and which relationships support your confidence and which of them actually might need adjustment. Again, confidence grows when you are supported. When you are informed, when you are affirmed.

If you're feeling down right now, if you feel like your confidence isn't where it needs to be, or maybe if you feel like, wow, I was once this really confident person, and why am I down in the dumps now? Why have I gotten this far? And I feel like, what even is the point? I want to remind you that [00:19:00] it probably took some time for your confidence to shrink down the way it is right now.

But so too, you can start to take some baby steps to increase it little by little, so you can increase your confidence over time. And also, one of the things I didn't mention earlier is that, the way I view confidence is as something that's tied to your conditions, right? And because it's tied to your conditions and your conditions are ever changing, your confidence is also gonna be shifting.

So confidence is something that fluctuates over time, but as you notice that it's starting to dip, please remind yourself of these strategies and start to implement them so that way it never gets too low because you deserve to feel good about yourself. You deserve to feel good about the work that you're doing.

And yeah, that's all I wanna say. I know y'all are doing an amazing job. I don't need to be telling you this, [00:20:00] but I hope that it's encouraging enough for you to walk away from this to remember, you know what I'm doing okay. And to not freak out the way that you might when someone compliments you, and instead you accept it, you embrace it, and you start to offer it to others as well.

All right. That's it for today's episode, and as always, I'll talk to you all next time.

Thanks so much for listening. If you liked what you heard, here are three ways you can support the show: the first is to make sure you're subscribed and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. The second way is to get your copy of my free resource kit linked in my show notes. This kit includes tools.

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