Five Minute Friday: CONFIDENT

Five Minute Friday: CONFIDENT

I laughed when I saw that this week’s word is “confident.”

I’ve written about confidence before.

You know what breeds confidence? Situations where you prove to yourself that you are capable of creating, helping others and producing something that you walk away from with more celebrations than questions.

I had a story last week as editor of the Sigma Xi Science Honorary newsletter that had a line I loved. It was:

“I sort of stood up from my desk and paced the hallways a little bit.”

The scientist had already made one relatively big discovery (of a meteor impact crater far below the ice in Greenland). As he was looking for another, he found one much more quickly than he thought he would.

Commence with the hallway pacing!

Here’s the thing. You don’t get to that moment of being so excited you literally can’t sit still without putting in all the hard work ahead of time (unless you just happen to be randomly, serendipitously blessed).

How many hours had that scientist spent hunched over his desk? Searching for evidence of craters a mile below the ice with no results? How many years before that involved hours of studying, fighting for research dollars, doing all the things academics have to do to get their place at the table?

***end of five minutes***

Sometimes, situations that should breed more confidence in me lead to more worry (how can I replicate that? was it really good enough? was that a fluke?). However, I have had a few instances lately that felt the right kind of good.

Someone I had been working with to help them learn a skill at our workplace “got it.” They were the one who did the hard work, but I chose to try to teach them instead of correcting their work myself repeatedly, something that would have resulted in a decent product but wouldn’t have helped them feel any more confident about their ability to contribute.

Knowing you’ve helped someone else feel better about their work IS something worth hallway pacing! It’s also easier than finding a meteor impact crater a mile below the  Greenland ice. And warmer.

Welcome to this week’s Five Minute Friday. Our instructions, via creator Kate Motaung: “Write for five minutes on the word of the week. This is meant to be a free write, which means: no editing, no over-thinking, no worrying about perfect grammar or punctuation.” (But I can’t resist spell checking, as you can imagine.)

Paula Kiger

Wife of one, Mom of two, Friend of many. My pronouns are she/her/hers.