The other night I was working with a group of mentors, exploring how they can best equip themselves for working with young people. The mentors are new to mentoring and many of them have not worked with young people in this way before.

As we spent the evening exploring tools, exercises and games, that they can use when working with the young people, someone asked about their own confidence and how that could be developed.

You see the work that the mentors will be doing is around developing the young peoples confidence, self efficacy and employability. And as a new mentor, confidence is something that they wanted to explore for themselves.

So we had a look at the circle of excellence – confidence. I know that you maybe familiar with this, or you may have your own way of using or exploring it, and here is how we went about it.

Firstly draw a big circle on the flip chart, with the title of the excellence you want to achieve, in our case it was confidence. The write all the words that relate to confidence for you, what confidence would look like, sound like and feel like.

Once you have your words in the circle, then remember times when you felt like, looked, like, sounded like that. So if for you confidence looks like someone standing upright, standing tall, then remember a time when you were standing tall. You might want to write that into your circle or just hold onto the memory.

Go through all of the words until you have a clear strong memory for them, and if you don’t have a memory, just make one up . Then place the paper on the floor and step onto it, taking in all those memories, feelings, sounds, and sights. Filling yourself with all the elements of confidence.

When practicing this, we were able to see the difference in the mentor as they stood on their paper, it was like instant confidence, not only could we see it, but the mentor could feel it too. This can then be anchored for later use.

As we continued to discuss how we could use it ourselves, we began to talk about how we could enable young people to use it. Not only with words, but also by adding their own images from the internet or of their own creation. By recording music as well as their favourite songs, by using coloured paper that relates to the colour of confidence for them.

This simple exercise could become an entire session or workshop, creating your very own vision board/circle of excellence, not only using confidence, but other emotions or states that would be useful for the young people, like calmness, creativity, resourcefulness.

With the young people you work with, or yourself, I wonder what might be a useful circle for you to create. I would love to hear your thoughts. Have a go and let us know how you get on.