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.

Recently I have been working for Mousetrap Theatre Project, with a group of young people based in Southall. The young people are all taking part in the Duke of Edinburgh Awards, and at the end they have to do a presentation. This group is made up of young people who haven’t had lots of positive experience in making presentations, in putting themselves out there, in talking to large groups of people about their achievements. With this in mind I was asked to help the group develop their confidence, which is something I come across quite often when working with young people. They often put up this front of ‘I’m ok’ and ‘I don’t care about anything’. However in my experience this is not always the case, in fact there are a lot of young people who do care and are will to work with you to develop their skills and confidence, so that they are able to make the best of their lives. With this particular group, we spent lots of time exploring what confidence meant to them, who they saw as having it, what it looked liked, getting all our ideas down.

After a while I asked; ‘How would you feel if I asked you to stand up and make up a story in front of the whole group?‘ The question was meet with silence and blank faces. After a while they began to tell me all the reasons why they wouldn’t be able to do this. Now I know all you coaches out there will be thinking about reframing, turning the negative statements around and exploring what they would need in order to tell the stories, one of the things being confidence.

On another sheet of paper we explored what might be in a story; beginning, middle, end, characters, locations, etc, and with their help I demonstrated how it might be done. Then, one by one, the young people stood up and had a go at telling a story. The first thing they did was to look at the sheet of paper with the ideas about confidence on it, they read them out to themselves, then stood on it, taking on all the attributes and told their story. Each one amazed that they were able to do it, and proud of each other for taking part. Each young persons story was met with lots of positive support and enjoyment, from myself and the group, giving each one the experience of stepping out of their comfort zone, being confident and presenting in front of an audience successfully.

At the end, they all spoke about how they would hold onto this experience, and how they would use it when presenting the story of their achievements for their Duke of Edinburgh Awards. The exercise was simple, and similar to the NLP Circle of Excellence. Now I’m not saying that the process was simple or easy, it took time to develop the trust, to engage each young person, to talk ideas through and develop their levels of participation. But we got there in the end and they left the room standing taller than when they came in. This for me is one of the reasons I do what I do. The opportunity to make a difference in the life of a young person, enabling them to move forward and be the best they can be.