Confidence is the art of being comfortable with uncertainty. Sounds oxymoronic, right? Confidence is acting strong and making a choice, surely.

By the same token, failure can often seem to turn up more often the more confident you feel. That’s because failure is often a by-product of your increased risk-taking that confidence inevitably brings. FAFO, as they say on Twitter.

Do you wish you were more confident? You can be – it simply takes awareness and practice. So how about you pick which *kind* of confident you plan to be?

So I’m asking myself, what’s brought about this change? And as I got into it, I realised that I wanted to formulate a path towards confidence for you, too, and make a list of tips and hints. Cue an appropriate challenge: to post a Confidence Trick per day on LinkedIn (Follow at www.linkedin.com/company/the-offer-bank/ . Search #TheOfferBankConfidenceTricks for all 30 posts.

When I'm coaching people to greater confidence when speaking in public or in groups, they always ask me how they can be 'fast-tracked'. "What's the secret?" they say. What they really mean is: "How do I get to achieve this immediately without any feeling of discomfort?" This scary, brain-frying headspace – known in psychological terms as 'conscious incompetence' – is there for a reason: so that you can be creative, learn your craft, practice a heap of strategies... and become satisfyingly resilient along the way.

Dancing and singing and group fun reduce stress hormone cortisol and release happy hormones: endorphins (painkiller) and dopamine (mood-booster) and oxytocin (‘love drug’). The more we create positive, habitual pathways and imprint a route to joy, the easier good habits become.

With luck (and not too much self-justification or defensiveness), the right balance of control and confidence means you'll swerve a debilitating mish-mash of controlling behaviour, bravado, bullsh*t and avoidance.

You read 23 Ways To Feel In Control On Zoom – now here’s 26 more Zoom ‘light bulb’ moments. Hopefully they’ll support you to feel more confident and in control of your calls.

Even high-pressure global Zoom calls can feel oddly cosy at times, I find, since they’re only a couple of clicks away and take place in your WFH office.

Getting old is weird, especially from a work perspective. It strikes me that I won’t be listening to Vera Lynn in the Old Folks’ Home as I’d been ‘sold’ as the norm when I was a kid: I’ll be listening to my first-generation dance music heroes who are now all hitting their 50s and 60s.

Today, please, put yourself first. Take up space. Be difficult. Be loud. No-one’s going to do it for you. Stop trying to make everything work for everyone around you and just please yourself!

Whether you’re on your first (clueless) or your zillionth (jaded) call this year, you’ll miss basics that give yourself and others a better experience.

Presentations are tricky and there’s no magic pill. Storms are inevitable. Get comfortable with failure: the process is part of the process. Embrace it!

Give a team space to think imaginatively and they’ll be stronger, braver, more creative and more resilient.

Four simple tips to get you out of your head and back in your body before you give any presentation.

Three great habits to help you take control of your presentations nerves.

Three easy steps to greater resilience that might just become your favourite habits.

Since V.U.C.A. represents what we need to manage in our businesses or our lives, I created a new V.U.C.A. with definitions that make me react positively (or in improv terms, cause me to “Yes, And!”) from the outset.