Should you expect to feel confident at work? Or is it normal to feel disillusioned and fed up at least some of the time? I mean, it is work. It is not your life. Amid all the noise and drama about quiet quitting, generational differences, hybrid working patterns, flexible hours, “the Great Resignation” and whatever latest workplace trend is in the headlines, there’s a temptation to believe that you need to love your work and feel very confident in it to be a fully functioning member of society. We tend to forget that most people neither love their work nor hate it. They just do it reasonably uneventfully, get paid and then go home. Sometimes that is the definition of professional confidence: getting the job done. But what if that’s not enough?
According to the UK’s Jobs Confidence Index, “job search and progression confidence” rose slightly towards the end of last year, indicating that workers are broadly optimistic about (a) being able to get a job somewhere else if they want to, and (b) being promoted or achieving progression where they are. But the picture is mixed: we may supposedly have relative job stability but earnings are stagnant. In the last quarter of 2022, the UK saw the worst contraction in real earnings since the first quarter of 2009. No wonder a lot of people are not confident in their, er, confidence. How, then, to be just confident enough at work, without getting caught up in unrealistic expectations?
