Think Confident, Be Confident by Leslie Sokol and Marci Fox

If you think you are confident, you will be confident. This sounds so obvious, doesn’t it? But, why do we, as moms, have so many doubts about our selves, our work style, our parenting, and our interactions with friends?

In Think Confident, Be Confident, Leslie Sokol and Marci Fox tackle the issue of confidence by looking at changing thinking and more importantly changing behavior. We all know that you can spend endless hours thinking of ways to improve how you interact with others in a confident way, but unless you put what you have learned in to action you will never change.Doubt, as we all know, is what stops you from doing what you want. I recall as a newly minted college graduate I lacked confidence in job interviews. In interviews with potential employers, I would stumble over my words, not make consistent eye contact with the interviewer, and generally present myself in a less than confident way. In short, if I as an interviewee did not project confidence in my abilities, why would an employer want to hire me? I managed to gain confidence in myself through taking a certificate program in my field, but my issues of lack of confidence remain to this day.

Fox and Sokol have written a cognitive therapy-based program that teaches the reader how to conquer doubt. The authors have divided the book in to four steps or chapters:

Label your doubt
Question your doubt
Rethink your doubt
Take action

The book is a good read with super easy-to-use fill-in-the-blank grids. As I read the book I was prompted to think about situations where I lacked confidence. To jog my memory the authors used fictional examples to illustrate situations where someone would feel neglected by a friend or marginalized by a boss. I used the grids to record the situations where I had confidence issues, for instance, job interviews, dealing with my children’s teachers, etc.

Once I isolated several situations I would analyze them using the four steps: label doubt, question doubt, rethink doubt, and take action. As I started looking at problems using the author’s grid I was able to think through my issues. I may not have conquered my confidence issues, but the book highlighted what I do well and what I need to improve.

The introduction to the book was written by two medical professionals from the University of Pennsylvania. Judith S. Beck, PhD, is the Director of the Beck Institute for Cognitive Therapy and Research and Clinical Assocaite Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry, while Aaron T. Beck, MD, is the University Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and the President of the Beck Institute for Cognitive Therapy and Research. Sokol and Fox both work at the Beck Institute as well. Sokol is the Director of Education while Fox is a Senior Faculty Member in the Extramural Training Program.

From reading the authors’ titles you might think that Think Confident, Be Confident would be a dry, academic-type book. You would be wrong. I found this book to be a great resource for tackling issues of confidence in all aspects of life.

By the way, if you are a confident person, I would love to hear how you became confident in yourself. Were you always that way? Did you become confident during grade school, middle school, high school, college, first job, or becoming a mom? What was the major reason for your shift in attitude in yourself? Please leave a comment and I promise I will respond. Let’s get a dialogue going to see how we as moms can gain confidence in ourselves as moms, entrepreneurs, workers, and people.

Publishers: I love to read books. For books I love, I will write a book review. You can contact me at JillAnneBerry@msn.com if you have a book you think I might be interested in.