104 The Coaching Toolkit for Child Welfare Practice
Building Confidence
Confidence is a critically important factor in child welfare practice
— confidence in knowing one’s skills, knowledge, and abilities to be
effective in a high-risk situation. Some sports psychologists believe
self-confidence or self-efficacy to be an important determinant of
athletic success and recommend various coaching strategies targeted
at directly improving self-efficacy (Leedham, 2005).
The higher the confidence
the more the ability to enact critical
decision-making skills.
~ Benner, Hughes, & Sutphen (2008)
If learners demonstrate skills needed to carry out the standard,
but is hesitant to demonstrate them in their practice, then other
coaching strategies may be needed. If the learner lacks confidence in
his or her ability to master the necessary skills and abilities to meet
the performance standard, the coach will need to provide coaching
in the following ways.
The first step is to identify a lack of confidence by cueing into key
indicators (Brenner et al., 2008). For examples, the learner might say,
"I'm not sure that I'll ever be able to do this well" or the learner will
exhibit non-verbal cues that indicate a lack of confidence, such as
hesitation in voice and action or avoidance of eye contact when