Workshops are conventionally not for concepts to boost creative confidence. Improving interpersonal skills, writing skills, leadership skills – all of these are conventional workshops, but they often don’t get to the root of the problem. There’s little gain to teaching people skills that they won’t have the confidence to use in their work – and yet confidence building is often barely considered in workshops.
The one plus side is that this means you can get the upper edge by learning how to use workshops to boost creative confidence. There are endless ways to go about this, but three work that much better than the others:
Teamwork
Much like the often dreaded team building activities, workshops allow for the honing of team skills. Having creative confidence around others is sometimes more difficult, as worrying about others’ perception of you can easily get in the way.
This is where a workshop comes in handy. Having a situation where failing is not life or death takes some of the pressure off, and allows people to put more effort into collaboration. More importantly, it also gives that vital bit of experience working together – so when the crunch happens, everybody is firmly prepared.
Ideation to boost creative confidence
Ideation – if you haven’t already read our explanation about it – is most quickly explained as the process of creating ideas. This can easily be the part of the creative process that knocks confidence the most, as when you’re pitching a lot of ideas, some of them won’t be useable.
Learning to enjoy this process – and to be okay with throwing out ideas – is an important part of any creative confidence workshop worth its salt.
Feedback
If teamwork is the most intimidating part of having creative confidence, and ideation the most threatening, then feedback is the most uncertain. Many people struggle to tell the difference between a critique of work and an outright attack on them personally. This makes it difficult to both give out and take feedback, which can make having creative confidence a struggle.
Workshops are the perfect place to counter this, as an environment where everyone constructively critiques each other makes nobody feel personally targeted. Not only is that rad, but it also means in the future people understand that critique is not a criticism, as they have had experience critiquing and correcting work too.
