Best of Viva Survivors 2022: Confidence
Years of work, weeks of prep and then… How will you feel at your viva?
Feeling nervous isn’t wrong but it doesn’t feel right. It’s a recognition that something matters: your viva and the outcome matter a lot. What can you do to feel confident for your viva? That’s a big question that occupies a lot of my thinking for this blog and for the work I do in webinars. Here are some of my favourite thoughts on the topic for this year:
- Don’t Deny Nerves – pushing nerves down doesn’t help.
- Long Term Prep – viva prep is a short-term activity: but what can you do for your confidence over the long-term?
- Corrections & Confidence – make two lists and focus on one of them!
- The Magic Numbers – what numbers can you track to help your confidence?
- Daily Confidence – my response to a memorable comment from a webinar this year.
Confidence is a skill and a story, a journey and a target. It’s how you feel and how you act. There are lots of ways to frame it and lots of things you can do to grow it for yourself, particularly in advance of your viva.
Tomorrow we finish the review of the year with the topic of surviving.
PS: the Viva Survivors blog celebrated five years of daily posts earlier this year! To mark the journey so far I wrote and published “Keep Going – A Viva Survivors Anthology” – a curated collection of the best of the first five years. If you’re looking for viva help then this blog is and always will be free – if you want to support the blog and get an awesome book as well, then take a look at the options at the link. Thanks!