Hey guys, so for the last semester I’ve been taking a class called Personal Growth Plan or PGP which is the PLP equivalent of Career Life Connections. The semester just ended and with it we had to present our final project, what do I need to know to move forward with lifelong learning and active citizenship? This project consisted of reading a book of our “choosing” and creating an artifact to represent our learning and an answer to the driving question that we would present to the other Grade 12 Careers classes.
The book I had chosen and was given by my teacher was The Confidence Code by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman. It’s a book made for women who feel like their confidence is lacking, especially in the workplace and in contrast to their seemingly overly confident male colleagues. In preparation, I read some of the reviews on Goodreads and they didn’t give me great hope for the book. Many people mentioned that the book felt drawn out and that many parts were much longer than they had needed to be, one person even said that the book would have been better as an essay. However, when researching the authors to create an author bio I gained back a bit of confidence. Both Katty and Claire are respected journalists and a lot of their work surrounds women and women’s issues so even if the book felt drawn out I was sure there would be solid research and thought behind everything. It turned out I was right.
Although there were some points in the book that felt like they could have been cut down in general the information and research they were presenting was solid and actually pretty helpful. One of my favourite things about the book was how they would simplify the science and research they were citing so anyone could understand and implement it. I also appreciated that Katty and Claire both tried out different methods for seeing your own confidence level and how to improve your confidence and shared their own experiences with it. I actually made a review for the book which I’ll leave below if you want to read it.
Reading our book was only one part of the project though, the more important one was taking what we learned from our books and sharing it with the rest of our Grade 12 peers. When I was reading my book I found that the most helpful chapters were chapter 4 and chapter 6. Chapter 4 was all about reasons why women have less confidence than men and how that affects women in the workplace. Chapter 6 was full of different habits and ideas that would help you build your confidence and rewire your brain to be automatically confident, almost like a how-to guide. There had also been some quizzes in the notes section of the book that helped you place where your confidence level was, these reminded me of the many tests that Claire and Katty take in the book to find how confident they are. I thought that recreating one of those quizzes than creating an infographic that explained a few key points from chapters 4 and 6 would somewhat recreate the learning journey that Katty and Claire went though when writing this book and my own learning journey when reading the book.
What I had actually created felt a bit underwhelming when next to my classmates who had built some amazing artifacts to their learning. However, the content within my project was still very strong, just not as visually interesting. My biggest regret is that I didn’t make the infographics pamphlets that people could take home and that I didn’t condense my station so that it seemed a lot more full of stuff.
In the end though, I answered our driving question. Women need to know the ways that society is working against them, that they are not alone in feeling like they are left behind in the workplace, and that it is possible and surprising pretty easy all things considered to rewire your brain to be the most confident you can be.