From the beginning of Compounding Your Confidence: Strategies to Expand Your Opportunities for SUCCESS, author Jill J. Johnson sets readers at ease with an “I’ve been there” approach that’s neither flippant nor condescending. “Confidence is an elusive characteristic for many of us as we journey through life and our careers,” she writes before assuring us we need only make “small and focused efforts,” not big and flashy ones, to boost this attribute.
Johnson, an award-winning management consultant featured in The Wall Street Journal, Inc. and other major outlets, further endears us with personal stories. Interspersing well-written anecdotes between tidbits of advice was a wise decision and makes the how-to segments seem even more credible.
Sharing a childhood tale about winning a pony at an Easter egg hunt, she writes, “I don’t know how I knew the [golden] egg was there. I simply knew running to the ladder of the big slide was the right thing to do. I trusted myself, and I ran to pick up my prize.” Johnson’s humor surfaces here when she admits that Goldie turned out to be “the meanest pony God ever created … probably why the farmer donated him to the Easter egg hunt in the first place.”
Other real-life examples—including joining a meeting at a swanky private club wearing different colored shoes and joking about it rather than being embarrassed—help readers grasp the importance of creating and implementing a Confidence Plan, whose primary points are Progressions (getting better at something, little by little), Practice (“You can practice your skill development anywhere—at home, at school, in your job, in a church group”) and Preparation.
Johnson’s impeccable timing and flow, along with a knack for painting a picture, make for inspiring, attention-holding reading. By the end, we are sold on the ideas in Compounding and ready to follow her lifelong mantra: “I can, I am, I will, and I’m going to.”
Also available in paperback and audio book.
