Self Determination and Self Confidence

By Zoey Giesberg, MSW

At last month’s FACTx conference, I gave a presentation on California’s Self Determination law. It’s a complicated law that revolves a regional center’s client ability to control what services they get, and more information on it can be found here. In my presentation, I was joined by two students in the GAP program to talk about our personal experiences and what the law would mean to us. But while I was trying to relay information on the law for others to learn, I found I learned more from the students than I thought I would about the topic we were talking about. What I learned was about the power of self confidence.

I’m not a particularly confident person by nature. Despite many attempts from many people, I never have felt particularly sure of myself and my abilities. I tend to notice when someone has notable differences in how they are and operate, they have a reduced sense of self worth in themselves because they can’t trust they can’t do anything right. This is definitely true of me – I tend to discount any compliments or praise I get because I never feel like I deserve it. I always feel like I could do so much better, so I can’t ever process the idea that I am as good as people say I am.

This feeling definitely reared its head at the conference. I prepared extensively for it from creating outlines trying to create basic explanations for Self Determination’s varying components to getting the student participants materials so they could understand a bit of the law they were discussing and what will be asked of them. And in spite of my best efforts, I found myself tongue-tied and stumbling over my words as I tried to explain the law. It really shook my already shaky confidence, especially since I’ve given multiple presentations with relative ease in the past.

But when I turned over the presentation to the students, something magical happened. The students were fully engaged and were not only to able to give great answers to my questions, they spoke with ease and confidence that I wished I had. I already had faith that they’d be good at what was asked of them, but how they expressed their insights really blew me away. They were so sure of themselves and it was beautiful to see.

The crux of the Self Determination is that the client is given the confidence to know what they like and what they want. The students demonstrated that so well that it inspires me to get to there myself. If I want to get where I want to, I got to start believing in my ability to get there. It takes self confidence to to practice self determination, and I’m working on making sure I get both.