Member-only story
SELF-MASTERY
Getting More Confident is a Big Con
How to start a ‘confidence recipe’
It was a summer morning and I had recently started working in a train station ticket office in the South of London, England. I’d been asked to open up the office for the first time on Saturday at the last minute and told I would be sent a ‘Relief Clerk’ (basically a roving ‘genius’ in the Apple sense) to help me. Ordinarily, I’d have been worried, but on this particular weekend it was worse as there was a major sporting event taking place nearby.
Sadly what I got wasn’t a genius, it was a patsy. Let’s call him Roy. Roy was clever but unassertive. He’d taken the role of Relief Clerk because it was more money, but he’d been given the job because he was easy to boss about. The managers could send him wherever they liked or give him a last-minute double shift and he’d comply.
So when Roy arrived late to a baying crowd of sports fans, ticket machines that didn’t work, and a junior clerk who only knew the basics, he was out of his depth and we both knew it.
And with that, I took over. I have no idea why. I guess I had to. I directed large queues to different places, barked orders at gigantic men supervising the ticket gatelines and eventually, the queues subsided.
