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OnlyMums is delighted to be working in partnership with Mum and Working to bring you practical and professional support and advice on being being a mum and working.

We will be adding information regularly, all of which we hope will help you whether you are looking to return to work or thinking about starting a new career. Please get in touch with us if you have any suggestions or comments about this section work@onlymums.org and don't forget if you have a specific question why not ask our Career Expert.

Confidence - where did it go?

Helen Slingsby is a career coach who set up Career Breakthrough to help people try to figure out what to do with the rest of their working life. Part of her time is spent helping women return to work and helping them combine work and family life. She does this through workshops and one-to one sessions.

Helen is a former business journalist and career changer who took time out to look after her two sons (now 6 and 8) and studied part-time to gain an MSc in Career Management and Counselling at Birkbeck College, London University. Below Helen offers some words of advice about confidence which in her experience is one of the core issues facing women wanting to return to employment after time at home with their children.

Lack of confidence is a key factor stopping women from returning to work after taking time out. Losing the ability to take on the world is accompanied with a very specific type of amnesia that makes us forget who we once were.

 From the career workshops I run to help get women back to work, it is clear that many of my clients divide their lives into "BC" and "AC" - before children with a job or career and after children with bring up the kids and continuous domestic chores. The AC world can be glorious and as challenging as any previous career but, immersed in family life, many of my clients have forgotten their "BC" persona and this has reduced confidence levels further.

If this sounds familiar and you are thinking about going back to work, here are a few confidence-boosting exercises that will help bridge the gap between BC and AC.

• Make a list of the skills you use daily. Read persuading a toddler to eat its tea as negotiating skills, organising a birthday party as events organising etc. Many of the skills you use are transferable to the work place and will include organisational skills, problem solving, interpersonal and creative skills.
• Remember an occasion when you were "at your best" and felt you were firing on all cylinders. It might be work-related or centred around the family. How would you have looked to the fly on the wall? Happy, confident, in control? Make a list. What resources were you using: persuading skills, the ability to bring people together, for example? Recall how it felt to be in full flow and absorb that feeling.
• Be positive. Stop saying 'I Can't' and say 'I Can' or 'I Can with the requisite training'.
• Believe in yourself and look great!



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