Thousands of employees with disabilities, have told us over the past five years, that it is often their own lack of personal disability confidence combined with having to manage disability ‘alone’ at work, that frequently hampers their careers and risks damaging their mental and physical wellbeing.

That is why we saw an opportunity for individuals with considerable lived experience of disability to share what they have learned that ‘works’ and to produce guidance and advice and creative thinking, which can expedite, for so many others, this journey to what we call inner Purple Confidence.

This inner confidence becomes real and visible when we see colleagues who feel confident in sharing information about their disability with their manager. We see that when they: 

• can readily request the adjustments that would enhance their productivity

• feel able to ‘break the ice’ with new colleagues or clients in everyday encounters 

• really feel they can be themselves at work 

• believe they are valued for who they really are.

Between 12 and 20% of any workforce worldwide will be managing the impact of a disability or health condition on their professional and personal lives. Yet as we review the academic and professional literature, we see that this dimension to the lived reality of disabled people in work has been largely overlooked. 

That is why we developed our Purple Confidence Maturity Model. When we first designed this in 2018 we wanted to create a model that enables individuals to assess their level of confidence against nine criteria. It offers a practical framework for someone to evidence their own personal confidence journey, and to understand some simple steps to build inner confidence at work. 

Our “10 Steps to Building Disability Confidence at Work” will also support with building confidence– and why not create your own in-house version with a message from your disability champion / sponsor?

Our Helpful To Know focus groups

Across the summer, we have been running a series of focus groups for people with direct personal experience of different disabilities and life experience of managing difference so they can surface the things they have learnt about sharing brief information in a relevant way to help them in their work interactions with colleagues.

Using the information from these focus groups, we will be creating a library of resources which will help frame conversations and interactions with colleagues for people with these impairments.

The last focus group, focused on musculoskeletal conditions, takes place on 7th September at 12pm BST. If you have direct and lived experience of musculoskeletal conditions, we’d love to have you join us, or share with colleagues who do.

What if we helped our employees to nurture their inner confidence as part of career development? 

Sheryl Sandberg, American business executive, billionaire and philanthropist wrote Lean In in 2013. The book argues that barriers are still preventing women from taking leadership roles in the workplace, barriers such as discrimination, blatant and subtle sexism and sexual harassment. She also provocatively claimed there are also barriers that women create for themselves through internalizing systematic discrimination and societal gender roles. 

Many of our members will be familiar with and promote the ‘social model’ of disability as a framework for understanding the root causes of disability inequality. But is there now a case to support employees to understand the ways to build inner confidence: how to transcend for themselves the soft bigotry of low expectation?

Learning and development opportunities in September

Maximise your PurpleSpace membership by accessing our learning and development activities coming up this month:

• Engage in real time with your contemporaries by joining one of our three Peer Group Learning Sessions where this month we will be focussing on how you can deliver activities that support your own employees to build their inner confidence taking place on 7th September at 16:00 BST, 14th September at 11:00 BST and 30th September at 15:00 BST.

• Learn from others in our ‘Spotlight On’ series as we talk to Lorna Woodman from Marks and Spencer’s, who has developed her own tools to build her inner confidence

• Join our Impact Steering Group meeting which helps to articulate the return on investment of disabled employee network/resource groups. This meeting takes place on 15th September at 10am BST and is chaired by Founding PurpleSpace Ambassador, David Caldwell.

• Join our #PurpleLightUp reference group meeting on 29th September at 14:00 BST This will be an opportunity to hear how other organisations and networks are planning to celebrate 3rd December impactfully.

And finally…

We like this quote from Rosabeth Moss Kanter, who tells us “Confidence isn’t optimism or Pessimism, and it’s not a character attribute. It’s the expectation of a positive outcome.” Or our favourite from Eleanor Roosevelt, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”