Flo LaBrado is a leadership and career development coach and founder of Olive and Grace Leadership Coaching. She is passionate about people discovering and realizing their goals and working in a healthy workplace.
We’ve all experienced the moment just before speaking up and stepping out to do something big. The impending impact of the moment may vary, but to you, it feels big. It is big. Between this moment and the next, the consequences of your emerging words and actions will be vulnerable to the assessments of the real world. What follows may change something important, and you would love to have the assurance—a guarantee—that you can deliver and that your words and actions will have the desired effect.
You feel the heat rise from your chest to your neck and face and wonder whether others can tell. Your heart beats almost as fast as your thoughts race. You are not sure what to do with your hands. The assurance that you can deliver would be great right about now, right before the moment you:
Turn on your video camera to introduce a radical shift in strategic planning and inspire the commitment of hundreds of leaders and team members;
Step out to the podium to speak with dozens of young professionals about the value of social connections and community for mental health;
Walk into your manager’s office to throw your name in the hat for the open director position you’ve been preparing for and waiting on for years;
Smile and introduce yourself at the start of the interview for the job you need;
Hit Send on your letter of resignation without knowing what’s next.
What if the assurance that you can do it never comes? Do you think about whether it is too late to walk away from the opportunity (avoidance)? Or do you think of just getting through it and that no matter how bad it goes, it will be over soon (survival)?
There is a better way than avoidance or survival to lead through these big moments. We can develop the healthy assurance we can deliver and flow (thrive). That assurance is confidence, the trust in our abilities, capacities, and judgments, and the belief that we can meet the demands of the task at hand. With confidence, we are sure that we can aim for our aspirations and follow through on expectations with reduced effort. Confidence is essential for effectiveness and success, and confidence is multiplied by its close cousin: self-efficacy.
Self-confidence and self-efficacy to unlock potential
Confidence, especially self-confidence, may seem like an intangible attribute to embody. The good news is that self-confidence can be well understood and cultivated along with self-efficacy with skills and strategies to unlock potential.
Self-confidence
Thanks to William James (1890), a forefather of modern positive psychology—the science of human flourishing—we know that self-confidence enables success and influences self-esteem. His formula for self-esteem, which is related to self-confidence, is:
The formula tells us we can intentionally increase our self-esteem by shooting more shots and achieving greater success. It means taking the risk of sometimes missing shots while gaining confidence by making many more. It also means success is enabled by having a healthy and optimistic belief that we can achieve what we intend.
However, unfounded confidence will dilute our success and our self-esteem. Instead of a toxic and baseless self-belief, we can develop a healthy assurance that we can apply our thoughts and behaviors to achieve desired outcomes—self-efficacy.
Self-efficacy
Self-efficacy is our belief that we can meet the challenges ahead. It is self-assurance that we can monitor and adjust our behavior and performance to achieve a goal. We have an inherent need for autonomy, to move freely, and to exercise self-determination. Self-efficacy is an extension of that, the understanding that we can show up and behave to achieve what we set out to do.
Self-efficacy is pivotal in leadership and meaningful impact. It is a differentiator in essential attributes for effective executive leadership like high performance and creativity (Kim, 2019), innovation (Brandmo et al, 2021), role clarity in teams (Brandmo et al, 2021), and psychological capital required for transformational leadership (Lei & Leaungkhamma, 2020). If you do not want to choke right before Go Time, build self-efficacy.
Strategies for building self-confidence and self-efficacy
By combining self-confidence and self-efficacy, we can look to the past and the future to perform positively in the present. We can unlock our potential for greater effectiveness and impact as leaders and professionals by looking at our past successes and self-belief for greater self-esteem (confidence). We can multiply that potential by looking ahead with an optimistic view that we can effectively use our abilities, capacities, and judgments to achieve desired outcomes (efficacy).
When we find ourselves avoiding opportunities or only surviving through them, we can shift our perspective and performance by building self-confidence and self-efficacy. The following are strategies to multiply our leadership impact.
Develop your compass
We are beautiful, powerful, and complex. We are also naturally creative and resourceful. A natural resource we each have is the ability to lead confidently and with integrity to guide our leadership, decisions, and outcomes.
An aspect of healthy confidence is to live and work with integrity to who we are: our values, work values, and strengths. Anything else is pretending to be someone we are not, a shaky foundation devoid of self-confidence. For example, say a manager values competition as a motivator but tries to downplay this value in their interactions with leaders and team members. The manager’s confidence will likely be impaired in two ways:
Energy diverted from leading with confidence to masking the value;
Other leaders and team members will sense the lack of transparency, impacting the manager’s effectiveness in leading and gaining trust, eroding their confidence in their ability to lead.
We can lead with confidence grounded in a strong internal compass that guides how we think and act as leaders and professionals. I cannot overstate the importance of investing time to introspect and clarify the components of Your Compass. It is so imperative that every client engagement with me begins with a Discovery Session focused on creating Your Compass:
Values: your core beliefs as a human, not just related to work;
Work values: what is most important to you in a job/work at this point in your life;
Strengths: what you’re great at.
Developing Your Compass can empower you to lead and perform authentically and with confidence. You can lead from your gut informed by your values. You can lead with confidence by leaning on your strengths to maximize performance.
Develop your leader within
Another resource for healthy confidence we can each tap into is our Leader Within. The Leader Within, as described in the Co-Active Coaching model that I use, is the combination of self-acceptance and self-authority to empower us to lead and move in life with grounded confidence.
Self-Acceptance: a total acceptance of who we are, including our strengths and weaknesses, gifts and imperfections, and what makes us unique. It means accepting who we are now and who we are becoming as we grow.
Self-Authority: the belief we can grow, determine our next steps, and thrive. Echoing self-efficacy, self-authority means we have the power to act toward our desired outcomes. We may stumble, but we have resilience, the capacity to bounce back.
One of the powerful ways that our Leader Within fuels our confidence and efficacy is that self-acceptance and self-authority empower us to grow and pursue mastery. The pursuit of mastery enables us to ditch the wasteful pursuit of perfectionism and its flip side, shame. The pursuit of mastery makes available to us the gifts of learning, experimenting, developing new skills, and building resilience that leads to confidence-building mastery.
Identify your saboteurs
Just as Your Compass and Leader Within are confidence-building aspects within each of us, the Saboteurs are confidence-killing and self-sabotaging thoughts. Having a hard time overcoming procrastination to start a project or update your resume? Finding yourself committing to projects you are not interested in because you did not want to let a colleague down? Do you choke right before the big presentation? These are just a few examples of Saboteurs at work.
Our Saboteurs are our self-sabotaging thought patterns. Everyone has them. They are the overuse of coping strategies developed earlier in life that worked then but not now. I think of the Saboteurs as gremlins that show up right before a big bet or decision, whispering the things we do not need to hear. Some examples of these gremlins include perfectionism, people-pleasing, and avoidance.
Fortunately, we can build Positive Intelligence, the mental fitness for self-mastery to overcome self-sabotage and lead with confidence and efficacy. First, identify your Saboteurs with the Saboteurs Assessment. Develop self-command to name the negative thought patterns and practice mindfulness to turn the moment into a gift for high performance. If needed, work with a leadership coach to move from self-sabotage to self-mastery.
Build “your board of directors”
Even the most confident and effective leaders and executive leaders need support. A support system that invests in you can help build self-efficacy and related factors. Proactive social engagement enables self-efficacy and creativity (Kim et al., 2019), which are important for performance and innovation. When working through a challenge toward a goal, getting feedback throughout the process is related to the endurance to go the distance (Harper and Vancouver, 2017). Also, high rewards build self-efficacy (Stirin, 2018), which may come in the form of positive reinforcement and social connections.
To cultivate self-confidence and self-efficacy and expand leadership and executive potential, build your “board of directors” for professional development. With you as the “chairman”, your board members are the leaders and partners who know you, invest in you, and support your growth. They are a sounding board, people who challenge you with feedback, offer guidance, and support you through challenges and setbacks. I recommend including the following roles on your board of directors:
Mentor(s) – may or may not be your direct manager
Sponsor – someone who advocates for you when you are not in the room
A partner who thinks differently from you
A leader in a different part of the organization
A leader in another organization
A leadership or executive coach
Celebrate the wins
As you step out and make big bets, make decisions, and deliver along the way, celebrate the wins. Acknowledging the wins along serves as positive reinforcement to believe your optimistic view that you can succeed. The research by Kouzes and Posner (2023) into the practices of transformational C-level leaders in large organizations confirms that celebrating even small wins encourages the heart through challenges. Failures are also wins to be celebrated because of what can be learned for future attempts, increasing the chances that future shots will be successful.
Multiply your leadership impact
Self-confidence is important for success. We can multiply the effect of confidence by also building self-efficacy. The healthy assurance we can deliver empowers leaders to grow and deliver when it counts. Look at your past successes to encourage confidence with evidence while building an optimistic view of your abilities to achieve future desired outcomes and multiply your leadership impact.
If you are motivated and want to increase your self-confidence and self-efficacy to flourish and exponentially increase your impact with intention and purpose, let’s connect on a complimentary call.
Flo LaBrado, Leadership and Career Development Coach Flo LaBrado is a leadership and career development coach and founder of Olive and Grace Leadership Coaching. She is passionate about people discovering and realizing their goals and working in a healthy workplace.
Flo combines over 20 years of leadership experience, academic research-based practices, and a people-centric approach to empower individuals and teams. She creates space for people to courageously discover and explore their creativity and potential as they develop grounded confidence, grow, and create the journey to reach their aspirations. She believes that integrity to one’s values, strengths, and work preferences is essential to leadership and career development and that teamwork and organizational health are crucial for high performance.
Flo's credentials include a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology, a Master of Science in Leadership and Management with a focus on Organizational Development, and numerous certifications in innovative change, inclusive leadership, ethical leadership, Trust at Work®, and Dare to Lead Trained™.
References:
Group Coaching that Promotes Self-Efficacy and Role Clarity Among School Leaders (Christian Brandmo and colleagues, 2021)
How Transformational Leadership Facilitates Innovation Capability: The Mediating Role of Employees’ Psychological Capital (Hui Lei & Lathong Leaungkhamma, 2020)
Positive Intelligence (Positive Intelligence, Shirzad Chamine)
Reflected Self-Efficacy and Creativity; The Power of Being Recognized by Others (Hyunjee Hannah Kim and partners, 2019)
Reward Moderates the Effect of Self-efficacy on Performance (Keren Stirin, 2018)
Saboteurs Assessment (Positive Intelligence, Shirzad Chamine)
Self-Efficacy’s Influence on Persistence: Moderating Effect of Performance Feedback Ambiguity (Leah Harper & Jeffrey B. Vancouver, 2017)
The Leadership Challenge. (James M. Kouzes, Barry Z. Posner, 2023)
The Principles of Psychology (William James, 1890)
What Is Co-Active Coaching? (Co-Active Training Institute)
