Written by: Sara Mueller, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Confidence is a critical trait for a leader. Without it, your team will not follow you or contribute at their highest potential. Without confidence, adversity of any magnitude can derail your team’s progress.
Confidence cannot be faked. You either have it or you don’t. None of us is born confident or starts out confident in our skills or leadership abilities. Instead, confidence is something each and every one of us creates. So how do you build up your confidence quickly when it's necessary to effectively lead your team and achieve the results you desire now?
Here are three crucial steps to follow:
1. Deconstruct What Influences Your Confidence.
As with all your belief systems about yourself and the world, your level of confidence is deeply impacted by your childhood. If your parents were confident, you observed and mimicked them and learned how to be confident yourself. The way your teachers, coaches, and religious leaders spoke to you impacts your confidence today. And, of course, the culture you grew up in influences you as well. If courage and sharing your voice was encouraged in your culture, you are more likely to speak up today. If your culture expected you to be seen and not heard or you regularly felt like you shouldn’t draw attention to yourself, those same thought patterns will occupy both your conscious and unconscious mind today as an adult.
Past performance also influences your confidence, with more recent experiences holding the most weight. For example, if the last five surgeries you performed were a success, you’ll go into your sixth one with higher confidence. We get stuck, though, when we believe our past is always indicative of our future results. (Any investment literature will warn you that this is not the case!) If we had success and assume subsequent attempts will be the same, this can lead to a lack of preparation that results in a poor outcome. Or, we may wrongly believe that because we made one misdiagnoses, future mistakes will be the pattern; thus, we aren’t cut out for this type of work.
When we recognize and deconstruct these influences on our confidence, we’re better able to choose a narrative that supports us and work towards gaining conviction in our skills.
2. Be Willing To Suck To Gain Skills.
One of my first mentors, Baron Baptiste, famously said, “You’ve got to be willing to show and suck before you can show up and shine.”
To build confidence in our skills, we must understand that we are going to suck at first. That’s just the way it is. No one is a poised public speaker the very first time they walk on stage, or picks up a guitar and makes beautiful music from the first strum, or writes a bestselling novel the first time they sit down at a keyboard. Even Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team before he went on to become one of the greatest basketball legends ever.
If we expect ourselves to get it right the first time, we likely won’t even ever begin. Instead, we must take action boldly and with an open mind, knowing we might suck, but that we’re bound to get better. With each action step, each new attempt of skill, we learn something new. We learn what works, and, just as importantly, what doesn’t. Then we tweak a bit and keep going forward, getting better and better, gaining deeper skills every time. It’s the same process whether you want to improve your research and publishing skills or inspire your team to have a more holistic approach to their patients’ health.
3. Track Evidence Of Your Results.
Once you start gaining skills from your willingness to show up and suck at first, it’s time to track evidence of your results. When I started my successful coaching and leadership development business, Joy Discovered, at the urging of my mindset coach I bought myself a journal that I titled my “Evidence Journal.”
Each week, I recorded evidence of the success of my coaching, from comments on my blog posts to the drastic transformations my clients achieved to the synchronistic opportunities that kept crossing my path.
Seeing evidence of the results I was generating gave me more confidence. So I kept going, trying new approaches while sucking at first, then gaining new skills and results, and deepening my assurance in my coaching. If I experienced a setback or was feeling a bit of imposter syndrome, I’d read through my Evidence Journal and it would lift me back up.
Confidence of any kind comes from results, and there’s no way to get results without first acting while being willing to suck. Here’s to you sucking… and then shining with confidence!
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Sara Mueller, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine Sara Mueller believes we CAN have it all. She helps leaders develop emotional intelligence, resilience, and high performance so they can balance an impactful career AND a meaningful family life. After being burnt out in her career and hitting rock bottom in her marriage, Sara realized that her limiting beliefs and unproductive patterns were blocking joy and success in all areas of her life. So, she underwent an intense journey of self-discovery learning how to own her authentic power, presence, and purpose. She now teaches the key learnings of her transformation in her Self-Mastery Method coaching and leadership programs. Prior to becoming a Success Mentor, Sara spent nearly two decades developing optimization training programs for Fortune Global 500 executives while also teaching mindfulness and yoga to people from all walks of life. She’s a certified Conscious Parenting Coach and is regularly regarded as “life-changing,” “eye-opening,” and “one of the most engaging facilitators I’ve ever seen” by her beloved clients.
