Richard Metheny & Associates LLC

F E B R U A R Y  2 0 0 8

Confidence is a vital characteristic for all leaders. Okay I know that.

Yet I must admit that I thought I knew what confidence was. When I thought about how as an executive coach I might try to assist someone to build confidence, I found that I was unprepared, not confident, to do so. I felt a need to research “confidence” and to break it down into a simple, easy-to-understand, workable model. Deconstructing confidence into smaller components allows one to address the areas that currently support one’s confidence and areas that, with work, could make the person more confident.

This newsletter is dedicated to my attempt to achieve a simple and useful understanding confidence.

Richard

WHAT IS CONFIDENCE?

I personally believe that confidence is simply our belief in our own fundamental competence, value, and abilities. Self-confidence is an attitude that allows individuals to have positive yet realistic views of themselves and their situations. Self-confident people trust their own abilities, have a general sense of control in their lives, and believe that, within reason, they will be able to do what they wish, plan, and expect.

Confidence is intrinsically motivating to our employees, teams, colleagues, family and friends. A Hay's study (Feb. 24, 2006, PRNewswire) examined over 75 key components of employee satisfaction. They found that trust and confidence in top leadership was the single most reliable predictor of employee satisfaction in an organizations. Employees are naturally drawn to leaders who are more confident, since confidence — as opposed to arrogance or cockiness — is built on fact, not fabrication. So, yes, confidence is a vital characteristic for leaders.

So where does confidence come from? In my view, confidence proceeds from four fundamental places:

1. Past success
2. Thorough preparation
3. Habits of confidence: How you sound, look, act, what you say and do
4. Mental attitude and physical state

I view these four as a sort of reverse-pyramid, building from #4 backwards. Let’s start at the end and work our way back.

MENTAL ATTITUDE AND PHYSICAL STATE

I personally believe that your physical health and well being is the absolute foundation of all your performance — whether it is at work, at home, or at play. If you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything, and it’s for this reason that I believe that all leaders should have, at absolute minimum, a basic cardio workout routine and some eating guidelines to help keep them on track.

Your mental attitude and physical health are fundamentally connected in a feedback loop: good health and a solid diet enable better mental acuity, quickness, memory, and sharper, faster social processing (the brain uses some 30% of the energy you consume in a given day, even though it only comprises 2-3% of your body weight).

At the same time, a positive mental environment will help bolster your immune system during times of intense stress — which, for most modern Westerners, is pretty much every day.

Which leads me to my next point: most of us Westerners, being chronically over stressed and short on time, have lax eating habits and less-than-ideal exercise routines (if indeed we have any at all).

Luckily for us, the body is a uniquely resilient instrument, and we can change and retrain our bodies into greater health. Changing our eating and activity habits can be extremely difficult, but like most major life changes, once the proper motivation is there, it will happen.

Proper exercise and nutrition lifts and sustains more positive affect; to say nothing of the concrete confidence benefits that come from gaining competence at a particular skill.

A final word on mental fitness as a distinct building block that rests on physical well being; while the idea of “mental fitness” is ambiguous, I would break it down into four major subcategories, along these lines:

• the ability to re-frame, or see circumstances in complex ways;
• frequency and power of positive self-talk, including affirmations and visualization;
• emotional resiliency; including regulation of emotional states;
• mental boundaries; understanding what (and who) one can and cannot influence.

HABITS OF CONFIDENCE

By “habits of confidence” I am referring to the behaviors of confident people; how they walk, speak, and generally conduct themselves. Habits of confidence can be broken down further:

• Body language (including vocal projection and tonality)
• Behavior in social interactions; including social energy and value transactions
• Behaviors of success; including actions that fall in line with expectations of success (i.e., taking better risks, thinking flexibly, engaging one’s creativity to surmount or tunnel around life’s inevitable obstacles)

Habits of confidence are the “externals” we often “fake” by copying the mannerisms, behaviors and body language of others we see as more confident than ourselves. This is essentially modeling, and it gets us far enough that eventually we stop modeling others and begin “modeling” ourselves; as we gain confidence and strike out on our own, our own mannerisms, behaviors and body language become totally spontaneous, flowing freely from within.

The point of all this is that habits of confidence, like mental and physical health, can be trained and re-trained over time.

THOROUGH PREPARATION

Preparation for a challenging task that will test our confidence is the key to successful completion of it. Preparation, in this context, can take many forms: reading, researching topics, attending workshops, talking with other mentors or other leaders about their experiences, practice, rehearsal, and especially gaining real experiences.

Preparation, and especially building the habits of preparation into your everyday existence, is a process that needs to be trusted. Just as with a workout regime and diet change, or investing your money, there is great value in building routine into the process, and letting your results compound over time.

There is a great temptation in modern Western society to be impatient, and expect instant or at least very quick results; but this is folly since the biggest and best changes in life are those that build momentum gradually, over time, until eventually you notice that your life is now fundamentally different — perhaps even unrecognizably so — than it used to be.

Remember, some people say research indicates that it takes 21 days to build a new habit (or discontinue an old one). I haven’t found the research to support this but intuitively I know that one must stick to a new behavior until it is “wired” into the subconscious. Neuroscience would state that we must stick to a newly desired behavior until new neural maps are formed. This implies that ridding yourself of old behaviors will vary based on the “hardwiring” of the old behavior. Actually it is easier, and quicker, to create new habits. Undoing old habits is what is hard. So focus on the new, positive behaviors you wish to create versus old, bad habits you wish to break. There are no quick fixes; trust this process. As Michael Merzenek stated in his 2002 article, Cortical Plasticity, “The brain was constructed to change.”

At last we end at the beginning.

If you don’t already have a string of successes behind you, it may be very difficult to imagine yourself being successful with a new behavior.

In that case, the typical advice is to start “faking it till you make it”; because once you’ve made it ONCE, you can “fake it” a little less…and so on and so forth, until you do have the solid record of past success that emboldens you.

However, a lot of people have trouble with that idea of “faking it." How can they act authentically from a place of confidence, and still follow the advice to “fake it”?

The answer is twofold; firstly, we really should lose the language of “fake it till you make it”; instead we ought to say “Model it until you master it”. Faking implies deception, and our new behaviors should be emptied of major (inauthentic) deception.

Secondly, it’s important to remember that we are not only talking about leaders with no experience, but leaders with experience who would like to advance their experience rapidly.

Put another way, if confidence is based so heavily on past experience, how are we supposed to “leapfrog” intermediate experiences and get access to higher levels of results in a shorter time frames than we would normally expect?

What mental structure can we put in place that will allow us to successfully fake it until we actually make it? Think about these questions:

1. Can you disprove that your goal is unachievable?
2. By not committing to the belief do you risk what might be gained by having that confidence?
3. Is what’s at stake valuable and important?

If you answered #1 - No, #2 - Yes, and #3 - Yes, then taking small reachable steps to build your confidence is important.

Too often we find that we are plagued by comments or experiences from the past that keep rearing its head as we set new goals or start new projects. There's an old saying, "Once bitten, twice shy." An example of a twice-shy person might be a child who is afraid of dogs because he had a bad experience with one. For example, when first meeting the animal, the child, like most children, was curious, though a little afraid, of the dog. Then, as the child moved closer, the dog growled at him. Now the child is twice shy of all dogs. In other words, the child's confidence around the dog, or any dog thereafter, lessened. Sometimes this happens to us, our confidence is shaken because of a bad past experience.

But, what would have happened if, when the child approached the animal, the dog wagged his tail, or, licked his hand or perhaps performed an amusing trick? The child would feel confident moving closer to the dog and even petting him. Then, when the child came across another dog, he would most likely feel comfortable with that dog, too. Given his positive experience with the first animal, he would be confident around dogs. He would have achieved a small success that would give him confidence around all dogs.

Your small successes don't have to start in your work place. They can start in your private life with things like making a commitment to walk everyday for 15 minutes or get your tool shed cleaned out and do so. The trick is to do things that you can successfully complete to your satisfaction and remember all of those small successes that you achieve, no matter how insignificant you may think they are. Start today, building small successes to help keep your self-confidence in tact.

These suggestions assist in the case of attempting to improve your results; especially true if you are interested in “leapfrogging” your normal developmental trajectory, i.e., improving your results and interactions with new behaviors, skills or competencies very rapidly in a short period of time, transitioning into a new role, or developing for a future, larger contributing role.

The point of all of this is to convince you logically of the importance of doing the things that will shore up your confidence; both externally (industry presentations, client relationships, coaching employees, interacting with more senior leaders and/or peers, working out, participation in meetings, eating right, monitoring and improving body language, tonality and vocal projection, etc) and internally (self-talk, monitoring and changing your internal state, or building emotional resilience).

In the future, investigate additional ways to expedite building self-confidence including positive reframing; self-talk; visualization; emotional self-regulation; and mental boundaries.

Remember that confidence is more, much more, than just a state of mind. The following are steps you can begin today towards becoming more confident:

Steps Towards Becoming More Confident¹

• Get healthier, physically and mentally. Start exercising. Actively learn something new everyday.
• Recognize your insecurities. What does that voice in the back of your mind say? What makes you ashamed of yourself? Whatever is making you feel less confident (or even unworthy, ashamed or inferior), identify it, give it a name, and write it down.
• Talk about it with friends, loved ones, trusted advisor, or coach. Wear it on your sleeve. Each day chip away at it; wear it down. There's no quick fix. Get to the root of the problem; focus on it and understand that you need to resolve each issue before you can move on.
• Remember that no one is perfect. Even the most confident people have insecurities. At some point in any of our lives, we may feel we lack something. That is reality. Learn that life is full of bumps down the road.
• Identify your successes. Everyone is good at something, so discover the things at which you excel, then focus on your talents. Give yourself permission to take pride in them. Give yourself credit for your successes. Inferiority is a state of mind in which you've declared yourself a victim. As Nelson Mandel said, “Let (your) own light shine.”
• Be thankful for what you have. Develop an attitude of gratefulness. A lot of the times, at the root of insecurity and lack of confidence is a feeling of not having enough of something, whether it's emotional validation, intelligence, skills, money, etc. By acknowledging and appreciating what you do have, you can combat the feeling of being incomplete and unsatisfied. Finding that inner peace will do wonders for your confidence.
• Be positive, even if you don't feel positive. Listen to how you talk to or about yourself. Speak positively about yourself, about your future, and about your progress. Do not be afraid to project your strengths and qualities to others. By doing so, you reinforce those ideas in your mind and encourage your growth in a positive direction.
• Look in the mirror and smile. Studies surrounding what's called the "facial feedback theory" suggest that the expressions on your face can actually encourage your brain to register certain emotions. So by looking in the mirror and smiling every day, you might feel happier with yourself and more confident in the long run.

¹ adapted from wikiHow