Trust Your Ability as a Confident Leader
You want to be a confident leader, no matter what. Confidence is the belief or trust in your ability to act in a reliable way. The Confident Leader programs help you have complete trust in yourself, your decisions and your behavior.
That’s not easy though, given the wide variety and changing nature of the enormous responsibilities in your job.
The Problem: Apprehensions, Second-Guessing and Delay
How do you respond to challenging leadership situations, such as:
- When you have to correct an employee’s poor performance
- When you learn of unethical behavior by someone in your
organization
- When you need to disagree with or push back on your
boss/Board
Most leaders who lack confidence would either put off addressing these situations, or they would overreact and later regret the way they handled it.
One of the primary causes of low leader confidence in situations like these is negative thinking. It erodes leader confidence.
Negative thinking includes:
- Apprehensions (“I’m not sure if this is right.”)
- Self-judgments (“I’m too tunnel vision; I’m not considering
enough options.”)
- Other-judgments (“She’s arrogant. She’s going to get it
wrong.”)
It’s hard to come across as confident externally when you're in conflict internally.
What Leaders Want: To Be Confident
To be confident and effective, leaders want freedom from inner conflict. You want to be in alignment. By alignment, I mean that your thoughts and beliefs are self-assured and on the same page. That’s when you’ll not only make and communicate stronger decisions, but you’ll trust your ability to handle whatever happens as a result of them. That’s unflappable confidence. Just like the leaders I’ve helped through the Mind to Lead retreats, you can: - Let go of fearful and self-doubting thoughts about your leadership ability
- Notice and examine your negative projections about others
- Resolve conflicts with irritating co-workers
- Regain your confidence to make decisions and take risks
- Be self-assured in meetings with your boss or senior management
- Enjoy the challenge and satisfaction of leadership, right here and right now, no matter what
How Do You Get There?
A Confident Leader uses the power of Inquiry to examine and let go of stressful thoughts.
You can’t wish confidence into your mental state. Confidence comes from letting go of the fearful and self-doubting thoughts that all humans have. Even though no one else can hear them, your negative thoughts can have a dangerous impact on your behavior.
For example, let’s say that as you’re walking down the hall to a customer meeting, you notice that your mind is having the
thought, “This client is a bear; she’s going to hammer me on the budget, and I’ll cave in.”
A moment later, you walk into the conference room, smile at your client, shake her hand and begin talking about the project.
Based on your pre-meeting thoughts, how confident would you come across in that conversation? How would you respond to her
forcefulness? And, how would you feel about yourself if you caved in to her demands?
Inquiry lets you investigate and neutralize your internal thoughts and feelings about the client and yourself as well as enhance your external behavior during the conversation. Instead of believing your stressful thoughts, be curious about them like a detective would be. Investigate whether your thoughts are true and the impact they have on your attitude and behavior.
When you're confident, you spend more time doing and very little time worrying about what you do. It’s not that you shouldn’t think. You should seek data from multiple sources, reflect on options, and make thoughtful decisions. Those are good action steps.
But, once you’ve made a decision, don’t spend any time worrying
about it.
Learn More about Calm, Confident Power
To learn more about what Calm, Confident Power is, check out:
To learn more about developing skills for Calm, Confident Power, check out the Mind to Lead programs:
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