If confidence is something you’d love more of – because it would open up so many more opportunities for you and those around you - here’s something that will help you make a start.

My Five Keys to Leadership Confidence quiz. It takes five minutes AND gives you some simple strategies or ideas to implement straight away.

Santa can’t give you confidence. In fact, no-one can GIVE you confidence. You’ve got to take responsibility for changing whatever it is that’s getting in your way.

And you CAN do it one step at a time.

Start with the Quiz.

PS: In early 2020 I launch my Lead with Confidence programme . The price? About the same as a quality one day leadership course but with focused, actionable content and ongoing support (+++ no need to travel, find a parking space, do cringey role plays, put up with the pompous prat in the corner or drink lukewarm coffee). Intrigued? Email me at [email protected] and I’ll let you know when we’re launching.

When we lose the need to have all the answers and really HEAR what someone is telling us (without interrupting, analysing, justifying or judging) our personal power grows stratospherically.

And I’m talking about power WITH people not power OVER them.

Let me give you an example.

Working with a busy team in a high-tech industry recently , I noticed how one of the leaders in particular had a great capacity to hear what was being said and ‘dig deeper’ with her questions.

The others played verbal ping-pong. Now they are a great bunch of people and hugely talented. But this one leader stood out like a beacon.

She really got to understand one of the key problems in the team.

The sense of ISOLATION and LONELINESS experienced by some of the new team members. (Their words).

When we don’t listen well, we miss that very emotive language that tells us so much. So whilst everyone else talked about ‘induction policies’ this leader identified a much more powerful (and much more simple) solution...

One of the things that can deflate our self-confidence is rejection – in fact rejection is one of the things we are hard wired to fear the most.

So I was interested to read recently about Jia Jiang’s experiments and work on embracing rejection.

It got me thinking – one of the things my father always did was ask for a discount – pretty much anywhere we went. My teenage self would cringe and want the ground to swallow me up. But he got surprisingly more ‘yes, ok’s’ than you might think.

And I realise how much this helped me later in life – negotiating ridiculously low hotel room rates when I worked in the travel industry, in particular, to get the best deals for our clients.

Even now, if we’re making a big purchase (house, car) I’m the one who asks for the reduction/discount with no qualms whatsoever. It’s an area of my life where I feel very confident.

So it got me thinking about other areas in my life where I would like to be more confident and how I might ‘practise rejection’.

Here’s ...

I’ve learned over the years that the first step to making something happen is to simply declare your intention – to make a public commitment.

Yes it can be uncomfortable.

But public accountability is powerful.

So if there’s something you want, start by ‘putting it out there’.

And, importantly, ‘put it out there’ to people who are on your side. Who’ve got your back. Who will support you in whatever way you need (and call you out on any BS.)

My big commitment for January 2020 is to launch my online and group coaching programme.

I’ve been planning it for a while but ….. (Yep, my avoidance is linked not only to the volume of work involved but to a bit of ‘inner critic’ a bit of ‘what if….’(insert ridiculous catastrophic phrase here….)

All the usual stuff that I am sure you will recognise in your own life. (Fear of rejection is one of the most powerful fears of all).

But we have a choice. To hide and stay ‘safe’ or to come out where it feels a bit less safe.

I’m going with the latt...

Lack of leadership confidence is holding too many people back.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

I want you to know this.

Firstly - Confidence is made not born.

Secondly - we can ALL grow our confidence with integrity and without undergoing a personality transplant or becoming a clone or an arrogant, entitled idiot. 

Thirdly - We’re making a BIG mistake when we say ‘I’ll do that (whatever ‘that’ is) when I’ve got more confidence’.

NO, NO, NO!!

The way we become MORE confident is by taking on those new challenges one step at a time.

Taking action effects change. 

If you want 2020 to be the year you REALLY step up and find that confident you (and help those around you find THEIR confidence too) then keep watching and keep reading.

I’ve got a ton of things to share with you.

P.S. If you’re in my Effortless Leader Revolution Facebook Group I’m doing a 30 minute live broadcast today at 1pm UK time (1st November) on: Four Ways to Grow Your Leadership Confidence. You’ll need to join the group to get...

Last week I shared an experiment with you. We looked at ways to read the room and tune your antennae – with a view to effective positive change in your meetings or interactions with others. I shared an experiment to help you do just that.

The article is here if you missed it.

Here are the kind of things you might notice now that you hadn’t really noticed before (or if you had – you’d not done anything about it).

People committing to things and then not doing them. As one person said ‘When I did the Reading the Room experiment it became obvious to me that commitment was lacklustre at best. I realised we need to understand why we’d got into this pattern and what we need to do with it. It’s almost become accepted that people won’t deliver on time’.

‘It made me realise how much people talk for the sake of it and don’t add anything new to the conversation. This is seriously adding to overwhelm and time wasting for everyone. It also made me realise how much I do that too’. Ooops! Work to...

Think about the meetings you attend.

How many people do you know who waffle on, fill the silence, finish people’s sentences, feel the need to tell everyone how smart they are (in a round-about way, of course –all that humblebragging on LinkedIn and elsewhere!)…. What about the people who stay silent, play ‘victim’ and blame others for everything?

If there’s a hint of self- recognition there, there’s an experiment I’d love you to try. It’s all about OBSERVATION (This is your FIRST STEP).
​
This experiment is best done in a small meeting that you are not chairing. Ideally it would be a meeting that you attend fairly regularly.

Your role in this meeting is to watch and observe AND as we coaches like to say a lot… ‘to be curious without judgement’. The purpose is simply to tune your antennae and to practise reading the room – so that you start to notice things that would normally pass you by.

The 80/20 rule applies here.

You need to listen for 80% of the time and speak only for 20%. Here are ten ...

Last week I wrote about the very real fear of ‘saying it as it is’.

I had my biggest number of responses EVER!

In honesty, I’m not surprised – my Facebook Group members (nearly 1200 now) say this is one of their biggest challenges too.

‘I know I’m a people pleaser’, you said.
‘My manager tells me I’m too soft’
‘I don’t know how to raise this issue’
‘My team want me to sort it but I don’t know where to start’
‘I dread the tears’
‘I know she’ll get aggressive and deny it’
‘Is it a British thing?’ someone asked me?

(I work internationally and would answer ‘no, not necessarily!’ to that question.)

So many of us struggle to work with the tough stuff.

The good news is, I can help you with ALL of this.

If you’d like to get this sorted once and for all then get in touch.

There are a variety of ways I can help which work with your budget and your availability.

One of the things I struggled with as a leader (and in my early days as a coach) was being able to ‘say it as it is’.

I hear my mother’s voice (God rest her soul) in my head telling me not to ‘ make personal remarks’ and ‘if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all’.

I get it – but these messages we pick up in our early years are not always helpful to us or others as we navigate the adult world of work and life.

Now of course I’m NOT saying that we should make intentionally hurtful remarks or start behaving like mad internet trolls and being vicious, spiteful and mean.

But something gets lost in translation along the way.

I had to do a lot – and I mean A LOT - of personal work to understand that there is another way – a way to be refreshingly honest AND show empathy at the same time. My desire to please people and to be liked had a positive side. But they also stopped me from helping others to grow, develop and change. (If I could avoid giving a difficult message, I woul...