Cultivating Confidence

 
(Picture from the National Photo Company Collection)


Cultivating Confidence: 3 steps to conquer challenges

The Dictionary.com definition of confidence is:

“1. full trust; belief in the powers, trustworthiness, or reliability of a person or thing:

We have every confidence in their ability to succeed.

2. belief in oneself and one's powers or abilities; self-confidence; self-reliance; assurance:

His lack of confidence defeated him.”

Funny how the very definition of confidence includes the danger of not cultivating it: defeat in the face of challenge. 

To be able to “go confidently in the direction of your dreams” as Goethe said, we coach our clients to use the Power of Personal Brand, as well as change their mindsets and how they communicate, to overcome obstacles like fear and insecurity.

Step One: Use your Personal Brand.

In my previous post, “Cultivating Confidence: 3 first steps to staying focused and strong”, I called a Personal Brand both a powerful tool to build confidence as well as an anchor in a storm, when a challenge can knock you sideways.

It’s clear how you become more confident by defining your Personal Brand: when you identify your core strengths, your passions, key values, and developed skills, you naturally feel more secure about who you are and what you can do.

Using your Personal Brand to conquer challenges means taking the next step - relying on your Personal Brand to ground you, and guide you as you push past your comfort zone, past obstacles and begin to grow.

My business partner and I have discovered this concept works for a wide range of people - from teenagers just beginning to search for their identity and path forward to mature adults who hit a midlife crisis or two.

Adults can find themselves feeling suddenly as insecure as teenagers.

Destabilizing challenges, like executives getting unexpectedly let go at the peak of their careers, mothers re-entering the workforce after several years of caring for kids, or even empty nesters who didn’t realize how much of their identity was tied up in the title of “parent” often feel unclear about their place in the world. 

Defining your Personal Brand immediately reaffirms the wider value you as an individual bring to your community.  It also provides you with a tool - a compass to help make decisions about possible paths forward.

Use your Personal Brand to set new goals that play to core talents and current values. Honor your passions and cultivate skills that align with where you want to grow. 

Using your Personal Brand will guide you as you redesign your life and reframe your future, while remaining true to your core self.

Staying true can be tough when you hear the siren call of old patterns. 

Hold tight to your Personal Brand and you will feel better equipped to resist temptations like pursuing a job description that fits like a comfrotable old pair of shoes: tempting you to slide into that role even if it doesn't match what you've identified as where you want to go.

Step 2: Take control of your thoughts

Your confidence can be shaken if you give into a temptation - let yourself fall into old or negative thought patterns and behaviors. Talk about instant sabotage. It can leave you feeling as wobbly as jelly.

Taking cognitive control cultivates confidence.

Use that jelly-like matter in your head instead. Researchers have now discovered our brains are not “fixed” when we become adults, instead, they continue to be changeable as we age. 

We can continue to grow and actually change the connections in our brain, building new “muscle memory” to create new and improved thought patterns. You can use this neuroplasticity to step out of self-sabotaging behavior.  

This new information leads us right back to ancient wisdom.

How do you take cognitive control? Go back to centuries-old practices like positive visualization: creating mini-movies in your mind showing how you successfully overcome an obstacle and reach your goal. The trick is not to just visualize the end result, but every step of the journey - just like top athletes do before important competitions.

Or you can take control by quieting the chorus of voices inside your head. We all hear them. Choose the healthiest (sometimes it’s the quietest) voice and promote that one to “coach”. Then, bench the loud and obnoxious team members who shout at you, insult you, or question your capabilities etc. Recruit more cheerleaders instead. They’re the ones who say “Why not try?”

You can also take control by mastering the art of deliberate calm. That can be as simple as stopping to take a few deep breaths as soon as a challenge kicks you into fight, flight or freeze mode. Getting oxygen to your brain and interrupting the escalation of stress allows you to think more clearly about the real issue you’re facing.

Step 3: Harness your hormones

Yes, you read that right. Research also shows that we are very much manipulated by our hormones. Under stress, facing a challenge or obstacle, our bodies are wired to pump up the adrenalin and cortisol to help us escape the danger at hand.  In the modern world, the “danger” we sense is usually not life threatening - so we have to calm ourselves down.

One good example of this: people are more afraid of getting up to speak in public than they are of dying. There are theories about this fear, suggesting it’s a survival instinct deeply wired. Apparently we're afraid of being separated from the “pack”, terrified of being turned against, or being left vulnerable to becoming dinner for a passing predator.

You can use your hormonal reaction to your advantage by turning it around - you can be the predator.

Amy Cuddy’s famous “power poses" have been shown to pump up testosterone levels and lower cortisol. That means you can change your internal chemical makeup, temporarily, simply by putting your hands up in the air a la Mick Jagger, or on your hips like Wonder Woman.

This may sound silly - but it’s based in science - so try it before you judge it. See if it helps the next time you step up to the podium.

There is strength in authenticity. 

Are your strengths coming through, loud and clear? Or are you minimising them, even hiding because you don’t feel confident enough to take the risk?

Define, then use your Personal Brand to make your value clear to the outside world - and to yourself. Rely on it as a source of strength.

Reveal the real, powerful you.

Be prepared. The Personal Brand process can be a challenge, requiring unflinching courage and honesty and trust. 

Be bold. In fact, don't just cultivate it - claim your confidence. 

Right now.

Cultivating Confidence

(Picture from the National Photo Company Collection)

Cultivating Confidence: 3 first steps to staying centred and strong

I survived 20 years in a business that is often described as “brutal” because of fierce competition, long hours, few holidays and constant judgment: television news. From an entry level job as a tape-loader, I worked my way up to an anchor seat in a top 10 market. Maaike had her trial by fire in another fiercely competitive world: being an opera singer where the genre is still central to the culture - Europe.  

Confidence was critical to our success.

However, if we allowed it, our confidence could have been shaken to the core, daily - by harsh critiques, angry emails, hiring and firing based on a subjective standards of “look” or “presence”,  instead of talent and work ethic...you name the feedback, we were vulnerable to it.

Without even knowing what to call it, we both figured out a formula to stay strong in the midst of the “storm”: cultivating confidence. It took trial and error, but we determined the best steps to success, a way to believe in ourselves and our ability to succeed.

Step one: Hold on tight to innate talents

We played to our strengths - the talents we knew we could call on 24/7, without question. Those are your anchors in a storm. And we didn’t coast - we worked hard to keep our talents sharpened. For some, however, just recognizing and appreciating their innate talents is a challenge.

We’ve worked with a midwife who dismissed her outstanding ability to seamlessly anticipate her clients’ and their families’ needs as simply “caretaking” - something she assumed anyone could do. We had to persuade a successful businessman, self-conscious about not having a University degree, that being a “self-made” businessman was a true strength he could rely on to mentor others.

It’s not just about knowing your strengths but also your weaknesses. We all have them. When Maaike and I finally realized, after trying for decades, that we couldn’t turn them into strengths, we brought our weaknesses to a manageable level and learned to work around them.

We call it Minding the Gap: managing expectations and relying on external resources to fill in the gaps that matter most.

Step two: Remain true to your core values

Contribution and creativity are values Maaike and I both share, and we are grateful we could make them our focus for many years.

However, when pushed by employers or circumstances year after year, to override another value very close to our hearts -  taking care of our families - we knew it was time to resolve that inner conflict.

How many employees wake up one day and realise what they do violates their values? It may not start that way, but as values shift in order of importance, sometimes you need to choose which value takes top priority at a particular time in your life. After identifying it, it may not always be easy to step right into another job that fits your new alignment - but awareness is always the first step.

Step three: Re-assess, recalibrate and refocus

Because value priorities do shift, always make sure to re-assess. When we felt out of alignment, it was a cue to make a change. Independently we each came to the same conclusion:  find a new professional niche that fit our strengths and passions and then upskill to be able to fill that niche. That recalibration helped us re-set goals and refocus on the best way to achieve them.

This third step may seem obvious but it can require courage. I retired from news, eyes focused on my future. I started a new life adventure by moving to New Zealand, sight unseen, where my husband had a new job. I decided to figure out what I'd do once we got here. For Maaike, the journey was similar. She abandoned her opera singing career and upskilled to follow another passion: guiding others - as a coach and a trainer.

These changes didn’t happen overnight and they took courage. We relied on our deeply rooted knowledge of our strengths, weaknesses and values to keep us moving forward.

When we first met, and compared our stories, we felt compelled to go one step further, and combine the skill sets we’d mastered. We created a company to help others do what we had done: build a strong, authentic foundation, aligned with personal and professional goals. To make sure our outside matched our inside.

We called our company Personal Branz (with a nod to our new home - the “NZ” at the end).

We know that today, the phrase Personal Brand is often considered nothing more than a marketing tool, used by people who want to sell themselves - persuading others to buy what they have to offer. But we believe a Personal Brand can be used to do something far more fundamental and internal: to provide not just an anchor but also a compass, both to inform the choices we make - personal life choices with compatible business choices. And it can help us stay strong, centred and confident when life knocks us off balance.

In other words, a Personal Brand helps cultivate confidence.

These first three steps require introspection, input from people you know and trust and a consistent effort. You'll be stronger for doing it. However, your confidence still will be tested. In the next three steps, I’ll clarify the challenges and identify tools to conquer them.