Confidence is an essential trait for great leaders, yet it remains elusive. Every leader, regardless of experience or accolades, has faced moments of self-doubt, hesitation, or fear of failure.
This lack of confidence can manifest in several ways. Maybe you “play it safe” and avoid risks, preventing innovation and growth. You might try to “control everything” and micromanage teams, signaling a lack of trust and lowering team morale. It can affect your mood, decision-making, and ability to foster a positive work environment, stifling both personal and organizational progress.
Or, imposter syndrome, as Adam Grant suggests, can benefit leaders when it fosters humility and encourages growth by highlighting gaps between your perceived abilities and others’ expectations. This recognition is a first step toward intentionally building confidence.
Confidence isn’t magic; it’s a skill that can be nurtured and refined. Let’s explore four practical ways leaders can develop more courageous, impactful leadership.
1. Accept the Possibility of Failure:
Mark Manson offers the “Confidence Conundrum,” stating that confidence comes from being comfortable with failure rather than expecting constant success. “Comfort in our failures and with what we lack allows us to act without fear, to engage without judgment, to love without conditions.”
This aligns with ideas from the eight worldly winds, which emphasize cultivating inner resilience and a grounded perspective in the face of fluctuating conditions like ‘success and failure.’ Both are bound to arise, but neither defines us. External recognition, both positive and negative, ultimately blows away, leaving only our inner resilience. Acknowledging this impermanent nature helps prevent an inflated sense of our abilities, creating the confidence to take calculated risks.
Comfort with failure without delusional bravado allows us to persevere and ultimately improve. Accepting failure as a possible outcome creates room for action that creates more confidence and a chance for growth. It lets us move past being stalled by a need to succeed or the fear of failure.
2. Rewrite Self-Limiting Beliefs:
Negative internal narratives have the power to shape our beliefs, including confidence, and resulting actions. Learn to recognize and challenge the “negative voice in your head” that tells fear-based, negative, unhelpful stories. Then, tune into your inner wisdom to find more useful narratives.
This negative voice is often trying to protect more vulnerable parts of our ego from being exposed or hurt. It manifests as thoughts like, “You’re not worthy” or “No one likes you.” Recognize and explore the origins of these negative narratives. They can come from past trauma, unmet childhood needs, career failures, or any painful event. Recognize the meaning added to these events beyond their facts that shape our “stories”.
Shifting from the negative voice requires recognizing when it is speaking and actively cultivating our inner wisdom, which speaks from a more positive and self-aware perspective. It creates stories coming from love and wisdom that have different, more useful added meanings and interpretations.
This gives us the power to rewrite stories like, “I am resilient” and “I am enough.” With these, we reclaim ownership and create narratives that result in more productive thoughts and actions.
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
3. Keep a Growth Mindset:
People with a growth mindset believe that they can improve through hard work and effort. They embrace new challenges and learn from mistakes. Practice recognizing when you fall out of a growth mindset, even if temporarily, and reframe toward growth.
If confidence comes from being comfortable with failure, then a growth mindset builds comfort and encourages calculated risk-taking that creates success and even more confidence.
4. Embrace Critique:
Leaders must build a support network that encourages open communication and vulnerability. Actively seeking feedback from trusted peers, coaches, and mentors reveals blind spots, illuminates negative narratives, and generates creative ideas for greater confidence to take bold, authentic action.
Beyond yourself, encourage open dialogue in a safe environment across your teams to build a supportive culture, making confidence part of how everyone thinks and works. Regular ACT check-ins and fierce feedback encourage diverse perspectives, build trust, and improve retention and engagement. Open conversations allow leaders to connect with their teams on a deeper level, inspiring them toward a shared vision and creating work environments where individuals feel motivated. They create more growth and better outcomes, building confidence across the business.
Three bonus tools:
- Mindfulness Exercises: Use meditation and breath exercises to help calm the mind. This enhances self-awareness and resilience and creates space between stimulus and response.
- Gratitude Practice: Write in a gratitude journal or spend a few minutes with a partner each day expressing gratitude for what you have. It rewires your thoughts to promote happiness, mental and physical health, resilience, stronger relationships, empathy, and generosity.
- Visualization Techniques: Regularly imagine successful outcomes and scenarios. Seeing success and progress in your mind’s eye fosters positivity and discipline while reducing anxiety.
How will you build more leadership confidence in these times of high uncertainty?
Adventure Humbly. Live Boldly. Please share this article to help others confidently take bold action.
Jon Strickler, Vistage Chair & Executive Coach
Find me at: 720 323 0793, jon.strickler@VistageChair.com, Twitter: @HorizonLineGp, LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jonst, Website: HorizonLineGroup.com
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