A Simple Step to Confidence
Thanks to many of you who responded to my survey on topics of interest. Overwhelmingly the topics you asked for were Confidence and Burnout, so I’ll give you both. This is the second of my confidence series. Also watch out for the webinar coming in January: The Confidence Toolkit – How to Know What to Say in Every Situation, From Navigating Your Career to Inspiring Your Team
with confidence. His team loves him but he doesn’t feel that his management sees him as a leader, and he’s worried about his future at the organization. In a simple assessment we did, this client learned that his superpower is knowing how to bring out the best in each member of his team and inspire them to do their best. He is a people leader. With that knowledge, he can focus on growing his team and the positive impact they have on the organization. He now also realizes that to serve his team he occasionally has to advocate and push with management so that the whole team can grow.Does this sound familiar? Maybe you want to be like your colleague who has amazing ease with clients and you just never find the right thing to say. Or maybe your boss wants you to just get things done and you swirl in indecision. One of the biggest challenges to confidence I see is that we think we have to be good at everything to be effective. In “Managing Oneself,” Peter Drucker says, “One should waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence. It takes far more energy to work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.”
If you are early in your career, take some assessments and pay attention to the projects or jobs that energize you. If you are farther along, it’s not too late. Most of us do our jobs, “our way.” That means that if you look backwards at peak moments in work, you can find what skillsets to carry forward. A great tool for this is the Strengths Finder 2.0. Take it, then do what I call the Impact Bullseye. On a sheet of paper put each strength in the middle, one by one, then make flower petals for how that strength impacts your team, your boss, the organization’s bottom line, your friends, etc.
A surefire confidence killer is to step over what you are good at. Please pause to really understand what you bring to the table and learn to embrace it.