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Confidence in your own abilities – particularly when it comes to influencing and inspiring others – is an essential part of leadership. In order to communicate effectively, and coach others so they work effectively as part of your team to achieve your goals, you need to radiate confidence, even when you’re feeling a little unsure of things.
Before you can inspire confidence in others, you need to be self-confident, and there’s a thin line between self-confidence and arrogance. It’s not a question of being so self-confident that you don’t listen to criticism or you can’t take on board your partner’s or colleagues’ advice and opinions – that smacks of insecurity. It’s a question of knowing your own worth, and that comes from within yourself.
Confidence doesn’t grow as a result of success – it’s not dependent on external influences. However, without confidence, you will not make it as a leader, so it’s something you need to work on if you aspire to be a leader. Leaders need confidence to make tough decisions and get their team behind them. Confidence allows you to make a decision and commit to it, even when the going gets tough. If your team can see that you believe in yourself, they will believe in you as well.
So, how can you build confidence in yourself? As was mentioned before, confidence is something that comes from within, so clearly it’s to do with having the right mindset. These are some of the ways you can build confidence and become a leader.
CONFIDENCE IS ALL ABOUT feeling good about yourself, and if you look good, you will feel good. So, dress smart, hold your head high and walk tall. Stride out, and step up your pace. Walk like you know where you’re going, and like you have a purpose other than just getting from one place to another. Look and feel important, and you will be more confident.
Work out to tone up your muscles and increase your stamina, and if you need to lose a few pounds, get onto it. Exercise releases ‘feel good’ hormones into the blood stream, and it also helps you relax and sleep well. And if you look good, you will feel good, as well as projecting a good image to the people you are leading. Take control of your body, and look like a leader.
Keep the stress levels down, because stress will dent your confidence. You might want to try meditation or yoga to relax yourself and clear your mind of negative thoughts. Work on looking and feeling good, and your confidence will grow.
DON’T LEAVE THINGS to chance, and don’t make ‘guesstimations.’ If you’re delivering an important speech or presentation, practice before the event. Run through everything in real time – read the speech, show the slides, cue the music – whatever you’ll be doing, do it first without an audience. Then run it past somebody you can trust to give honest feedback.
Rather than read from your speech notes, print off using a large font, and highlight the main part of each section, so you can just glance down for reminders. If you’re reading from a script you’re not making eye contact with your audience. Eye contact is a sign of confidence, but reading from a script dents that confidence, because you come across as unsure of yourself and your audience.
Another thing that will give you confidence is to anticipate any questions the audience might ask and think about some answers to them. Research any facts and figures, and make notes of the things you think might come up on a separate sheet of paper from your speech notes. A little behind the scenes work like this will help you prepare and give you more confidence.
Always think past the actual speech or presentation. If any elements are controversial, have some arguments, statistics or study results available to back up your argument and answer challenges. Thorough preparation will help underline your authority in the topic and boost your confidence, so don’t just ‘wing it,’ be well prepared.
COMPLIMENTS ARE FUNNY things. Everyone loves to receive them, and feels they should give them, but very few people can handle the art of compliment giving and receiving graciously. When someone gives you a compliment, just say ‘Thank you,’ and smile. It’s enough. Most people’s natural response is to be self-effacing in the face of a compliment, but all that does is demonstrate that you don’t have confidence in your abilities.
As well as learning to accept compliments graciously, you should also make sure to praise someone who has done a good job. This shows that you notice and appreciate their contribution, as well as demonstrating that you are confident enough to acknowledge talent in others. A true leader celebrates the achievements of his team, rather than feeling threatened by them.
If you’re sincere when handing out the compliments, you will win the support and loyalty of your team. Everyone likes to be appreciated – and a confident leader will let his team know that they are indeed appreciated.
THE REVERSE SIDE OF the compliment coin is criticism. Nobody is perfect, and nobody gets everything right every time, so there will be times when you, or a member of your team, will be criticized. This is not a comment on your character, or anything personal at all. It just means there is room for improvement. Confident people listen to criticism and act on it – they don’t try to justify their position, because they know that the criticism is deserved.
Most people realize when something has gone wrong, but some people can’t cope with the criticism. They see it as a personal slight, or a reflection on themselves, rather than what it really is – an observation that something didn’t work out according to plan, and an invitation to put things right. Be confident enough to embrace criticism, and you will make a great leader.
FAILURE GETS A BAD press, but it’s actually something that everyone goes through at some stage. There’s an old saying that ‘Anyone who never made a mistake never made anything.’ That should tell you that it’s okay to fail. If you fear failure, you cannot possibly be confident of success. That fear will hold you back, so you need to look at failure in a different light. See it as a positive, rather than a negative.
Thomas Alva Edison, one of the most famous inventors and innovators in history, famously said ‘I have not failed, I just found 10,000 ways that did not work.’ He was confident that, eventually, he would succeed in what he was aiming to achieve. Take inspiration from Edison, and see failures as opportunities to extend your experience. Sometimes, you need to fail in order to gain new knowledge. While it’s a good strategy to learn from the mistakes of others, sometimes you need to make those mistakes for yourself before you can move forward. Failure increases your knowledge and expands your skill set, making success more accessible.
Here’s a third quotation for you: ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’ It’s the same with failure. To be a confident, effective leader you also need to know what it feels like to fail. The first time it happens, it feels like the end of the world, but when the world keeps turning, and the sky doesn’t fall in, you realize that failure isn’t as bad as you expected it to be. It gets to a stage where failure holds no fears for you, and that’s good news. It means you are more confident, and you can relay that confidence to your team by making it clear that although failure is not something to go looking for, nor is it something to fear.
It should be clear by now that confidence is not something you are born with – it’s a state of mind that can take a while to become second nature. However, the good news is that just as the muscles in your body can be trained and sculpted to perfection, so your mind can be trained to be confident in everything you do. It’s a belief in yourself borne of the knowledge that you can do – or be – anything at all. Confidence is what you need to be a leader – confidence in yourself, and confidence in your ability to encourage and inspire others. Once you have that confidence, you can work on your communication skills, but confidence is essential if you aspire to be a leader.
