MARCH 2025 - Why Confidence is Everything
As a leader you may have the skills, the passion, the purpose and the plan, but do you have the confidence? A striking 3 in 5 people say they lack confidence, and it is no coincidence that a common topic to come up in executive coaching is how to increase confidence.
Confidence is a belief in yourself and a secure sense of your own capabilities. Having confidence is not something we have or do not have – it is something that can show up in varying degrees depending upon the situation, the context and your physical/psychological well-being.
In the workplace lack of confidence most often shows up as:
Self-doubt on decisions: protracted indecision, and/or extreme anxiety after making the decision
Avoiding risks, staying comfortable
Not speaking out when it would be helpful to do so - in meetings or in other ways
Not welcoming feedback on development areas
Needing positive feedback from others – unable to self-validate
Hesitating or resisting on applying for job progression
Fearing or avoiding presenting in front of others or having difficult conversations
Eroding others’ confidence - usually team members - through insecurity and defensiveness
A desire to make things absolutely perfect, or else they might not be good enough.
Do you recognise any of these in yourself or others?
We can all have moments of low confidence, no-one is immune.
If you would like to have more confidence, the first step is to believe that it might be possible. This may sound overly simplistic, but many people who have periods of low confidence or repeated specific triggers for low confidence cannot see that they will ever change.
They feel stuck and can integrate low confidence into their personality, or as an affliction they suffer from: ‘I am a person who has low confidence’, ‘I suffer with nerves’.
To nurture confidence, you can look at it as two prongs of focus.
The first is more cosmetic – outward confidence. What do other people see about you? What do they hear? Working at this level over time helps the second level by encouraging behaviour change and practise.
The second is the deeper work - what is going on in the inside - inward confidence.
First steps to outward confidence
Reflect on the areas where your lack of confidence shows up visibly to others and identify how you would like to be seen, or what you would like to do in those situations. This gives you a focus to work towards.
Who already does what you would like to do? How do they do it? What do they do?
Be a magpie and collect healthy body language habits or vocal tone habits that lead towards your goal of outward confidence.
Then consciously practise doing the things that trigger low confidence. You can’t get more confident at something by just wishing for it. You have to do something different to make it happen. Seek feedback from others so that you can more accurately understand how you are being perceived and how you are improving.
First steps to inward confidence
Reflect on what you will have to let go of to make change happen at a deeper level. This may be a deep-rooted belief on what makes you ‘you’ such as:
‘I am a person who is always anxious about speaking out in front of many people’. What if you were not? What would you lose by letting that go? And what would you gain?
We generally hold onto beliefs, even ones that seem unhelpful because they serve us in some way. For example, by holding on to the belief that you are not confident to present to a large group, then it gives you a reason not to volunteer to do so. You avoid discomfort. Yet equally, you avoid getting any better at it.
Recognising limiting beliefs about yourself is the first step to inward confidence and accepting them without judgment. You can then work on a new belief/thought that would encourage you to seek the discomfort of doing something differently and be curious about experimenting with new ways of working or new ways of showing up.
Confidence can wax and wane. It is not static, and it is not a fixed trait. The fundamental belief of the elasticity of confidence can help shift someone to believe that they can make a real change to their confidence level.
What does lack of confidence stop you doing and what change could you make today to start increasing your confidence?