How To Project Confidence Your Own Way
Male and female leaders agree that one of the most important traits for effective leadership is confidence.
This is a conundrum since women are often told that a lack of confidence holds them back in their careers, but our surveys at Elevate Talent (we develop the female talent pipeline, ensuring that there’s equal opportunity for women to thrive and reach their full career potential), show that women themselves don’t feel that they lack confidence.
What’s become clear through our survey is that the real issue isn’t a lack of confidence but the perception of how confident or competent these women are.
Confidence is a gift. Every day we decide who to trust with certain tasks; but what do we base this decision on? In a word, it’s confidence. The person that we perceive to be the most confident in their abilities and performance tends to be given the task.
That’s why it is key to build the reputation that you are the person who gets things done, that you are a safe pair of hands. You have to be the one to start that rumour.
Confidence isn’t about standing on the rooftops screaming or shouting that you’re brilliant.
For example, let’s look at the fairy tale Goldilocks and the Three Bears; one bowl of porridge was too hot, one was too cold and one was just right. There’s a fine line between demonstrating confidence and being seen to have too little or too much.
As women the key differentiator is to demonstrate confidence so that others can instantly recognise it and trust us. People don’t take the time to study you and try to work out if you’re confident; you need to make it obvious and present it in a way that they can understand.
It’s easy to say that someone’s perception of you is wrong but we can’t force them to change. The only way we can change their perception of us is by changing our behaviour and how we demonstrate our competence.
Elevate Talent’s theme of the month is focussed around the Gift of Confidence. We don’t teach you how to be confident because we believe you already are, instead we’ll explore how people make decisions.
From there we can begin to understand what we need to demonstrate for other people to trust us and view us as the right person for that task or role. When somebody doesn’t demonstrate confidence, we feel that we can’t trust them. This is human nature.
Elevate Talent will show you the strategies you need to know to project confidence, and you can translate those in your own way so that your confidence feels natural and is rightly perceived as genuine.
In the coming session, we’ll unpack the three main principles that will create massive impact. They’re literally life changing. After working with one of these principles one client told me that her whole demeanour had changed. She was sitting up straighter and her voice had changed based on just one of those principles, and, more importantly, that dramatically altered how others perceived her.
We would all benefit from focusing on what other people need from our interactions. It’s about their needs. Over the next few blogs, we will dive into the six human needs that American motivational coach and author Tony Robbins has championed. These include:
- Certainty
- Variety
- Significance
- Connection
- Growth
- Contribution
There is a key need for the other person to feel confident in your abilities and we’ll reveal ways you can do that so that you can positively impact other people’s perceptions of you.
I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding around over-promising and under-delivering where we try to impress someone by giving them what they need ahead of the expectation we set. I think that’s the wrong strategy; it just makes people question if you’re capable of doing what they ask.
The sooner we learn how to demonstrate our abilities the sooner we’ll be able to build on our career successes.
Peter Thompson said: “The best place to be on the map is north of confidence and south of arrogance,” and that’s exactly where we expect women to be after The Gift of Confidence webinar.
I’d love to hear your experience of how confident you feel versus how you feel others perceive you. Pop a comment in the box below and let’s open up the conversation so that we can all learn from each other.
For more information about how Elevate Talent can help develop your female workforce and support your organisation to thrive email us at team@elevatetalent.co.uk.
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