I’ve been really interested in the role confidence plays in my performance. I accept that some people are naturally more confident than others, I also believe that confidence is a fluid attribute with triggers that can boost or sap our confidence in different scenarios. So how important is confidence and how can we harness it to improve outcomes? Today I will delve into my own experiences and observations about how I use confidence and offer some practical tips.
The most astute observation of me as a person and my effectiveness was not made by a manager, a colleague or even a close friend. This vital piece of advice was passed to me by a senior player in the rugby team I played for in my twenties. Without going too deep into the intricacies of playing rugby, I was a tight-head prop forward and my teammate, Grant, was a blindside flanker. The game often restarts with a “scrum” and all you need to know is that Grant’s left shoulder pushes against my right bum cheek. In other words, no one else on the team could observe me as much and at such close quarters. The rules have tightened considerably now, but back in the early noughties every team usually had one slightly unhinged enforcer, who’s unwritten role in the game was to push the game to the edge of the rules and rile the opposition into a starting a fight or start a fight themselves. Grant was our enforcer and so the source of this wisdom was unexpected. But what Grant told me one day before a game was as true of the way I played rugby as it was with the way I did my job and every other facet of my life. He said: “James, you are confidence player. When your confidence is low you play like crap. When your confidence is high, you play rugby beyond your natural ability. I’m going to tell you before each game why you should be confident, and you are going to play consistently better from now on”.
My mind was blown. With this new found knowledge I quickly learnt which moments early in the game were dictating my confidence levels. I knew my abilities and I learned how to use them to my advantage, which then boosted my confidence further. If I came up against an opposition player who was much bigger and stronger than me, I knew all I needed to do was hang on in the scrums for the first 15-20 minutes when they would have the upper hand. I put no pressure on myself to win the engagements in the early part of the game. My opposition number would nearly always tire quickly and the additional energy I had in reserve would allow me to start winning the head-to-head battles. Each time this situation repeated itself my confidence levels soared.
Add one more epiphany to the mix. I started attending an outdoor bootcamp in Asia and during the sessions I would often be made to hold the plank position for a minute at a time. At first, this is uncomfortable, and your brain is begging you to quit. But if you ignore the messages from your brain and push through you quickly realize that nothing is really happening to your body. It’s not like a set of bicep curls when you reach failure and can’t lift the weight anymore. Your plank will continue to be a plank until you decide to collapse. Provided you don’t have any injuries, the length of your plank is determined primarily by the power of your mind. As a result the world record is now over 9 hours. I can do four minutes and then get bored, but you get the picture.
Putting this together, the mind is truly powerful and if you can tap into a confident mindset, you are likely to avoid under-performance and can increase your performance levels beyond what you previously thought were your limits. Confidence levels tend to naturally increase as you repeatedly succeed at something to the point it becomes routine. What we need to consider is how to become confident in the first place or how to quickly reverse a set-back in our confidence.
I was in an internal senior management conference a few years ago and there was a session on wellness. The facilitator asked the room for a show of hands if we had ever suffered from Imposter Syndrome. Without a pause every single person put their hand up. The facilitator had expected that reaction. But she asked us to consider the results of this unscientific but overwhelming survey. With a few exceptions, most people lack confidence at specific moments or during specific tasks. We do not suffer alone and the very fact that we suspect we may be more nervous than others around us is testament to the fact that it is possible not only to mask our lack of confidence but also to address it so that it doesn’t hinder us.
I suspect that the levers and triggers we can use to boost our confidence vary from person to person. The key foundational pillar for confidence for most people would be the warm comfort from knowing what they are doing. This could be specific training or research followed up with actual experience and first-hand knowledge. Before you get the direct experience, you are reliant on your training and research. In this situation there is room for doubt that your theoretical knowledge will translate to practical performance and results. I find a source of confidence in being able to say I have done all the preparation I can. However, I know many others that naturally tilt towards analysis paralysis. The need to know more and to prepare more comes without any improvement in their confidence levels and often undermines the confidence they do have. There are no easy solutions other than focusing on the task and striking a bargain with yourself as to what a reasonable level of preparation looks like. Once you hit that level of preparation, train yourself to move your attention to something else that warrants more attention.
Another trigger for confidence is that I consider myself to be as effective as possible with information available. I try to simplify tasks down into the constituent parts and break out the easy to do from the more challenging. Rather than the whole task feeling challenging, I boost my confidence by confirming that broad areas will be straight forward and that a few areas I can devote more thought and emotional energy to.
Another confidence trigger for me came from very early in my career. I chose to believe that there was no significant difference in natural ability between me and someone who had been successful in their career. The difference in ability was attributed to experience gained over the course of their career. At the time I would phrase this simply as “there is no reason why I can’t be as successful as them”. If you can’t say this to yourself, it could point to insecurities that probably aren’t helping you. By saying this to myself I would take the immediate pressure off my current performance and refocus that pressure on making good career choices and putting myself forward for interesting projects. Over time my thinking on this has evolved as I began to realize that luck, appetite for risk and chosen specialization play an outsized role in career paths. But these too give me a source of confidence as I feel my abilities reflect my appetite for risk and specialization, plus I have gladly taken any gift of luck that came my way and didn’t sweat the luck that didn’t.
Speaking with confidence will usually make others feel confident in you and lift your own confidence. That does not mean that you need to know all the answers or that you should say you know all the answers. I like to speak confidently about the gaps in my knowledge, how much impact that will likely have on a project and how I intend to address those gaps. I like to radiate out confidence to my team that we have sufficient knowledge between us that we will find the right solution and together we have the capabilities to deliver. Another way of looking at this is being comfortable sharing vulnerabilities. It is unlikely that we will be right 100% of the time. If you realize that you have made a mistake and something is wrong, having the confidence to own the mistake can be very challenging. I would rather own my own mistakes and address them quickly than live in hope that someone doesn’t spot the error.
Returning to the topic of my second post, many people lose confidence or doubt themselves when they don’t understand what someone else is telling them. My Only Tell Me Twice rule was a confidence trigger for me that pushes the responsibility to be understood back onto the communicator. I have confidence that I will understand someone if they choose to be understood.
To be effective at negotiations you need to be able to take part in tense and uncomfortable discussions. The same can be said for leadership. Negotiation training is probably some of the best training for boosting confidence because there are times when you need to be unreasonable to secure the best value. If you are someone who likes to be liked and draws confidence from this, then negotiations and some aspects of leadership will prove challenging. Having senior support and the knowledge that what you are doing is both normal, expected and meant to feel uncomfortable can help maintain confidence levels.
If you are asked to do something that you know no one else wants to do, then I would treat it as a free pass. A recent example (not my own) was a request to summarize and curate notes on a white board in real time whilst brainstorming with senior leadership. Unless someone is a professional facilitator, most people in the room would be worried about the legibility of their handwriting, their spelling, correctly transcribing the points whilst also trying to actively engage in the thinking process. If no one else wants to do the task they should be very forgiving of minor mistakes and very thankful for your efforts. Knowing it’s a free pass allows you to fully play without fear or nervousness. Sometimes you will be shocked by how much you enjoy the activity you were previously nervous about. The risk is that you do it so well you are asked to do it again, but then your confidence will be up as you have first-hand experience of how to do it well. At the very least you will empathize with others in the same position and help to put them at ease.
I could offer many more examples experienced, observed or even imagined. The key takeaway for me is that confidence is only a state of mind. Your mind usually needs a reason to be in a confident state. The reason can either be direct experience or a trigger that appeals to the rationale side of your brain. That trigger will be something that resonates with you and may not work for other people. For the trigger to work you must want it to work and secondly believe it will work. When all else is exhausted, there is one simple trigger I like to fall back on. When faced with something and I lack experience and confidence; until proven otherwise I am going to confidently expect to be successful. Why talk myself out of being successful when I can take a chance with reality?
I have not covered over-confidence or arrogance in this post. In the industry and organizations I have worked for I haven’t observed many examples and I suspect they are defensive mechanisms to compensate for fragile egos. Expressing yourself with confidence can and should be done with humility. The objective is to give your best performance and to enable people around you to give their best performance.
All thoughts are welcome. Do you have mantras or triggers for spiking your confidence when necessary? Would you feel willing to share them? Next week I want to put forward the idea that it is never too soon in your career to show leadership and what I mean by that.