3 Steps for Women Leaders to Build Confidence

A survey, commissioned by KPMG in 2015, interviewed 3,014 women. One of the findings was illuminating:

“Women cited ‘confidence’ (63%) and ‘determination’ (63%) as the top two characteristics leaders had; however, less than half of women (49%) personally identify with ‘being confident’ today.”

This is clearly a dilemma, right?

If the majority of women regard confidence as being key to becoming a leader but they don’t see themselves as confident… does this mean they largely also don’t identify with being leaders?

What are your thoughts as you read this?

 

 

How to Build Confidence in Your Value

Over the years of coaching professional women, looking to change careers, step their careers up a level, or chase those big C- level seats I have definitely seen a key barrier to that success as being a lack of confidence in their abilities, their value and even credibility.

To sell you to anyone else you must first sell you… to yourself!

Women are tremendously good at looking externally (at the people and the world around them) to gauge their levels of success.

This means they compare their situation to others to assess how they are tracking.

This is a human trait of course (men do it too) but I have observed that women use external validation regularly, daily and on many different measures.

 

How is Comparing Yourself to Others Potentially Harmful?

1. Well, first up, it slows you down.
2. You’re second guessing yourself a lot.
3. And you get into a rumination-inertia pattern that means your self-doubt slows you down to getting nothing done at all.

Wouldn’t it be so much easier to not get into patterns like these?

So how can you stop it?

How can you grow in self-confidence?

The quickest and most valuable strategy is to stop looking externally and to look internally, at what you’ve already got (in bucket loads):

 

 

Step 1

Do a self-assessment of where and how you add value. If you want to take work as your focus point, do that.

Go on, get a bit of paper and write this stuff down!

Just do a brain dump of loads of examples where you already are adding (but perhaps not acknowledging) the buckets of value that you add daily, weekly, monthly!

Think about your day to day, your team, how you support your manager, how you innovate, make decisions, frame strategy… the list is infinite… work now to capture yours!

Can you visualise your bucket of value filling up?

 

Step 2

Write a list of at least 30 experiences (life and career) that have either changed your life; challenged you (and you emerged victorious); or opened your mind.

I know your mind is shrieking out right now, “I’ll never think of 30!!! There won’t be – I know it!”

Even if I said “find 50”… there will be… I guarantee it! Just give yourself permission to explore the concept and see what unfurls!

 

Step 3

Lastly, if your goal is leadership (or stronger leadership) start to explore what that means to you.

Question whether or not you are identifying with that vision. If you are, awesome – keep it up!

If you’re struggling to see yourself or identify as a leader, ask what’s blocking you from fully associating with that role?

Can you see how powerful it is when you dig deep and really challenge yourself with questions like these?

The more self-awareness work you do, the greater clarity and control you gain. With clarity and control, you get another ‘c’: CHOICE.

Make some new choices today and instead of focusing on what you are not, start bathing in all that you ARE.

Rebecca

Rebecca Allen, COI of Illuminate Personal Growth, works with professional women to help them take their careers to the next level. If you are feeling underwhelmed by your lack of career progress, looking for support and encouragement and keen to learn new skills to improve your prospects, then you’re in the right place. We provide online career courses, courses for women, live workshops and leadership trainings in Sydney as well as 1-1 executive coaching. Get in touch!

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