Building confidence a different way

Thanks for being here. My aim is to provide you with useful, thought-provoking and inspiring content that helps you answer 'WHAT NEXT?' with clarity, confidence and control.

Please don't hesitate to post questions or comments, or feel free to drop me an email at [email protected] or book a free coaching consultation call at livetrue.co.uk.

.......................................................

A few weeks back I set my client Mel what she considered to be a “strange” challenge.

Here’s what happened.

Mel was scheduled to give an hour-long presentation at a virtual industry conference. The other speakers were people she considered ‘A-Listers’, and her audience was going to include peers and sector specialists she rated highly.

The consequence was that Mel was petrified.

Every time she thought about presenting, she felt increasing levels of anxiety. And as she tried to focus on her content, there were three dominating thoughts in her head:

1. Don’t embarrass yourself.

2.?Don’t mess it up.

3.?It’s got to be perfect.

As the pressure to perform and make her presentation a success mounted, it had one overriding effect: Mel stopped taking action.

Paralysed with fear and self-doubt, it meant she kept putting off creating her presentation material, and when she only had a couple of weeks to go, the ticking time bomb became an additional pressure that fuelled her paralysis.

Now, when Mel came to me for help, she was expecting me to do two things.

Firstly, she thought I’d set her some clear goals with deadlines.

Secondly, she thought I’d “kick her butt” (her words!) until she met them.

But that would have done nothing to alleviate the true problem, which was centred around self-confidence and the perfectionistic yardstick by which she was measuring her success.

So I did something else :)

I asked her two unexpected questions and set her an alternative challenge.

The first question was this:

What could you get out of the process, even if the end result doesn’t end up being what you want?

I.e. what could this experience give you or do for you, regardless of the outcome?

Despite wondering where I was going with this, Mel humoured me and after some thought, she said it would help her learn about giving a presentation in a virtual setting, because she hadn’t done this before.

Specifically, she’d gain a better understanding of which engagement tactics?worked best and which didn’t, and how to navigate an online Q&A.

Then my second question bemused her further:

What values do you want to act on in every moment of your preparation and presentation?

I.e. what personal qualities and character strengths do you want to reflect and cultivate through the process?

Here Mel said she wanted to be creative, authentic, adventurous and brave.

And then I set Mel her “strange” challenge.

Rather than focusing on her end goal, which was delivering a pitch-perfect presentation, I asked her to focus on something else:

Getting passionate about the process.

This meant two things:

1. Making the aim about the learning opportunities she’d outlined.

2. Fully engaging with the values she wanted to connect to and embody.

I explained to Mel that this didn’t mean she was giving up on her goal. It simply meant that she was shifting her emphasis.

So instead of her idea of success being purely linked to the outcome, which caused anxiety and self-doubt, it became about the learnings and feeling good through the process as she consciously reflected?creative, authentic, adventurous and brave values, and took related?actions.

So Mel went back to her presentation preparation and tried this out.

What happened?

Well, she reported three results.

Firstly, Mel's clear learning aims meant she started in a different place than originally planned.

Rather than facing a blank PowerPoint deck and feeling the pressure to try and create something, she began with some research.

She looked up engagement tactics and online Q&A approaches, and got ideas from other people’s experiences and lessons learned, which gave her confidence in how to deliver her content.

Secondly, Mel found that approaching content creation from a creative and authentic perspective made it easier to start.

As she focused on imaginative ways to capture her key messages, she got absorbed, and consequently, she completed her material much more quickly than she?imagined.

Thirdly, by reminding herself that her core aim was learning and embodying her values, she was able to relax a little more as she gave her presentation, because she was less hung up on the end result.

And paradoxically, her delivery was much better because of it!

It meant Mel ended up getting much closer to her original goal of being pitch-perfect than she'd thought was possible, which has helped build her confidence for any future speaker opportunities.

So if, like Mel, you’re feeling the pressure to perform, or deliver a perfect outcome on any project or opportunity, try getting passionate about the process instead.

Ask yourself those two questions and then shift your emphasis.

You might just find that detaching from the outcome has two positive impacts:

It makes the whole experience more enjoyable, and it builds your confidence in a different, but effective?way.

Alison x

P.S. Want to work together? Learn more about?my coaching programmes here:

• Raise your confidence
• Career progression
• Career change
• Corporate coaching