Why can’t you just be confident? Why are you confident in some areas but not in others? How do you create But how do you create confidence if you are lacking it? In the episode, we’ll answer these questions and discuss:
Jill Griffin is committed to making workplaces more successful for everyone through leadership training and development, team dynamics workshops, and employee well-being programs. Her executive coaching, workshop facilitation, and innovative thinking have driven multi-million-dollar revenues for top agencies, startups, and renowned brands. Collaborating with individuals, teams, and organizations, Jill fosters high-performance and inclusive cultures while facilitating organizational growth.
Visit JillGriffinCoaching.com for more details on:
Follow @JillGriffinOffical on Instagram for daily inspiration
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Why can’t you just be confident? Why are you confident in some areas but not in others? How do you create But how do you create confidence if you are lacking it? In the episode, we’ll answer these questions and discuss:
Jill Griffin is committed to making workplaces more successful for everyone through leadership training and development, team dynamics workshops, and employee well-being programs. Her executive coaching, workshop facilitation, and innovative thinking have driven multi-million-dollar revenues for top agencies, startups, and renowned brands. Collaborating with individuals, teams, and organizations, Jill fosters high-performance and inclusive cultures while facilitating organizational growth.
Visit JillGriffinCoaching.com for more details on:
Follow @JillGriffinOffical on Instagram for daily inspiration
Connect with and follow Jill on LinkedIn
Hi, welcome to the Career Refresh podcast. I'm your host, jill Griffin. I'm a former media and marketing executive, turned career strategist and executive coach. I spent my career working my way up and through the ranks of global organizations and startups, and today I show others how to be the same. Join me each week as we discuss the strategies and actionable steps to leverage your strengths, increase your confidence and develop your career well-being Ready, let's do it. Hey there, welcome. I'm glad you're joining me today.
Speaker 1:Today's topic is juicy to me and it is often misunderstood. It's about confidence and what I call the confidence gap. So I just want to ground. Self-confidence is one of the most important feelings and attitude we need to practice and adapt, and if you do a Google search on how to develop confidence, you'll get like a billion like literally a billion results in the search returns around confidence, and there's even a featured snippet on Google that has a list of 10 ways that you can build your confidence, and it includes things like do the right thing, exercise, stand up for yourself. And I always think well, how do you stand up for yourself if you don't know how to do it and you lack confidence? How do you jump that gap?
Speaker 1:So, first, self-confidence comes from being secure in your abilities. It's about having your own back. It's about trusting yourself. It is about knowing you can get through something based on your abilities. Confidence comes from evidence of previous successes, and getting clear on both is super important to closing the confidence gap. So many well-meaning people will tell you that you just need to be more confident. Why don't you just be just practice. Just practice the things so you can be confident.
Speaker 1:And I've often wondered why someone can be so confident in one area of their life yet utterly lack confidence in another area of their life. Because if you have equal experience in these two areas and in this case meaning minimal experience then why does one challenge increase your confidence while the other challenge decreases it? And I'm here to tell you that it is because of your emotions, your feelings. It's because you are letting your feelings run the show and your emotions again, or feelings are coming from your thinking. Some people are frequently self-confident and others. The feeling comes and goes, but most people have some varying level of confidence based on their thoughts about their past circumstances, performance, evidence and experiences. When we pick up negative thought patterns, it's kind of like putting an octopus to bed. No, seriously, sometimes the anxious achiever in you figures out how to slog through, make it work, figure out the challenge, but then there's the new challenge, and then there's that octopus arm or is it a leg that you're like looking for? How you're good enough in one area of your life and you can do it, but suddenly that doesn't translate to the other area and there's this obvious gap between where we are and where we want to go.
Speaker 1:I've seen so many articles in business journals about how to create confidence through practice, and for me there's that irritating quote that practice makes perfect. There's usually some expert again well-meaning who is telling you to work hard and practice the thing and you know what. You should even do it in front of a safe audience, and that if you keep practicing, you will outsmart your natural talents and attitude. And this evidence is definitely helpful, but it's not going to do anything for you if you don't change your thoughts, and that's the gap. I've also read that when you produce work and you get positive feedback from your leadership, you'll finally see how valuable you are, so that you can be more self-confident.
Speaker 1:Nope, it doesn't work that way. You can't fix your self-confidence solely through accomplishing something you think if you could do the thing or get the win, you will feel better about yourself. But you cannot close the confidence gap through something external. It is an inside job. Yes, you can get training and you can practice and you can increase your confidence going back to those business articles. But it still comes back to your thoughts. Your external wins and other people's feedback do not create your self-confidence. They can't. When you are trying to get external validation, you are basically outsourcing your thoughts to someone else. You are asking someone to give you a thought that you can think for yourself and you may feel better about yourself for a bit, but you haven't changed the underlying thoughts you have about yourself. A situation, a circumstance in your career does not create your feelings. Your feelings are created by your thoughts. So something outside of you will never create what's needed inside of you.
Speaker 1:Self-confidence is about knowing that you can experience any emotion, any feeling, and, even though it may totally suck. Self-confidence is about knowing you can get through it. You can live to, talk about it. It means trusting your judgment and abilities regardless of any circumstance. Whatever thought you are holding onto will create your experience. Cognitive behavioral therapy has taught us about the think, feel, act cycle, and Chinese philosopher Lao Su is credited as the person to write and I'm paraphrasing here your thoughts become your words and your words become your actions.
Speaker 1:So what kind of things are you saying to yourself? If you are asking yourself questions like how come I'm not successful and do other people see me as a failure, then you are setting yourself up for failure. The work here is to shift your thoughts and to ask yourself better questions. The key to asking yourself better questions is to flip to why statements. Ask yourself why shouldn't I accomplish this? Why shouldn't I accomplish the things that I set my mind to? Why should I waste my time on my fears instead of focusing on my strengths? When you ask a better question, you will get a better answer.
Speaker 1:Learning how to create self-confidence is about being the watcher of your mind. You have to believe in your ability to succeed before you can create self-confidence. So if you go into a situation knowing that you can handle it, then that is exactly what will happen. It does not mean perfection. It means that you can handle it and get through it, and if you know how to handle anything, that is where you create the self-confidence. This is also what it means to have a growth mindset. It's the belief that you can manage your emotions, develop knowledge, improve your skills, get trained and practice. But you see, again the gap comes back to. We're just normally telling people to practice. We're not telling them to manage their emotions and their thoughts, and that is the gap. The emotions and the thoughts have to come in with the practice.
Speaker 1:Viewing challenges and an opportunity helps. You see that bumps and bruises along the way are opportunities for you to strengthen and manage your emotions and your confidence. And I swear that I am not lying that when I get nervous or anxious today about a challenge, I see the trigger for what it is. I do think that's juicy, because it shows me where my work is. It's like, ooh, this is a new area to explore, and why am I suddenly anxious, nervous or lacking confidence in something? So how do you do it?
Speaker 1:Well, the first step is reminding yourself that self-confidence is not about your achievements, but confidence is here's where it gets a little tricky. Looking back is only providing you with evidence, and this evidence can help you rewire your brain. But looking at past experiences and success for proof that what you've done before, that you've done something before, something that was new and maybe, just maybe, it's possible that you can do it again. When you review your past victories and remember that you've accomplished things in your life, that little boost sometimes can move you leaps and bounds. It allows your mind to think positively. If you gave an impactful presentation to your company last year, well then, why wouldn't you be able to complete your next project by whatever deadline they've given you? Relishing in these moments of pride can help you see that you can do it again, and the more you do this, the faster and easier it is to get there.
Speaker 1:If you don't have any achievements yet, then building self-confidence is about building the belief that you already have what you need to get through the challenges. You may not have the skills, the knowledge or the experience, but you believe you can get there, and this has to come from your thoughts and then your feelings. This doesn't come from the external achievement. When I launched my own coaching and consulting business four years ago, I had zero experience in running my own business, but looking at my past successes as an employee, developing and leading teams I thought to myself well, maybe I can do this too. And if you're looking for a crash course on wanting to build confidence, then building your own business is like putting miracle grow on all of your shitty thoughts. And that's a good thing, because in order to scale my business, I had to scale my brain, and the way to scale my brain came from building new levels of confidence. I decided to believe that I'm capable of getting what I want. Based on adjacent experiences, you can do hard things and succeed. I had to become a different person in order to be a successful, confident entrepreneur, and you can get the same thing by thinking about the times that you, personally or professionally, showed up for a hard challenge.
Speaker 1:What did you overcome? What did you think you couldn't handle? Yet you did. You've been dealt with challenging personalities, disappointments, uncertainty, grief. You've done it before, and remembering the times that you've done it before can be helpful as you approach your next challenge.
Speaker 1:Amy Cuddy is the American social psychologist and she's done a ton of research on the impact of how we hold our bodies and the impact that our bodies have on our mind. She's got a great TED talk. I'll put that link in the show notes, but the poses she suggests immediately change your body chemistry and these changes affect the way you do your job and interact with other people. Think of it like an athlete getting ready for the game. Right, they're amping themselves up to create that shift, to create that confidence. That's another way of generating confidence against something that you haven't done before closing the gap. And lastly, consistency and frequency are some of your best tools. Practicing your thinking where you've overcome challenges in the past will help you build the self-confidence to know that you can do it again in the future. So if you think you want some help or boost in building your confidence, I'd be honored to help you. Check out the details in the show notes. It'll also tell you where you can apply for my one-on-one coaching program.
Speaker 1:Alright, my friends, thanks for joining me this week, until next time. Hey, thanks for listening to the Career Refresh podcast. If you're enjoying this and want more information, go to my website, gelgriffencoachingcom. There you can find information on how to work with me one-on-one or my group programs, or even bring me into your workplace. I'll put the link to my website in the show notes, but hey, listen before you go. Do me a favor Rate and review this podcast, because it definitely helps me get the word out to people everywhere so that they can also thrive in the workplace. Alright, friends, I appreciate you. I'll see you soon.