Create Confidence

This is episode 152 of the Empowered Team Podcast. Welcome to the Empowered Team Podcast where we explore how to optimize your performance in career, sport and life. And now, your host, vitality and peak performance coach, Kari Schneider.

Hello out there, everyone. Today's podcast is all about confidence. The confidence that it takes to do whatever it is that you want to do. And if you look at this topic and you think about confidence, you think about your own confidence, you wonder, where did it come from? Only once it's disappeared. Where did I get my confidence from before, when I had it? Because now it's gone. And I see this happen with a number of people. So today we're going to look at confidence and break it down a little bit like we did in our coaching calls in the month of September, so that you have a sense of some of the things we work on in our coaching calls in order to peel back what holds us back from what we really want in life. And the reason I chose the topic of confidence is because so many of my clients, when they're working towards something that's really challenging, and I ask, what is the emotion? What is the feeling that's going to have you taking the big actions that you need to take? The answer is often confidence. They reply with confidence. And I've seen that as a driver for so many athletes and so many business owners and so many people who want to go after something that's really meaningful for them in their life, whether it's greater connection in their marriage, whether it's the advancement or startup of a business, or whether it's a fantastic physical goal. Confidence tends to be this thing that comes up over and over and in the variety of people that I've worked with. So when we look at confidence, what really is confidence? The definition is a feeling or belief that one can rely on someone or something. Another one is just the two words, firm trust. Firm trust. I like that one because in just two words, it really exemplifies confidence, the feeling of self assurance arising from one's own ability or qualities. And in our coaching call, we went through some exercises to list off some of those qualities. What are you good at? What do you like about yourself? Some of the things to point towards what develops confidence in ourselves, because what often happens is confidence can kind of fall in our lap because we've repeated something so many times and then suddenly we feel confident in it because we've done it so many times without the repetitious failure that we had in the beginning. We've done it so many times that that failure has disappeared. And then instead of the failure, instead of the apprehension, instead of the self doubt, we have confidence because we've done the thing so many times. So I'm going to distinguish between four levels of confidence or if we think of a scale or a spectrum rather of confidence that we worked on. And one is overconfidence, another is confidence and self confidence and humble confidence. And they might sound like some similar things, and they are. However, the distinctions make a world of difference for the outcome. So for instance, when we look at overconfidence, it's the excessive confidence, the quality of being too confident. And there's some pretty solid negative effects that come from that. And they look like people believing that they are better than they actually are, that they can handle more than they actually can. And I've seen this countless times in high performance sport when someone comes in years ago, they'd come in looking for, they'd go for a goal, they'd look for the physical ability to be able to get them to a national team, the physical ability to be able to get them to a pro team, the ability to make a university team, or to go from a university team to the next level. And they would consider themselves elite already, but they didn't really have a sense of where they really were. If you don't know exactly where you are, you know those maps in the mall, a really big mall that says you are here and it shows you where you are on the map, you are here and then you can understand where you want to go. Well, when people don't really know where they are in relation to everything else around them or everyone else around them that they're comparing themselves to to get to that next goal, then it's impossible to create the plan or the path to, to get them to the next place when they truly don't understand where they currently are. So overconfidence would come up over and over, especially in that, that level of athleticism where somebody believes that they're maybe an elite athlete, maybe they're at a university level, they want to make the next level and they don't quite know how to get there. And part of the problem with the overconfidence is they don't clearly understand where they currently are. They think they are better than they currently are. And this has a lot of negative effects because it can have people make mistakes because they don't have a good sense of their own strengths, weaknesses or abilities. They don't have a clear sense of where they really stand. So they lose trust from people who rely on them because they might over promise, they may make poor financial investments because they think they know more about the market than they actually do. Or, or they waste a lot of time on an idea that can't possibly work because they don't have a clear understanding of what their current abilities are or where they currently are in relation to where they want to go. And that is really an outline and overview of overconfidence. And the reason that I'd like to point that out is so that if, when it comes to developing your own confidence, if the immediate thought is, well, I'm plenty confident, I've got lots of confidence, then you might be dabbling in that realm of overconfidence. And there's actually a scientific term for it, and it's called the Dunning Kruger effect. And the Dunning Kruger effect is one where the better you think you are, the greater the risk you are of overestimating yourself and the greater the odds that you'll stop improving. And it's one of these things where somebody gets better and better at one thing, but they stop learning or they stop improving and they, they think they're really good right where they are and it really prevents growth. And it was in the book Think Again by Adam Grant. He refers to the Dunning Kruger effect as being stranded on Mount Stupid. And it quite literally is that because it's, it's holding yourself back from growing into knowing more and really holding yourself in an ignorant place. So that really sums up the overconfidence. And it's key to identify that for ourselves, not necessarily pointing at others and saying, oh, that person's stranded on Mount Stupid and overconfident, but rather for ourselves, so that we can identify where we currently are and decide where we want to go. And that brings us to really what confidence looks like. Because if we understand that we're not overconfident, but we do want to have confidence, because we know that the feeling of confidence generates driving actions, it generates actions that will get us to our result. That's why confidence can be a key factor in our lives, a key emotion, a key driver, and to take us into the actions that are going to get the results and the outcomes that we really want, whether it's the boardroom, the gym, the family environment. The confidence is something that really, if we don't have it, everything stops. If we have the opposite of confidence, which is doubt, then doubt fuels actions or inactions that won't get the results that we want. So it's not about ego, it's about honest awareness of what you can do or what you're good at. And we tend as humans not to be aware enough of ourselves in our own strengths, our own weaknesses, or our own qualities or abilities. We just don't have a sense of where we stand. We have a poor sense of you are here on that mall map. We don't truly have a sense of what we're capable of, let alone what our weaknesses are. And we often let our past determine what we're going to think about our future. And that also affects our feeling of confidence because of whatever happened in the past. So confidence is often based on the past. So for instance, I'm going to use my little dog as an example. We traveled and I traveled alone with my dog and she is accustomed to being at home most of the time. But we take her out a fair bit. But because of COVID we weren't taking her out as much. And she, when we would go in the car we get a little anxious, there's a little more crying. And she wanted to sit on the lap of the driver all the time, whether it was Paul driving or me driving, she wanted to cry and sit on the lap and be held and all of those things. Well, when I was driving 20 hour drive across the province to get to Northern Ontario, northwestern Ontario, she couldn't sit on my lap that 20 hour drive, that was not going to happen. I was not going to tolerate that. So she had to sit in the passenger seat and she didn't like it and she'd be staring at me, she'd want to be on my lap, want to be on my lap. And then once we arrived at our destination, she was still that same, wanted to be on the lap but I wouldn't let her, wouldn't let her. And then eventually I noticed that I'd take her in the vehicle a whole bunch back and forth from our camp to my dad's house and I'd roll the window down and she started to kind of sniff the air and then she started to poke her head out the window. And after a couple more days she had her head hanging out the window, could see her face in the wind, her eyes squinting, her mouth open, her nose sniffing, her ears flying back, all of the things super confident, did not want to be anywhere near my lap, wanted that window open in the passenger side and sticking her head out the window. And that's where she was confident and happy and right ready to be. Head out in the air. Now this is an example of her past. She wanted to be on the lap, held, reassured that everything was going to be okay, and that past dictated the future behavior every time we were in the car. However, being in the car over and over and over increased her confidence because she started to learn that nothing bad was going to happen. She started to learn that it was kind of fun to stick your head out the window. And. And then she became this little dog that once she got in the car, she could hang her head out the window and enjoy herself without whining and wanting to be on someone else's lap. Now, that's exactly what we do as humans. We are scared and we cry and we hold ourselves back because we haven't done something before, because that little thing is scary going forward. And that is the epitome of doubt. It's letting ourselves, letting our past dictate our future simply because in the past we hadn't done that thing. And so it impairs our confidence going into the future thing that we'd never done before. And that's where we don't want to have our past dictate our future steps. And a true measure of confidence is quite literally that can we do something we've never done before with confidence? Another measure of that confidence would be can you risk failure in front of others that's doing that thing that you've never done before, or risking that failure doing something you have done before, but doing in front of others in a way that might be a little bit risky and risking failure in front of others, Those are measures, outward measures of confidence. So there's a number of ways that I've coached clients to create confidence because it becomes a skill that we want to draw from, like I said before, for our relationships, for our businesses or our careers, and also for our personal development for ourself, for the things that we want to show up in life for ourselves. The confidence to. To get up at the time we want to get up at, eat the food we want, go to the gym, do the things that we want to do, to have the outcomes that we want. And there are some amazing ways to create confidence. It's number one, we create confidence when we honor our word to ourself, when we honor our word to ourself. That is the number one way that we keep showing up for ourself in our own life. There's plenty of time that we honor our word to other people. We show up in integrity for other people, but we don't do it for ourselves. But when we do honor our word for ourselves when it comes to something new, then we believe in ourselves more because we've continued to show up for ourselves in the past. Now, again, we're still relying on confidence from past behavior. It's the kind of concept of, oh, I could, I could hit the ball a number of times over and over, I'm pretty confident I can hit that ball. Again, it's relying on our past behavior. And another one to create confidence is when we have shown ourselves that we can do our pet best, keep showing up, keep putting effort in, in the face of doubt, struggle, or outside circumstances. This example of being able to keep showing up as our best even when things are going wrong is a way that we create confidence within ourselves because it shows ourselves that we can handle things that aren't ideal. We can embrace the suck, we can handle struggle, and we're not dependent on outside things to create our confidence. We keep showing up. A third one, and this is one of the biggest ones I find that makes such a huge difference. And it's all based on action and it's preparing. Confidence can be easily increased by preparing for whatever the thing is that we might feel a bit of doubt around. Maybe it's a presentation, maybe it's a competition, maybe it's a physical event, maybe it's family relationships. When we prepare the conversation, the presentation, the physical training and readiness ahead of time, when we prepare ourselves, we are generating that skill of creating confidence as well. Another one, and this is a powerful one. This is a really meaningful one. And this only really works when we are truly in a solid space individually, because it has to do with serving others. When we serve others, when we contribute to other humans or the world or animals, whatever it is, when we contribute, we see our impact on the world. And when we understand the positivity or the help or the improvement or whatever we are contributing, when we understand our contribution and see that positive impact, that positive ripple on other humans or other entities in the world, then that too increases our confidence in that we really matter, we really make a difference. And the things that we do, the ways that we serve, make a difference. And another one, lastly, here is this one I love to draw upon when I have a client, or when I'm experiencing personally low confidence or doubt or just my confidence has been shaken. And when we look to someone that we admire, we look to someone that we trust, we look to someone that we respect, and we learn from them what they perceive we're good at, what they think our best abilities, qualities, or Strengths, then we can take a look at their opinion and embrace it for ourselves. Sometimes, even though we'd like to generate what we need from ourselves all the time, sometimes we need to hear from someone else. We don't need to hear from someone else, but we can embrace someone else's opinion that we respect and that can support our confidence because of our lack of awareness of our own strengths and our own abilities and our own capabilities and our own weaknesses. So hearing from someone we trust reminds us objectively about what we really can contribute and what we really have going for us. So those are some ways to create confidence and generate it when you really, really want to. And the, the next level of confidence is called self confidence. And the distinguish. The distinguish distinguishing feature of self confidence versus confidence is that self confidence is the belief in oneself without the evidence, without the past evidence. I keep referring to confidence as often being passed base, but self confidence comes from that path, from without any past evidence. Going into the future, going into the thing that you want to attain or generate or the result that you want to have. Going into that with self confidence means that you don't have any evidence you're going and based on your own trust in your own ability, but specifically, specifically your trust in your ability to figure it out, your trust in your ability to face obstacles, face struggle and face outside circumstances and be able to figure it out. That is self confidence. It's got nothing to do with ego. It's got nothing to do with trying to be better than anyone else. It's the honest awareness that you can figure things out and even if you don't know how to, even if it's going to be uncomfortable, you can figure it out. That is the foundation of self confidence. Years ago, in 2005, I was leaving the Canadian Sport Institute Manitoba and I was opening, I was constructing and it was being renovated, the space that I was opening, which was my business, my gym and power conditioning. And I had no evidence that I could do it. In fact, I had looked for partnering from Sport Manitoba, I had looked for partnering from the Canadian Sport Institute and no one would partner with me. And I felt so convicted in the need for the facility for our Olympic athletes. I felt so, so passionate about providing the service to private clients along with the high performance athletes that I was working with, that I continued on, I kept pursuing it, even though I kept getting no, no, no, no in the partnering, no in any of those, those inquiries I would go into and I wasn't even hearing all the reasons why. And I didn't care. I didn't want to know because I really felt that this thing was important. And I wasn't overconfident. I had read probably five business books. As I was considering whether to do this or not, I had spoken with my banker. I had found the funds and put up my own capital and got a line of credit and loan through my home and all of these things. But not from a place of overconfidence, because specifically I was a single mom of a young child and I didn't want to be remotely overconfident. I was very cautious, I was very careful on the numbers and the business plan that I was projecting and in doing so, I kept moving forward. But I didn't have any confidence from any evidence in the past because I had no, I had no business opening a gym in. I didn't have the business background, I didn't know how to do it. I had run gyms, I had created the inside infrastructure, I designed them. But when it came to all of the other things that came to running a business, I didn't have that. So I kept learning and figuring it out and reading books and talking to the bankers and talking to the developers and talking to the landlords and doing all the things and vetting out other people's opinions on certain things I had to figure out. I put up a climbing wall and all the equipment and all the things I had to do and crunching the numbers every single night. I did all the homework and all that was doing was it was all the figuring out actions, it was all the figuring out steps. And that's where the self confidence came from, is the belief in myself, in the belief in the ability to figure it out without having evidence that I could, without having evidence that I could open a business, but having evidence that I could figure things out. And that one ability was what was driving the self confidence. And it allowed me to take massive, massive actions and actually open a facility, open a gym, hire coaches, have national international Olympic teams within my facility. And I had no business really being able to do that because I didn't have the right business partner, I didn't have the right past experience, I didn't have the right anything. But I knew that if I was going to do it, I had to take the action on it and I had to start somewhere and I had to figure it out because no one else was going to figure it out for me. So some of the questions that you can ask to really start to take a look at your ability to figure things out, your ability to work that skill. Because that skill of figuring things out is exactly what's going to develop your self confidence. What are you really good at? Really, really good at? And don't just rely on your own opinion on this because you are not your best objective opinion. You need the outside input from those who see you in action, from those who experience what you can provide to the world, from those who you respect and trust. So find out what you're really good at. What do you really like about yourself? What do you really like about yourself? That might be a question you've never pondered, but it's an important one because it shines the light on the things that you admire, the things that you respect, and the areas of your life that you might want to further grow out of all the amazing things you've accomplished and contributed in this life. Do you have a favorite? What's the. What's the areas of life, the spheres of influence that you have an affinity for. And what would you like? What area of life would you like to develop more self confidence? Because you can, you can develop more self confidence in the area of relationships. Maybe you want to figure more out and read more books on relationships to develop more self confidence that you can manage any of the relationships in your life, whether the work relationships or romantic relationships or family relationships. Same thing for your career or your personal growth. And what I love to do in this is generate cross confidence. And this is just a little term that I used, kind of like cross training. So instead of just focusing on the confidence all the time, borrow from other areas of confidence that you are really confident in. So if I know I'm amazing at baking certain kinds of desserts that I love to create, well, I can borrow that confidence in cooking a meal. It's like if I could figure out how to bake a really mean apple crisp, if I could figure out how to bake some really key Christmas cookies that my family loves. If I could figure that out, then I'm sure I could figure out how to make a really great homemade soup. I'm sure I can figure out how to create a favorite breakfast bake that's healthy and my family loves that is using cross confidence. It's borrowing the confidence from another area and bringing it into an area you're not as self confident in. So, so that you can develop that confidence in yourself and your ability to figure things out, generating your own self confidence. And lastly, I want to touch on humble confidence. And humble confidence is kind of like the holy grail for confidence. It's recognizing and embracing our flaws, our weaknesses, while allowing others to see us how they will. No judgment, but giving space for them to discover our strengths, for them to see what our abilities are without having to flaunt, without having to show, without having to tell all of the areas that we're good at. Now, I'm not saying at all that there's anything wrong with someone who wants to show off their ability in the gym, who wants to share their earnings in their company, for someone who wants to show pride of workmanship in the last thing that they created, there is nothing wrong with that. That is a fantastic example of confidence and a great example for other people to learn from. It can be inspiring and motivating and, and can influence others to create things on their own and can put a amazing positive effect in the world. There is nothing wrong with displays of confidence. Humble confidence is subtly different. It's the. It's not having the need to do that for others to maybe be drawn to you or like or respect you. It's not using it for your own benefit. Humble confidence is really being able to highlight your weaknesses just as much as you can highlight your strengths. It's really showing that, hey, I'm human. I fail and fall on my face. And this is a. These are a couple of the things I'm really not good at. And that's okay. I accept all of me that. Humble confidence shines in leadership because others see you as human, because you embrace all of you. It's an example of self love. This is one of the things that people are drawn to because when someone is all confidence or overconfident, others can't necessarily relate because they might be aware of their own weaknesses and not be aware of their strengths as much. And when someone, when we can embrace our weaknesses, love our weaknesses, maybe be working and failing at our weaknesses, and also embrace our strengths and love our strengths and try to continue to learn about where we can grow and learn about ourselves. That really exemplifies humble confidence and it creates an affinity towards other people in that they don't feel afraid to be around someone like that who has humble confidence because they see them as human and they see them as someone who's relatable and see them as someone who has incredible abilities all. All at the same time. And really, isn't that just the example of what being human is and being able to embrace it all? So ultimately, this exercise or this podcast on confidence is so that you can develop one of those areas or some of those areas on the spectrum of confidence in a way that serves where you want to go, in a way that serves the outcomes that you want for your life. And if I leave it with a couple of action steps, as homework, if you will, or real growth steps, it would be to go to three people and ask, what are three things you think I'm really good at? Or maybe three attributes, and write them down and also ask them what are three weaknesses or three things that I'm really not so great at or characteristics that you may think aren't becoming of me? And write them down. And by the end of that, when you've gone to three people and you've written down the three strengths or the three weaknesses from each of them, and these are three people you really respect, maybe you admire, maybe you look up to them, or maybe you really care about them, you see them as a very good friend, and you get their feedback and you sit down and you look at what all different three people, because hopefully those three people are from different areas of your life. You look at what they've given you, the feedback that they've given you, you may see a couple common things come up. You may see a couple of common weaknesses that came from different people that they shared with you, or a couple of common strengths. Take that to heart to know that that's their perception of what you're putting out in the world. And do this in a way that is not to make anything right or wrong or good or bad, but from simply a space of awareness. Because to generate confidence and to step into self confidence or humble confidence, we truly need to understand ourselves. Our strengths, our weaknesses, our capabilities, our qualities. And that this exercise will go a long way in understanding ourselves, not from a place of judging, but from a place of understanding and embracing and learning more. So that wraps up our session on confidence for this month. I hope this serves you in a way that allows you to look at your life just a little bit differently. We're just trying to shift the angle, look, change the, the angle from just a couple of degrees so that you can see things differently. When we can do that, we get greater perspective. When we get get greater perspective, we see things differently in the world. And we can do and attain and be different in the world or the same. It's your choice. And that's where the power comes in. So I hope this serves you. This month we are bringing new people into the empowered team. So we are excited to grow that at this point and we want more from you. So if you have any interest on specific topics, let us know. We'll bring those topics, we will research them, and we will coach so that you can get the results that you want in your life. Have a beautiful rest of your day and if this served you pop a little comment. Tell us more. Tell us more about what you want to hear about. Have a great one.

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