Stop Compartmentalizing Your Confidence

Foreign.

Welcome to this week of the Leadership is Feminine podcast. I am your host, Chris Plackey. And just in case you popped in and you have never listened before, we are moving into episode three of a series focused on female founders and self trust and self worth. So in this episode we going to talk about why it is that you can trust your V, your vision, your ideas and your ambition so much as an entrepreneur, as a leader, but then you struggle in other areas like tough conversations or even self care. In this segment of self trust and self worth for female founders, I break down different elements of self trust in what I call domains like visionary trust, body trust, money trust, and more. We talk about how evidence, identity and past experiences shape where we feel confident and where we hold back. And the key to really moving through that is to identify where your self trust is lacking, leverage your strengths and practice with support. You know, we talk a lot about things that we're not very good at and what I believe is true and it's taught by Marcus Buckingham, who I talk about in this episode, that one of the best ways to get better at something that we're not very good at is to leverage a strength that we have in another area instead of just trying to turn a weakness into a strength. I think you're going to find that really insightful and useful today. So true self trust is the cornerstone of an of impactful life and business leadership. And it's absolutely something that I know we can move you closer to. And as a reminder, I have created a female founder self trust Self worth individual index and I'd love to invite you to take it. Go to the Visionary CEO Trust. You'll be invited to take the index and also you'll have the opportunity to access this master class that you're listening to in video form if you would like it. So without further ado, let's get started. Okay. Welcome back. So in this section I want to talk to you about the anatomy of self trust. So we're going to pull self trust apart and look at it for a second. And, and I will tell you, I was actually about to get into the shower.

I had started working on all of this and I turned on the water. I don't know if other people notice this, but when you turn the water on, do you, do other people get ideas? Right when you turn the shower on? I don't know what that's about. I think there's something to be said for that. But regardless, I turned on the shower and I all of a sudden have this Thought about visionary trust. And what I was thinking about is that as female founders, as visionaries, most of the time we really trust our ambition and what we see. You wouldn't be where you are if you weren't sort of kind of crazy in terms of what you trusted, right? Like being a female founder who created a company from your brain, that's a. That's a heck of a lot of trust in yourself or in your idea. Right? And so I wrote this down, visionary trust. And then I came back to it and I thought, okay, this is so interesting that a lot of us really trust our ideas. We trust what we see as possible in the world, and we see how we can bring people together, ideas together, resources together to make something happen. And in many ways, it's like not even. We don't even question it. We just think, yeah, let's go get it. Let's do it. Let's make it happen. This is super cool, right? But then that same woman who says, yeah, I'm going to create this business.

That I have no business creating. I mean, I have many of those clients who barely even had experience in the thing that they started, and now it's a multimillion dollar business, right? That same woman doesn't trust herself when it comes to having a difficult conversation with, you know, Rhonda in accounting. That same woman doesn't trust herself when she has to hold someone accountable who's worked for her for 15 years. That same woman doesn't trust herself when she has to hold her kid accountable for, you know, staying out too late. That same woman who negotiated a $5 million contract with on Tuesday can't tell Joyce that she can't work from home anymore. So I thought, okay, so is this self trust? And so then what I did is I journaled on it. And what I. What I really figured in my mind is that we actually compartmentalize trust and we'll get into why. But I broke it down into several different domains of trust, if you will. There's visionary trust, right? The trust that you have in what you see and your ideas. There's body trust. There's what you listen to and believe about your own body, your health, right? I would say I have a lot of body trust. I listen to my body, and because I trust what my body tells me, I have saved my life on more than one occasion. I've had a dvt. I had cancer. And I listened to myself and sought out and demanded resources. And I was lucky because I got the right ones. Money trust. There are people who just trust themselves with their money. They trust how they spend it. They trust how they save it. They trust how they earn it. They trust it will always be there. They trust there's more, more and more of it.

And they trust their relationship with it. And there's other people who don't trust money or themselves with money at all. Love, relationship, we can put them together. I trust myself enough to be in a loving relationship, to be myself in a relationship, to be myself with people that I know I am who I am. And I trust myself to show up. I trust myself in the way that I talk to my partners and my friends. I trust myself or I don't. Communication trust. I trust what I say. I have confidence in the way that I speak or I don't. I question myself all the time. I don't trust myself with the way that I give people feedback, with the way I talk about what my needs are. Future self trust, which I sort of put into this bucket of believing in yourself in the future. So visionary trust is believing in the ideas that you have about your business. Future self is believing in and having trust in yourself, creating that version of you. Do you believe that's possible change or transformative trust? Do you believe in your ability to change? So I put all these domains together because these seem to be the big rocks that I hear people talk about. I guess I would add probably the most important one, which is leadership or team guidance trust. But I think all of these sort of fall into those for the most part, especially the relationship and the communication trust. But do you trust yourself to be the leader that your team needs? Do you know what that is? Would you rather not have to do it? So where does this all come from? Right. Because if we think about all these different versions of trust, there has to be some reason why I trust myself more in a $5 million contract negotiation than I do in a difficult conversation with Joyce. And so I thought about it, and I came up with a few distinctions. And as a. As a. As a part of this course, I want you to kind of think about these for yourself. Evidence and repetition. So, first of all, we need. Trust needs to be developed where we've built evidence through repeated action. So if I've done a ton of contract negotiations and they've gone, well, I trust myself. If I've made a lot of good decisions with money, I trust myself. If I haven't, I don't. Right. So there is something to be said for your track record, if you didn't have difficult conversations Even in, in your personal life, in your family life as you were growing up, if those, if everything was just tucked in, we went for the, with the silent treatment, then it's understandable that as you grew up, you did everything you could to avoid those. And then. So you haven't built a lot of competence. This is quite obvious. And yet I think we have to give ourselves some permission for this to be true. The identity and narrative. So trust is often tied to your identity. So as you built this experience, you've also built sort of little mini egos, if you will, right? I had one woman explain it to me in such a great way. Like as you build a life, you build this totem pole. And your totem pole is all the different egos that you've built over your lifetime that will pop up when called upon. Right? And sometimes we don't want those egos anymore. We don't. We're. We. We want those egos to take a rest. They no longer serve us. But regardless, we have this totem pole of egos, right? That are kind of collective. So that's when you say things like, well, I'm not really good at. Or I'm really good with this. I'm really good with numbers. I'm not good with people. I'm really good in front of a group. I'm not good one on one. I'm really great one on one, not so great in front of a group. I can master, you know, how to deal with all this technology, but please don't make me have to send emails. I'm not good with technology. So we, we start to develop these legal little nuggets of identity that are simply just based out of past experience. They aren't who you are, but they contribute to your level of self trust because they become beliefs about who you are. Then we have our environment, right? What gets reinforced? Where do you get praised? Where have you been criticized? And probably more than once. But sometimes once is enough.

When I was in the fourth grade, I did a project late and so. And I had a teacher who lived across the street. She wasn't my teacher, but she was one of the teachers in the school. And so I went over to her house, I asked she. Anyway, we kind of had a little. She was very nice and she was very friendly. And so she, I called her and I said, do you have these an encyclopedia? Because I have to do these book reports or whatever they were, and they're due the next day. Well, she told my other teacher, Mrs. Ellison, that I did it. The night before. And Mrs. Ellison pulled me into the hallway, which in fourth grade, that was a really big deal to get pulled into the hallway. And I got pulled into the hallway and she told me that, you know, I was very talented, I was a leader, I was very capable. She saw that I had a really bright future. But as a procrastinator, if I kept that up, I wasn't going to get anywhere. Now, the fact that I can tell you that I was in fourth grade, what is that, 10? Nine? Now, I don't think she meant to scar me for life, but that, that impacted me for life. And it wasn't until I started to get coaching and unearth some of these truths I believed about myself that were limiting my ability to trust myself and to do big things. Because it's hard to do big things if you procrastinate. Right? It's just better just to stay small. You don't want to take on too much because if you're a procrastinator, you know, you're just going to screw it up. That was a big one for me. And then lastly, there's fear and vulnerability. Some areas of trust just expose us more. And if we don't have a lot of self worth, which we're going to talk about, it's easier to avoid risk. It feels safer to trust money than it does people. It feels safer to trust process than it does your wisdom. It feels safer to trust, you know, traditional expectations of yourself than your own into intuition. I say this a lot and I really believe it's true. I, I believe that if every woman on this planet truly believed herself, don't marry that guy. Yes, start that business. Invest that money there. Spend time with this friend. Don't go to that party, don't talk to this person anymore. Have that difficult. If all of us believed ourselves like rock solid, I believe this planet would be different. And that is part of why I do what I do. Okay, so what do we do then? Right, and this is part of what we unearth in Sage, because of course I'm not meeting with you and I don't know what your specific situation is. And I want to know so I can help you. But in order to go through and sort of build trust, we first have to have awareness that we lack it. And identifying the domains where we have lack of self trust is even more powerful because maybe you don't need to work on all of it, but you do have some key areas where you don't really trust yourself. And I want you to be able to know what those are, then we have to think about what would it look like for me to trust myself here? And one of the leaders in skill and behavior development is Marcus Buckingham, and he wrote a book called now go discover your strengths. And his whole premise of his work is that we don't make weaknesses miraculously better. What we do is we leverage our strengths to mitigate our weakness. So if. If you really, really struggle with difficult conversations with people, I don't think you should expect yourself to become that rock star in it. But what we want to do is leverage. Where are you good at communicating? Where do you trust yourself? And we. We look at why.

Why is it easy for you to do that? Stand in front of a room of 500 people and talk about whatever you do, but you. You struggle to tell, you know, Brandy that are her miniskirts too short?

And how do we leverage that part of you that can stand in front of the room and then come over here? How do we leverage that skill, that strength, rather than turning you around into this miraculously good person? What I want you to know and be able to do is just trust yourself regardless. You don't have to be amazing at it. We just want to trust ourselves. So I know that we can identify what the standard is for how. What it feels like to trust yourself, and we can leverage that in the domains that you don't. Then it's not going to surprise you. What do we do? We have to practice, and you have to practice with support. You know, that's what I love about what I do with my clients, is we role play. We go back and forth. We create a plan, they go implement it, and we talk about it. We debrief. We have to be willing to practice. We have to be willing to fail. We're going to talk about failure. When we get into worthiness, then we have to go through this process that we haven't done it wrong our whole lives. A lot of women get really, really upset or frustrated with themselves when they do start to gain some competence. Like, God, I wish I had known how to do this. I wish I was better at this when I was. Yeah, it's okay. That's. This is the journey that you're on. And you know what? One of the things I like to think about is that your. Your kit. I've. I did a podcast on this years ago. But you. You are your own little kit, right? Like a jigsaw puzzle. You're your own little kit. I like to think that you're your own Little university. And you, your university has curriculum. And inside that curriculum, there's going to be these courses that you're going to have to take. Now, you don't sign up for them. These courses come at you in the form of circumstances and people you didn't know that was coming. And that becomes the curriculum and the coursework that shapes you. And what we don't have with this kit is what the end product looks like. We don't have, you know, on a jigsaw puzzle, we have the picture on the front that we're supposed to be creating. We don't have that. So we spend a lot of our initial parts of our lives looking at everybody else's kits, looking at everybody else and what they're doing and figuring out how to be who we should be based on what we see outside of the world. We're a very mimetic community, mimetic culture. And the problem with that now with social media is you could go on there and spend four hours and come up with 1200 ways that you should be. And the one I want you to figure out is the one you were already born with, the desire you have. But the noise of the world is making that very hard for you to find. But we have to do that. We have to do some self repair and then we have to integrate a version of you into you that you most want so that you most trust her. So self trust. We can't underestimate the vital nature of you developing self trust in the domains that you don't have it as a successful, powerful, accomplished woman, because I know it's limiting you.

It doesn't have to.

It is solvable. So let's do that together. Okay, I'll see you in the next one.

We everything that you've already created, I know it might seem crazy to say that you don't trust yourself, but I have found that that is really true. And what I have found is that trust is not linear. It falls in different categories as female founders. There's visionary trust, there's money trust, there's love trust, there's communication trust. And so I built an index for you as well as a masterclass. And I, I want you to have it.

It's free. It's a powerful tool for you.

Both of them are for you to get some insight into yourself. So go to the visionary CEO trust so we can start this conversation and stop you second guessing yourself, questioning yourself and kind of having those like cringe moments where you wonder if you said it right or did it right. You're doing a great job and I want to give you more tools so that you feel more confident, more empowered, and more emboldened as the amazing person that you already are. Go to the Visionary CEO Trust. Take the Self Trust Index and get access to my free masterclass on self trust and self worth for female founders.

Let's do it.