Stop chasing confidence in the outcome. (#314)
The Confident Leader
BOOST YOUR LEADERSHIP IN UNCERTAIN TIMES
Nathan, a CFO, kept trying to feel confident about how the board meeting would go, and the harder he reached for the feeling, the more it slipped.
He’d staked his confidence on the outcome, the one thing he couldn’t control.
“The score takes care of itself.” – Bill Walsh
This Week’s Edition
This week, why confidence belongs in your process, not your outcome, and how that makes it trainable.
Clarify Your Thinking
For Nathan, the danger wasn’t the board meeting itself. It was where he’d pinned his confidence.
He fell into the trap of feeling confident about the hopeful outcome. We all do it. We try to feel confident about the result. The sales win. The meeting success. The deal closing. The team’s affirmation.
We call it being confident, but it’s not complete confidence.
“I feel ‘pretty’ confident about how this’ll go.”
We hang our confidence on the outcome. Problem: the outcome isn’t yours to control.
So our feeling we call confidence stays foggy. Some days it rolls in, some days it doesn’t, and you never know why.
Here’s the shift. Thoughts lead to actions, and actions lead to results. You can’t will the result. But you own every action that produces it.
That’s where confidence lives. Not in the outcome, but in the process that generates the outcome.
Old Thinking: Confidence is a feeling I hope shows up for the big moment.
New Thinking: Confidence is something I build into each step of my process, where I can see it and train it.
Thoughts Lead to Actions
A process has steps, and you can look at each one and know where you’re solid and where you’re shaky.
Your confidence was never one amorphous thing. It can vary step by step. You just never separated the steps to see it.
So move your confidence off the result and into the process. Three moves.
Step 1. Map the process.
Lay out the real steps of the process to generate the outcome, start to finish. Three steps. Five steps. Whatever it is. You can’t be confident in a process you’ve never defined.
Step 2. Assess each step honestly.
Go step by step and gauge where you’re rock solid and where you’re shaky. Ask yourself, how confident am I in this step in the process? Quantify it. 100%? 70%?
Step 3. Train the shaky step.
70% confident is 30% doubtful. Don’t rely on being “pretty” confident. Train your confidence in that step and move it from 70% to complete confidence.
The less-than-confident step is where you focus on training your confidence: the thinking that needs to change or the skill that needs to be developed.
Nathan stopped hoping for a good outcome and mapped his real steps. Rock solid on the analysis, shaky on holding his position under pushback, so he drilled just that, uncomfortable as it was.
You already have proof this works. Everything you now do with ease once lived in that shaky confidence column. Confidence isn’t a feeling you wait on to arrive. Build it, one step at a time.
Boost Your Performance
Want to stop white-knuckling the outcome and build confidence into your process instead? This week’s video shows you how.
What’s Your Opinion?
For your next big moment, are you chasing confidence in the outcome, or building it into the steps?
Share it with me at robin.pou@robinpou.com
If you are going to be a leader, you might as well be a good one. Don’t let doubt count you out. Have a confident week!
Robin Pou, Chief Advisor and Strategist
We live to make bad leadership extinct so forward this newsletter to others who strive to be confident leaders.
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What is “The Confident Leader”?
During the Covid-19 Pandemic, I began a video series called “Panic or Plan?” It was designed to equip leaders to navigate the doubt they experienced and to rise in the confidence they needed to lead during turbulent times. It took off. I then started this newsletter to equip leaders in the same fashion each week for the doubt that crashes across the bow of their leaderSHIP.
