Confidence
From friends and colleagues to clients and family, I’m often described as confident. It’s an interesting comment as I certainly don’t always feel confident, and search for the secret sauce to give me courage in many situations. Because of this, I haven’t always agreed with the description and have given much reflection to what others see in my behaviour.
At first I thought my general presence reflected confidence. I can be loud, I can be gregarious, I’m quite extroverted. In a group I share my thoughts, encourage others, look for opportunities to have some fun and generally can be quite ‘big’. These are traits we often see with confident people and it was how I interpreted the trait.
However, as I dug a little deeper the overarching theme that surfaced is a willingness to try, and not be caught up in expectations or results. Trying often means venturing into new territory, including a wide breadth of contexts, that help build exposure to a multitude of experiences. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy - the more experiences you have the more willing you are to try new experiences. There is security in knowing that you’ve tried in the past and have come out the other side; suddenly you have some resiliency in knowing that trying isn’t a bad thing.
Of course, not everything works out well when we try. Another big part of what I see as confidence is a comfort with making mistakes. For me, this is entirely connected to learning, which I love. To learn requires something new, and often new things for us have a bumpy period of errors, mistakes and failures. The perseverance in overcoming those bumps are oftentimes driven by the confidence to get through: I can do this; I will do this; I must do this! The journey to get to the end is never smooth, and despite the results, the learning along the way results in confidence. Always. Even if something fails, once the dust (and emotions) settle, the phoenix that rises is more poised than ever to try what’s new.
This willingness to try is the center of my beliefs about change. If you try a new leadership position, a new approach to how work is done, an adjustment in your perspective to enable transformation, it takes the confidence to make mistakes, learn from them, and continue to persevere. Boiled down, change requires confidence. When we approach change with an expectation that mistakes will happen, it allows us all to be more willing to try.