Is confidence a natural, or is it learned?

Last month I gave a webinar on speaking up with confidence even as a non-native speaker.

The participants probably expected me to talk about posture, breathing exercises, eye contact and voice, but instead I asked "Who here considered themselves a naturally confident person.?" Only 1 hand was raised.

So I asked "What is confidence?"

Some of the answers from the chat were:

• Alignment 

• Self worth 

• A state of mind 

• Feeling ready

Then I asked what does confidence feel like? And the answers were:

• Inner calm 

• Being secure 

• Feeling powerful 

• Being me

Good answers, but none of the descriptions actually described the physical sensation of confidence in the body. 

That’s where our work began; on tuning into the sensations in our bodies to recognize how we were feeling, and moving on to how confidence actually feels physically in the body. Everyone’s experience was difference but having identified how confidence felt everyone could focus on that sensation, tune into it and strengthen the sensation.

This is just one exercise of many I use with my clients to help them stop shrinking when they walk into high pressure meeting rooms and speak up in a non-native language. They’re techniques to help you be present and know your worth rather than putting on an act and trying to be someone you’re not.

They aren’t superficial hacks to help you ‘push through’ and get the job done, they’re deeper techniques to identify who you are at your core and what the root cause undermining your confidence is. When you take the time to discover that you not only build a stronger foundation for further development, you also reduce your cognitive load, meaning more of you is present in high pressure meetings and you have access to all your knowledge.

When we’re in survival mode we’re only able to access information related to our survival, and sometimes subconsciously, survival looks like saying nothing, which is why your mind sometimes goes blank in high pressure meetings. Subconsciously your mind is denying access to information forcing you to stay safely silent.

Yes, you can force you way through it, but it requires effort and as a leader when you’re pushing through on will power alone, you’re not really present… and your team feel it. Leadership presence is as much about leading yourself as it is about leading others and the work starts with you.

The Leadership Presence Blueprint is designed to guide you through the process or reacquainting yourself with who you are, identify your core strengths and help you access not only confidence but calm, compassion, strength and even defiance when you need it.

When that happens, you can be present and lead with presence while focusing on the matter in hand rather than fighting to regulate an overloaded nervous system.

At the end of the workshop I asked who now believes they are naturally confident? Most people said “I would switch to naturally confident now”

There were other insights from the group:

“It’s not easy to connect with the body as I am used to ignoring it”

“I realized that I never associated an emotion with a body reaction but every emotion also has a body performance. This is a huge insight. Thank you”

“We are all naturally confident, but sometimes it is very well hidden even for us, these are the additional layers acquired through the adult life that make me feel smaller than I am”

“It was interesting to learn in the breakouts that finding the root cause of non-confident cases”

One participant commented “it might help to address finding the root cause of non-confident cases later”

That work or identifying the cause of the disconnect from natural confidence is the next stage. It’s step 3 in my program ‘The Leadership Presence Blueprint” and I’ll be giving a workshop on that in the new year.

If you’re interested in joining one of my workshop or joining signing up for the full program, click below to find out more and join my mailing list.