You're not lacking confidence. You're lacking access to it.

Five years ago I had a panic attack on a scooter in Thailand. It wasn't the panic attack that was the problem… it was the shame and guilt that followed. Shame, guilt and the feeling of failure that I couldn't do what everyone else, young and old, seemed to be able to do without a second thought.

A few days later I decided to do something about it, I decided to do my motorbike test in Germany.

I'm sharing this because that wouldn't have been possible without the techniques I now use with my clients; multilingual leaders in the healthcare industry who struggle to speak up with confidence and lead with presence in high-stakes situations.

And when I say multilingual professionals, I mean people very much like you, because the majority of my clients are capable leaders with decades of experience and excellent language skills.

It’s just that they’ve experienced a confidence crisis, when transitioning into a new role, new team, or new company. Because a lot of this anxiety is managed internally, it isn't always visible to the people around them.

It’s one thing speaking up in meetings or commenting via email in a second or third language, it’s another achieving leadership presence in a foreign language. To be a multilingual leader you need to not only speak clearly and fluently, but be able to do so whilst navigating the cultural challenges of living and working outside your home country with a multicultural team. You need to feel comfortable in the language as well as also grounded in yourself to be able to lead well in a foreign language.

But here’s the thing, even those of us with decades of experience, those of us who are extroverts who enjoy the spotlight, those of us who are native speakers who've built careers helping others perform under pressure; we all doubt ourselves sometimes… We're all human.

We talk about confidence as if it's a skill you can learn, like riding a bike. But...

 Confidence isn't a skill, it's a feeling and it depends on your belief and trust in your own knowledge and ability.

If it were simply a matter of knowledge and ability, people who have 10 or 20 years of experience wouldn't be coming to me struggling with a lack of confidence when speaking up and leading in high-pressure situations. But here's the thing: these individuals aren't lacking confidence; they're lacking access to their confidence.

That might sound pedantic, but it matters enormously. Because when you realise it's an access problem, not a missing skill what you do about it differs. Instead of asking "how do I get more confidence?" you start asking "what's blocking me from accessing the confidence I already have?” … and the answer, inevitably is fear.

But fear isn't all bad; the real problem isn't the fear itself, but our relationship with fear. Fear's job is to protect us from being reckless and doing dangerous things. So trying to eliminate it or push it away doesn't work. What does work however, is getting curious about it, understanding what it's trying to tell you, and showing yourself some compassion in the process. When you do that, you can start to work with your fear rather than against it.

Three ways back to your confidence

We each process the world differently, through 3 main senses, visual, auditory and kinaesthetic, or what we see, hear and feel. And the most effective techniques for reconnecting with confidence work along exactly those lines.

At the HBA workshop I ran last week, I shared the three techniques I use most consistently with clients each one focussing on one of the 3 senses:

• A visual technique and where you consciously reshape how you see a future high-stakes event before it happens, using an NLP approach that goes beyond simply "imagining it going well."

• An auditory technique taken from parts work which tunes into the mental chatter that surfaces before a difficult event, rather than trying to silence it, and learning what it's actually trying to protect you from.

• And a Kinaesthetic technique that helps to define what confidence as well as other emotions actually feel like in your body, so that you can achieve the emotional flexibility to access and associate with emotions consciously depending on the situation.

Talk of emotions might have you feeling skeptical, but naming your emotions matters more than you might think. Most of us are surprisingly out of touch with what our emotions actually feel like physically in the body, which can lead to confusing sensations that are physiologically similar, like anxiety and excitement for example.

Research by Harvard Business School professor Alison Wood Brooks found that reappraising anxiety as excitement, simply saying "I am excited" out loud, led to better performance across tasks including public speaking and high-pressure presentations, outperforming those who tried to calm themselves down. (Get Excited: Reappraising Pre-Performance Anxiety as Excitement, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2014)

My work goes further than re-labelling, though. I help clients identify what they're actually feeling and develop the emotional flexibility to consciously connect with the emotion that best serves them in the moment. This isn't about masking emotions or pushing them away. It's about developing the ability to choose which emotion to associate with.

When you can do that, when you're no longer forcing your way through anxiety or putting on a performance, it's actually less work. It reduces cognitive load and lets you be more present, more authentic, and more effective. Because when confidence is something you access rather than something you add, there is literally more of you present in the room.

Last week I delivered this as a workshop for HBA, covering these ideas along with the three core techniques I use with my clients to help them access their confidence under pressure. If you're in L&D, HR, or lead a team of multilingual professionals and you'd like to bring this workshop to your organisation, drop me a message. I'd love to make it happen.