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Welcome to the 360 leadership podcast, the top rated show for driven women in senior leadership with new episodes released every Wednesday. I’m your host, Lucy Gernon, a multi award winning executive coach for women leaders and the founder of 360. Leaders Club exclusive high level membership for career driven family orientated women just like you. I created the 360 leadership podcast to share practical tips, actionable step by step strategies, and inspiring stories to support you to unlock the power and belief within to accelerate your impact and potential. So you can build a life filled with success, balance and happiness. So are you ready to achieve 360 degree success? No more excuses. No more waiting. Your time is now? Where does your lack of confidence come from despite your success? Your positive, collaborative, educated, optimistic woman who always wants to do better? You’re known for being ambitious. You’re strategic thinker. You’re ideation. You’re loyal. You’re customer focused. You’re a fantastic problem solver. People look up to you. You’re calm, you’re organized. You’re consistent, trustworthy, ambitious, and you’ve achieved so much. Yes, these little voices sometimes can pop up on getting your way. Can you relate? If you can, I want you to know you are not alone. You’re not the only one who feels this way. And today, in this episode, I wanted to kind of break down a little bit about where this lack of confidence can come from, and how to begin to overcome it. Firstly, I want you to give yourself permission to be human. I want you to understand that how you’re feeling. A lot of people experience it I experienced at times, sometimes I you know, people look at me, and they put me on a pedestal which I really never, never want. Because when you put me on a pedestal, I can only fall right? People see me as very confident. And I am very confident. But I wasn’t always this way. And some of the women I work with I look at you guys. And I’m like, do you see what I see? You are absolutely killing it in the business world. And all you’re doing is giving yourself a hard time, your confidence can get in the way. And it can really hold you back from really unlocking that power and belief within so that you can truly accelerate your impact, accelerate your success while living the most amazing, balanced happy life. So there’s a few reasons where does lack of confidence can come from some of them would be imposter syndrome. So you know, I’ve spoken about this before. It’s a really, really uncommon phenomenon with successful people where, despite your success and your level of seniority, you can doubt your accomplishments. And you have this internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud. And even when you achieve success, you can attribute it to lock or external factors rather than actually down to your own ability. So I remember I had a client once and she said, Well, yeah, I probably just got a VP role. And she said, I probably just got this job because it was a right Right place, right time kind of thing. They couldn’t find anyone for it. It was advertised for ages. So they just gave it to me. And when I worked with her, this was one of my private VIP one to one clients who I was supporting her to really up level her leadership skills, there was a lot of change happening in her organization, she wanted to manage the change without losing her absolute mind. She couldn’t see what I see. So what we did was she sat down and wrote out a list of her achievements, which is something I really recommend recommend that you always do, and really see in black and white, how amazing you are. So if you ever do experience impostor syndrome, I want you to know, you’re not alone. And it’s really, really common. But you’ve got to move forward anyway. The other reason that you might struggle with confidence is your high standards. So a lot of the women I work with, again, would come from technical backgrounds, and I have a science background. So I have been trained to be analytical in my thinking. Now I’m a unique kind of character in the sense that I’m very, very people focused and I’m very, very empathetic as well as having the technical, a lot of leaders in the technical space would actually not have the people skills. I know most of you who are listening to me absolutely are people, person, persons people, which is why you’re listening to my podcast. So you can definitely relate to this too, right? But sometimes, because you’re an analytical thinker or technical thinker, you can set really, really high standards for yourself. And this can really, really hold you back and perfectionism and idealism can kind of come in to a to where you set the bar so high for years. Have that it’s impossible to meet it. And then when you fall short of your standards, then you’ll start beating yourself up. And so you’re not good enough. Even though the standards you set were too high to begin with, can you relate? Another reason why you might be lacking confidence is because you’re comparing yourself to others. So when you’re constantly comparing yourself to your peers, to people you see online, to the boys club, the other leaders, all of those things, especially if you’re, you’re comparing yourself to people who are more successful or perceived as being more capable. Like, obviously, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Now, it’s a really, really difficult thing for us to do. I compare myself, but I catch myself when I keep going, stay in your own lane, stay in your own lane, stay in your own lane. So that’s my invitation for you is that if you find yourself comparing yourself to other people, be it that young peer who’s just started, he’s an up and coming, hotshot, I’m hearing lots of these guys are coming out now at the moment, to stay in your own lane, stay focused on your intentions and put the action behind moving forward. And I promise you, as Oprah said, she said, become so skilled at your trade or your craft that nobody can dismiss you. So become so skilled at what you do, become so certain in who you are, and stop comparing yourself to other people. And that’s how your confidence will begin to increase. Another reason you might lack confidence, and I can absolutely agree or relate to this is negative self talk. You will never speak to anybody as much as you do in your own mind. And the way you speak to yourself internally absolutely has the biggest impact on your confidence. So if you’re constantly looking for reasons that you got it wrong, or criticizing yourself, how you perform how you look what you could have done better, it’s literally taking away your power. And lucky for you one of my superpowers is supporting women with confidence at work because it is the most underrated leadership skill known to man. Because if you don’t have confidence, and certainty in who you are, and in your abilities, you are going to miss over for opportunities, you are going to procrastinate on decisions, which is going to slow you down. It’s also going to cause a lot of stress for your team and your colleagues and your co workers. There’s so many reasons, aside from yourself why you need confidence at work. Okay. So my invitation for you on that piece would be to start speaking a little bit more kindly to yourself. Ask yourself, what would I say to my best friend, if she was saying this? What would I say to my colleague if she was saying this, and just start speaking nicely to yourself.
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Another reason that you might be lacking confidence is you have a track record where you’ve made made mistakes, and past failures or setbacks can really leave a lasting impression on your self esteem. Now, even if, you know I remember one time, I made a huge mistake. I think I may have shared this way back on the podcast. But I worked in the pharmaceutical industry, and it’s a very, very highly regulated industry. There’s a lot of complexities. It’s extremely complex. And the impact of mistakes when you work in a regulated environment is severe, especially when you’re dealing with people’s lives in terms of patient safety and things like that. Um, I approved a document that had an incorrect specification. It was the person who edited it, I didn’t realize the change was made because she hadn’t tracked the changes. But nevertheless, I still approved the document and there was a shitshow and I was devastated. I thought it meant I was crap. And I’m what made our situation worse actually is people were judging me. And one thing I learned from that is like you cannot judge other people when they make mistakes. And if you’re multitasking please come back to me kind of side note here. But please don’t judge people for making mistakes because mistakes are all part of business. You will never get it perfect mistakes are going to happen. But what sets you apart from your peers and all those other people is how you deal with those mistakes and how you learn from those mistakes and how you openly share how those mistakes made you a better leader made you a better person so that other people can grow. So please do not see your mistakes as something to keep you in the shadows. I want you shining your light because your company needs you. The world needs you those women who look up to you need you so please please please value yourself because I know that you’re amazing. So if you are lacking confidence, please stop comparing yourself to other people. Stop looking for external validation because when you rely on external validation if you need praise from others if you you know everything and becomes contingent on you getting that validation. And if you don’t get the praise you expect or you feel that you deserve, well, then you beat yourself up even harder with the stick. So my invitation for you today would be to validate yourself. Right out, this is my my little tip for today before we I sign off, if you’re lacking confidence at work, write out a list of your achievements and make them smart love doing this. So you want to be coming up with like tangible. So bottom line savings, increase in revenue, time savings, efficiencies, get the data, even if it’s directional, some sort of an estimate, and write down all of your achievements. Ask for feedback, ask for a positive feedback, stop always looking for how you can be better and actually do more of what you’re already frickin great us because you are great at so so much. So that is my little pep talk for you today. If you’re lacking confidence and you are in a senior leadership role, I want you to know you’re not alone. You’re absolutely not alone. And it does not have to be this way. Just keep trucking forward. And of course, you know, if you ever need support, you can always apply to join 360 leaders club. If the doors are closed right now you can just join the waitlist or you can reach out to me on LinkedIn or Instagram and we can have a chat about potentially working together but honestly, my lovely lovely lovely listener, you are fucking amazing. I don’t say that word too often. But I want you to know, if you’re in a senior leadership role you deserve your seat at the table. So go and claim it stop snakes playing small and go and chase your dreams. So until next time, be safe be well and if you enjoyed this episode, please just take two seconds to rate and review it I would be so grateful. Have a brilliant day. Talk to you soon.
