The Confidence Guy

Here’s a quick round-up of some of the most useful and insightful things I’ve found on the Net recently - all with a relevance to confidence and self-esteem…

1. You’re Not the Brand I Thought You Were, Starbucks
   An insightful post relating where Starbucks went wrong with dating and relationships. Nicely done.
2. Making It
   Sam talks a lot of sense in this post about what success really looks like, and how TV seems to be making us believe it’s something else. The key point for me is when Sam says - “Be your best - even if no one’s watching“.
3. Finding Time For Yourself In A Busy Day
   I’m a frequent visitor to Dee’s blog, and this post is an excellent example of why.
4. Your Own Big Picture: How to Know What You Should Do Next
   There’s a balance between making things happen and letting things happen, as Monica’s found, and sometimes you have to evolve even if you have no idea what you’re evolving into.
5. Why Women Attack: The Affirmation Effect
   Good for you Allison, couldn’t agree more.

I’m a frequent visitor to The Onion, and stumbled across this great video.

It reminded me how sometimes the trickiest thing to do is not to begin something, but to let go and move on.

Not so long ago I was coaching full time and working from home every day. My commute was from my bedroom, down the hall into my home office. The only time I spoke with people was ordering my morning coffee and while on the phone with a client, which ended when the session was up.

I have to admit to going stir crazy and being bored silly. As much as I loved and still love coaching, doing it from home on a full-time basis doesn’t work for me. I need to be around people a whole lot more than that.

So I needed to make a different decision, and switching to coaching part-time wasn’t an easy decision for me to make. It felt like I was giving up on something that meant a huge amount to me, it felt like I was letting down my coaching peers and it felt like I’d be seen as quitting.

Nevertheless, I knew I needed more stimulation and more human interaction, and it was clear that that was more important to me than sticking with a full-time coaching business. I took a deep breath and went for it, and it was most certainly the right move.

The safe and stupid thing for me to do was to keep doing what I’d been doing simply because it was a known quantity, but the confident thing for me to do was to make a decision to move on. That’s a decision you need to make if:

1. What you’re doing no longer matters to you in the way it once did, and has no relevance to what matters to you now.
2. Neither what you’re doing or what you’ll gain along the way will contribute towards something that matters to you (in whatever measure), or is part of the game you really want to play.
3. You’re squeezing yourself into a box that’s too small for you, pigeon-holing yourself in a way that, left unchecked, will damage your sense of self.

Feel free to write the worlds foremost text on anteaters, igloos or hairnets if that’s what matters to you. Otherwise, make a decision to let go and move on.

How do you stand up? How do you walk down the street? How do you make toast? Chances are the answers to those questions are pretty straightforward (unless you’re an A-List celeb in which case you’ll have people to do those things for you).

You stand up by using the muscles in your legs, using your abdominal muscles to stabilise you and sometimes using something solid nearby to lean against or use as a surface for leverage.

You make toast by putting bread in the toaster and pushing the handle down. Sometimes you even stand up and make toast at the same time (not for the faint-hearted).

There are things that you do all the time - everything you do, feel and think - that either work for you or don’t work for you. If I look at what I did, felt and thought back in 2001 to end up being made redundant and suffering from stress and depression I can see that I ignored the quiet little voice inside me that was telling me exactly what I needed to know, carried on acting like I was perfectly happy, drank as much alcohol as I could and switched into auto-pilot so that I didn’t have to think or feel.

If I look at what I do to make myself such a good dancer, I can see that I have natural rhythm and let my body take over. Just kidding on that last one. I dance like Ernest Borgnine.

If there are situations where you suffer from low confidence - job interviews, first date, networking, etc - knowing how that feeling of low confidence comes about can open up a whole world of possibility. So the question is, how do you do you low confidence?

Here’s something to try -

1. Imagine that you’re handing over to someone else for a day, someone who will step into your life and do everything in exactly the same way you do it, even down to how you think and feel. To let them experience things in the way you experience them you need to write down a step-by-step instruction manual for how you experience low confidence in that specific situation.
   
   Think about what happens to start you feeling ‘less-than’ or doubting yourself? What happens in your head? What do you tell yourself? What sensations do you feel in your body? What’s the next thing that you tell yourself, and the next thing you feel physically? Keep going, and write down every step you can think of that would allow someone to pick up the instruction manual and do exactly what you do.
2. That’s your personalised instruction manual for how you “do” low confidence, and you might already have written down something that’s surprised you or has you kicking yourself. What jumps out at you from your instruction manual?

3. Now try turning it round and creating an instruction manual for having bundles of confidence. For each step of your manual, write down the opposite action. If you’ve written -

   1. I tell myself that I really can’t do it.
   2. I tense up my shoulders and neck.

   then turn it into

   1. I’ve done bigger things than this, so I know that I’m perfectly capable of doing it.
   2. I consciously take a moment to relax my shoulders and take a deep breath.

When you know how you experience low confidence in a particular situation you no longer have to play it out in the same way. Just by knowing how, your instruction manual has already started to be re-written.

The benefits are there if you’re willing to open up and figure out what your instruction manual’s doing. This is all about giving you a choice to do things differently, and this kind of choice needs radical self-honesty and full disclosure.

Right now I’m a happy and very relieved man. The Big Messy Project I’ve been running in my ad agency in London is over. Finally. Done with. Delivered.

The sense of satisfaction and relief is enormous – I’ve finally got some room in my head and space in my day for other stuff other than the often spiralling, politically charged shenanigans concerning Big Messy Project.

The good news is that it’s delivered right on time and doing exactly what it’s supposed to – it’s a successful delivery, which is what I’ve worked my butt off to achieve.

But there were times early on in BMP when I wasn’t sure at all whether any of it would be get delivered, and times when I wanted to run away and pretend that it was just a bad dream (worse than the one I have about being eaten alive by a 50ft Tony Robbins).

Those early please-let-me-run-away moments happened once or twice a week. I’d look at the huge to-do list and feel intimidated by the apparent impossibility of delivering everything, leaving the odd task or two sitting on my list in preference of sticking my head in the sand.

And, wouldn’t you just know it, the more I left something sitting there on my to-do list, the more work stacked up around me. The more I ignored something the bigger it got, and the more I let my work slip, the worse I felt about my ability to deliver great work. The worse I felt about my ability to deliver great work, the worse I felt about myself.

I could have said ‘No’ to taking on BMP, but that still, quiet voice in my head told me, ‘Steve, don’t run away just because it’s Big and Messy. You’re better than that.’

In a recent article, Holly Hoffman hits the nail on the head by saying ‘I don’t want to put mediocre work out into the world… I may not be passionate about my 8-5 job, but I am passionate about being a quality employee and co-worker.’

Nice insight Holly. It reminds me of a scene at the end of the movie ‘City Slickers’, when Billy Crystal comes back from his cattle-driving adventure, having previously thought about quitting his job because he just doesn’t enjoy it or get satisfaction from it any more.

With a renewed sense of vigour and a baby cow in the front room, he turns to his wife and says ‘I’m not going to quit my job. I’m just going to do it better.’

All the time you resist the crappy parts of your work that you’d rather not do you’ll never do great work, and perhaps worse, you’ll damage your perception of your ability to do great work. I’ve experienced this myself, and I know that many of my clients do too.

Make a choice to engage with the crappiest parts of your job and you’ll be surprised at the difference it makes to both the quality of your work and your level of confidence.

That’s me when I was around 4 years old (funnily enough I have a very similar polo shirt that I wear now!). Of course, at that age I had no idea what was in store for me, and just a couple of years later when I was around 6 years old I remember being asked by my primary school teacher what I wanted to be when I grew up. I reflected for a moment and torn between two options I said ‘I’m not sure. Either an artist or an inventor.’

I had two pictures - one of me in a huge studio, being swept along in the moment as I created magnificent works of art that would make people weep, and another of me in a lab coat with crazy hair surrounded by bubbling test tubes and all manner of electronic devices as I used all I knew to build Something Amazing (TM). Those two sides have always been there for me (I’m a typical Gemini) - the art and the science, the creative and the logical, the head and the heart.

In my 20’s I got sidetracked by a successful but personally damaging career in IT, which lead to me hitting my quarter-life crisis, losing my self-confidence and having to rebuild myself piece by piece, and I can see that part of the reason for hitting that crisis point is because I came to live purely in the logical part of me and pretty much ignored the creative side.

As a 6 year old boy I’d identified that both themes were hugely important to me, but ended up paying an extremely high price for it when I went forward with a life that didn’t reflect that.

Those two themes persist for me to this day, and a day where I can use my logic and my creativity is a great day because I get to use the things that have always been there and still persist for me.

Another memory that’s been a puzzle until fairly recently, is when I was 13 or 14 in my Religious Education classes. In some classes we’d ditch the normal teaching format in favour of a debate, where the teacher, Mrs Evans, would lead us all in a debate on particular topics related to religion in the world. One day, she asked me to come up to the front of the class, invited me to sit in her chair and told the class that I was going to lead the debate that day.

It felt great - I was sitting in the big chair at the head of the class, I was letting people speak and counter, and I was managing the flow of the whole thing. I remember clearly how much I enjoyed it.

Mrs Evans asked me to lead the class in a debate 3 or 4 times, and never asked anyone else. Why would she do that? I think the only reason can be because she wanted me to see something. To be honest, I’m still figuring out exactly what, but I think it has to do with leading people and bringing out what’s important to them.

Thanks so much Mrs Evans.

The great thing is that my work now - both the coaching and the ad project management - is a fantastic combination of head and heart, thinking and feeling, creativity and logic, orchestrating and leading - and that’s why it works.

I share this all with you because I’ve worked with hundreds of people who come to me with low confidence, not knowing what they should be doing, and they want to figure out how they go forwards with something that feels right.

They feel stuck, like they spend just a tiny amount of time doing what they love and want more out of their lives and careers. Some of them even wonder if wanting something more is too much to ask for.

In my opinion and experience, having work that includes the things that have persisted for you is absolutely critical in terms of loving your work and getting more richness out of your working experience.

So figure out what your themes are. In your early days at school, what did you want to do when you grew up? What did you want to be when you were a kid? In your teenage years or at college or university, what did you really want to be, regardless of whether you took that route or not? What have been the most enjoyable and rewarding parts of the jobs you’ve had?

What patterns can you see? What are the themes that come out and what still persists for you to this day?

Look at the patterns and themes that have always been there for you. Those things aren’t going anywhere, and ignoring them is ignoring who you are and who you’ve always been, and that’s a sure-fire way to lose all confidence in yourself.

So there I was, chowing down on a sandwich and sipping a glass of wine outside the Covent Garden Hotel last week, when a car pulls up, and out comes Uma Thurman who’s greeted by a couple of people waiting at the Hotel entrance just 6 feet away from me.

I nearly choked on my chicken club.

Now, as my friends will tell you, I think Uma’s stunning. She’s absolutely gorgeous, with a great body of work (cough) and (I imagine) a sharp mind and sparkly personality. I’ve joked for a long time that Uma and me would be very happy together, never thinking I’d be choking on a sandwich just an arms length away from her.

Into the Hotel she goes, and I text everyone I know telling them who I just saw. 30 minutes or so later I walk through the restaurant on my way back from the bathroom, and pass her in the doorway as she walks into the restaurant, obviously having gotten changed and freshened up, and looking just amazing.

I pause as she continues walking by me, thinking to myself “Say something funny and engaging Steve, for Christ’s sake. Go on, bowl her over…”

Of course, I didn’t think of anything and didn’t even go for the “Hi, my name’s Steve” angle. So I leave the Hotel, throwing a couple of glances behind me, not having plucked up the courage to say something to one of my favourite actresses and one of the most stunning women on the planet (IMHO).

I bottled it. I persuaded myself that I shouldn’t do anything, and persuaded myself that I’d end up looking like a complete, star-struck idiot (which is exacty what I was). Faced with a fantasy situation that had suddenly become reality, my confidence escaped me.

Did I blow it? Did I throw away my one chance to say hi, get a photo with her, even have a little conversation with her? Is it possible to say something in that situation without looking like a total jerk and getting thrown out by security?

You know what? I doubt she’d have invited me to lunch, to her room or to live with her in LA, but I bet I could have got a smile out of her (I can be pretty charming when I try), even just a small one before getting thrown out. So should I have plucked up the courage to say something even if it meant crashing and burning?

I’m willing to bet that there’s something you’ve always wanted to do.

Maybe you want to write a novel, maybe you want to visit Africa, maybe you want to open a little coffee shop in your neighbourhood or maybe you’ve had an idea for a neat little product that just might change the world.

Everyone has at least one thing that you dream about, and 99.9% of the time you never do anything with them.

You persuade yourself that it’s pie in the sky, that’s it’s just a pipe dream and that it could never actually happen because you wouldn’t know where to start, couldn’t afford it and it probably wouldn’t work anyway. You lose faith in your ability to make your dream reality, and lose a little faith in yourself in the process.

The more you filter what you wish for, the more you train yourself to think small, and the less confident you become.

But what if it was possible? What if you could make some or all of it happen? What if you had what it took to see something come to life? Wouldn’t that be cool?

Here’s my 3 step process finding the confidence to do what you’ve always wanted to do.

1. Look into it

   Do some leg work and investigate what might be needed to get going. Look online for resources and examples of how other people have done similar things. Go talk with people who’ve been there, done that (use Ecademy or LinkedIn to find good people to talk with).

   Write down what you need to know and what you need to figure out so that you can make a decision to do it or not. Having investigated you might find that in reality it’s not up your alley after all, or you might find yourself getting pretty darn excited at what you’re discovering. Either way, looking into it won’t cost you anything and you’ll never know without doing the leg work.

2. Make a choice

   Once you’ve looked into it, you need to make a choice based on 2 things.

   a. What matters to you. Is the choice founded on something that matters to you personally? Is it something you can engage with on an ongoing basis? Is it something you’ll enjoy no matter how it turns out? If not, you’re much less likely to follow through with it.

   b. Your priorities. How does this fit in with your other priorities (family, finances, career, hobbies, etc)? What compromises are you willing to make going forwards, and where are the boundaries? It might be the case that your priorities are such that now isn’t the right time, in which case figure out what criteria needs to be satisfied and when is the right time.

   Once you’ve figured those 2 things out, make your choice and commit to it. That commitment is what will carry you through, and it’s an attitude and a way of behaving that shapes your experience and behaviour as you go forwards.

3. Do one thing
   If you’ve made a choice to go forwards, do one thing today. Just one thing. Then do one more thing tomorrow.

   That’s all.

   Do one thing every day - no matter how big or small - and in a year you’d have done a whopping 365 things towards something you want. Even the most complex of tasks (and the Biggest and Messiest of projects) can be achieved simply by doing one thing followed by another, then another, then another. Don’t elevate the task to something bigger than you, break it into chunks that you can deal with and tackle each one in turn.

   If the one thing you do on a particular day doesn’t work out, don’t sweat it. There’s the next day to try it a different way so don’t beat yourself up – you can’t control how everything turns out.

   Oh, don’t think that once you’ve made a decision that you can’t make a different decision. Often you need to tune things as you go, and sometimes what you learn along the way renders the destination redundant. Being confident means allowing yourself to continue to make choices that serve you well.

Here’s a quick round-up of some of the most useful and insightful things I’ve found on the Net recently - all with a relevance to confidence and self-esteem…

1. Quote About Truth
   This is what I talk about with every client I work with, so it’s crazy how I haven’t come across this quotation before.
2. A Kick Up the Back-side
   Nice and succinct - love it.
3. Dreaming Through Obstacles
   This post from Jaye Fenderson is a great example of how damn hard life can be, and the simple stuff that makes the biggest difference.
4. The Change that Generation Y is Actually Creating
   A really inisghtful post from Monica O’Brien that hits so many nails on the head that she could build a small out-building from this post.
5. Five Secret Japanese Tricks to Make Life Better
   Silly, frivolous and surprising - this post reminds me of 2 things. Firstly that solutions are always out there and someone will always know the answer (if you’re willing to ask), and secondly, that sometimes the craziest sounding ideas are the ones that work the best (if you have the guts to go out on a limb).
6. Make a Goodwill Tour of Your Office, Increase Productivity
   Forget about any productivity benefits, this article is really about the importance of building relationships with people, even if it’s tricky or awkward to do so.
7. What Defines Success?
   A common-sense article dealing with what real success looks like. Also check out her post about Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It - couldn’t agree more…

A couple of years ago I took a 4 hour a week shift in my local Gap store. I loved it. I broke the store’s sales records, had regular customers who scheduled their shopping for when I was working and I flirted like crazy. I was in my element.

But it was also the first time that I really saw how important body image is with regards to self-confidence.

I had great fun helping women pick out a pair of jeans, going through a few different pairs until we found ‘the one’. I was sure to give honest but positive feedback, and when a customer looked great in a pair of jeans I’d tell them. The effect of telling a woman that she looks great in a pair of jeans was instant.

Every time I did it she’d visibly change. Her posture shifted; her face shone; she became self-approving instead of self-deprecating, and her whole personality seemed to relax. The first time I saw it happen I was pretty stunned at how one little compliment had such a huge effect in their self-esteem.

I see this everywhere on the TV too. There are so many makeover shows (What Not to Wear, 10 Years Younger, How to Look Good Naked, etc, etc.) where, at the end of the show, the woman always grins broadly and her friends and family all say how confident she’s become – something the restyled woman will also enthuse about.

Research indicates that when women over 18 look at themselves in the mirror, 80% are unhappy with what they see. So I’m willing to bet that a month or two down the line those made-over women will slip back into their old way of thinking about themselves, and their self-confidence will slip backwards too. The same goes for those women who I said looked great in their new pair of jeans – they may have been buoyed temporarily but would soon have gone back to their old way of seeing themselves (until the next time they went shopping).

Those makeover shows and my role in Gap all did the same thing – to build someone’s self esteem and self-confidence by dressing up the outside and hoping that it leaks through to the inside.

I’m not about to tell you that “it’s what’s on the inside that matters”, because it’s often more complicated than that. The fact is that your relationship with your body is important - it would be stupid for me to tell you otherwise. If you have a bad body image you have a bad relationship with your body. It’s like having a bad relationship with your partner and not knowing it – you’ll be sure to suffer as a result.

And that means that your body image matters.

Your job is to get along with yourself no matter what, and that includes getting along with your body. By all means hit the gym if there’s something you’re not happy with that’s within your power to change, but don’t go too far and don’t let that be a conditional relationship. Don’t tell yourself “I’ll be happy with myself when I lose 6 pounds” or “I’ll be happy when I can get into those jeans I wore 5 years ago” – that’s making your happiness dependent on a bad relationship with your body and it won’t work.

Also feel free to enjoy a compliment, but don’t go searching for validation in order to get some relief from a bad relationship with your body.

With some clients I’ll get into this area with them, while with others it’s not an issue. What’s abundantly clear and what I’ve seen work is that a good body image starts with radical self-honesty. That means being totally honest about what you like and what you might not like so much, and it’s only with complete self-honesty that you put yourself in a place where you can make different choices. That’s how you’re able to celebrate what you like about your body and learn to be okay with what you don’t.

Let me know how your relationship with your body affects your self-confidence, and check out this neat little body image test.

“It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

If I was to sit you down now and go through everything that you’re currently getting up to I’m sure it would be a pretty long list. All that stuff in your head, all that stuff that occupies your time, all the people, all the to-do’s, all those things you’d love to do if only you had the time. Yep, it’s a pretty long list.

To paraphrase Shakespeare in the quotation from Macbeth above (my English Literature O’Level wasn’t wasted), you get so busy with everything on your list that all that ’stuff’ becomes a load of busyness and pressure that sometimes doesn’t add up to a whole lot.

So sometimes I throw this curveball question at my clients – “On a scale of one to ten, with ten being you at your best, how much like you do you feel right now?”

Think about it. Right now, as you’re reading these words, how much like you do you really feel?

Being a ten out of ten means that you feel absolutely right, like you’re completely yourself, in the perfect place or that you’re able to be exactly who you want to be. Take a moment to figure out where you are on that scale right now.

You may or may not be surprised to learn that when I ask people that question, the vast majority quietly answer “6“, which is a pretty low place to be on the ‘Being You’ scale.

Blowing my own trumpet for a moment, by the time I’m finished with them I always hear them confidently say “9” (10 out of 10 is normally reserved for those utterly ‘perfect’ moments that come and go).

Wherever you scored yourself, it means that the remainder of the scale is busy doing something other than being you. If you scored yourself as a 6 out of 10, it means that 40% of you is busy doing something else. While 60% of you is busy being you the other 40% is occupied with other things that have nothing to do with being you.

Now, I don’t know about you, but that seems as crazy as a soup sandwich.

As long as there’s a chunk of you that’s busy doing something else you’re not giving yourself the chance to be at your best or to feel like yourself, and over time it’s pretty obvious that you’re sense of self will shrink along with your self-confidence.

You need to get to grips with what that other chunk of you is focused on – otherwise you’ll never feel as much like yourself as you deserve to feel.

That’s part of the thrill for me in working with my clients – that I get to see them climb that scale and become more ‘them’. So think about what that other chunk of you is doing. What stuff is it busy trying to deal with? Is it struggling to find a way to make what you want happen? Is it resisting the place that it finds itself in? What’s distracting it? Is it dreaming about what comes next?

Having a piece of you that’s busying itself with not being you makes as much sense as having Ernest Borgnine lead a Jazzercise class.

So tell me, what are you really up to?