Personal leadership and confidence come from knowing and trusting yourself whilst listening to your intuition.
Self-awareness is a key factor, as without this deeper view and understanding, change is limited.
Right now, Covid-19 has given us the most treasured gift of all, the gift of time. If we use it wisely, we have a wonderful opportunity to do the self-work needed to launch our goals even further. Sometimes we need to take a step back, to pause and reflect, before taking our next step forward.
A great framework for self-reflection is Transition Hub's Personal Confidence Model, which highlights the many layers that showcase our unique qualities and abilities that comprise our professional identity.
With personal confidence at its core, this model emanates out starting with transferable skills, followed by knowledge and experience and finally, at its outer layer, how we represent our professionalism.
The outer layer is most powerful and authentic when we have clear awareness of our inner core.
Personal leadership and confidence come from knowing yourself, trusting yourself, and listening to your intuition.
It is this inner confidence that creates a positive impression and impacts your ability to engage, influence and inspire others.
As we move outward in the model to focus on transferable skills, it’s here we think about the difference between our technical skills and those that can transfer into anything and everything we do. Those skills typically underpin our career performance, and yet we so often take them for granted, assuming everyone can do them because these skills have become automatic and easily done without thinking.
But, if we stop and reflect on these skills, we find an incredible strength and confidence that forms a solid career foundation.
The next layer is knowledge and experience, which are usually gained on the job over time. Too often in business however, we draw confidence from these outer layers, rather than a belief in oneself – which truly centres us.
As a result, we are inclined to worry about our technical skills not being deep enough, or our lack of experience not being good enough to hold a credible seat at the table.
Sadly, this erodes our self-esteem and confidence, which leads us to question ourselves, forgetting the many qualities and strengths that contribute to both our personal and career success.
By focusing on all four layers of the Personal Confidence Model, we lead from a place of authenticity and create a strong individual style, based on trust, credibility, and presence.
This ‘wholeness’ becomes our personal brand, to which I encourage you to bring colour and light; that which reflects who you are, as that’s what makes you uniquely you.
Often this is displayed in the first few seconds we meet someone, in our body language, in our verbal language or tone, what we wear and in our energy. Simply smiling with confidence and eye contact can communicate so much about who we are. It breaks the ice and lifts the heart, releasing those feel good hormones - endorphins, connecting us as humans.
Right now, more than ever, we need to connect with people, to appreciate how as humans we are wired to connect with others. It is this very reason why social isolation is so testing right now.
While many are being redeployed and made redundant, it’s important to remember that work is only one of many dimensions in our lives.
Whether for you, work simply pays the bills, or perhaps enables you to fulfill your passion or potential, it’s important that our work doesn’t come to define us. It’s important to look closely, with gratitude, at all of the experiences we’ve had throughout our lives; the good, the bad and the ugly. They all count. And each has given us a gift of wisdom that we can use and share for a lifetime.
We have the ability to create our desired impact and make conscious choices about how we show up in the world. How we want to be perceived should feel natural and innate to us, adding rather than zapping of our energy reserves.
When we lose sight of it, then it’s times like this that give us the headspace to stop, reflect and observe – to see what we truly need to have in place to nurture our confidence and put our best selves forward.
Personal leadership takes discipline, effort, energy and choices to lead from a strong base.
Ask yourself, ‘What are you leading with?’
Coach & author bio: Annemarie Kanturek is a Transition Hub Career Coach. She is also a transformational change, organisation development and business improvement consultant who brings a pragmatic, creative and holistic approach to her work.
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