Four Strategies for Staying Grounded When Surrounded by Uncertainty
When You Don’t Know, Does It Show?
In today's rapidly changing business landscape, the importance of self-confidence in leadership cannot be overstated. True leadership, with all its innate skills, roots back to an inner sense of self-confidence in one’s ability to lead, especially in challenging situations. So, when new situations arise, how are you presenting yourself in an uncertain environment? Leadership presence is grounded by stable self-confidence.
Inner Work and Self-Confidence
We’ve consistently emphasized the significance and value of inner work for leaders. Self-confidence is at the top of the foundational attributes we measure and ensure is stable. Strengthening self-confidence means holding a consistent belief in your ability, proving reliability of your abilities, and ensuring success. Behind the scenes, doubts may linger. But when leaders step up, they must leave their inner critic and performance concerns behind. Today’s high change workplace drives leaders to not only have self-confidence, but keep it stable and reliable.
Strategies for Maintaining Solid Self-Confidence
1. Embrace Continuous Learning
Self-confidence grows when leaders face new challenges with growth mindset and learning agility. Taking on uncertainties and learning from failures build resilience and courage, keeping self-confidence solid even in uncharted territories.
2. Develop Strong Flex Capacity
Flex Capacity, the ability to adapt and respond effectively to changing circumstances, plays a crucial role in maintaining self-confidence. Leaders with strong Flex Capacity can retain their composure, engage steadily, and present a strong leadership presence. This adaptability ensures that self-assurance remains intact when facing unprecedented situations.
3. Celebrate Achievements
Recognize and celebrate even small victories. This practice reinforces self-belief and motivates leaders to tackle bigger challenges. Acknowledging success keeps the foundation of self-confidence strong, ready to support you through unforeseen challenges.
4. Cultivate a Success Network
A network of managers, mentors and coaches can provide invaluable feedback and support. This network helps validate decision-making and strategies, reinforcing self-belief and providing the necessary push to move forward, especially in ambiguous situations. The best networks are filled with cheerleaders that energize you, champions that candidly engage you and a couple of critics whom you can count on to tell you what you may not want to hear, yet need to.
The Role of Teamwork
Watching the Tour de France offers a powerful analogy for teamwork and confidence. Cyclists rely on teammates for support, drafting, and strategy, much like leaders rely on their teams. Even when the odds seem insurmountable, a breakthrough rider, fueled by self-confidence in themselves and confidence in their team, can emerge victorious. The blend of practice, self-confidence and confidence in who surrounds you creates a powerful combination.
Having confidence in the team and self-confidence in yourself significantly bolsters everyone’s ability to be more successful. By relying on a cohesive team, leaders can draw strength from collective insights and support. Strong collaboration ensures that self-confidence remains unwavering, even when navigating the unknown.
Letting Leaders Lead with Personally Cultivated Self-Confidence
Pivotal Growth recently hired Yemisi Iyilade as the new AVP of Leadership Development. Yemisi embodies a quiet and stable inner confidence. When we asked her how she cultivated her self-confidence, she reflected on her journey to date and shared the below.
"Self-confidence is about pushing yourself to handle new challenges and face uncertainties with a mindset of learning. Starting my role at Pivotal Growth, I confronted the unknown bravely. Throughout my career, I’ve realized that facing uncertainties and learning from failures build courage and self-confidence to approach situations with courage. Equally important is a supportive work environment that motivates you to take on new challenges with resilience, and a willingness to learn."
In 2021, we surveyed 83 women leaders, aged 25 - 35, and published Why Women Have What it Takes. Using a 42 question, 5-point Likert survey, we asked our future female leaders about their mindset and leader genetics. What was the biggest takeaway? The data behind 81% of them stated they had a mindset for success, and 70% showed confidence in their leadership skills, which included stepping in, facing mistakes and learning from them and their decision-making skills.
What we learned was this sample group of millennial leaders are self-confident, and 65% [1] were managing an inner-critic that could constrain the reliability of their self-confidence.
Are You Self-Confident?
Anywhere from 80% - 90% of leadership is dealing with ambiguous situations each day, so self-confidence is essential for effective leadership. Self-confidence is the psychological belief in one’s abilities, while confidence is built daily through experiences, support and achieving goals. Leaders need both to thrive.
Our data and work show self-confidence is propelled into action by:
1) Effort: having goals and working on them with discipline
2) Resilience: having the ability to sustain mental strength with optimism
3) Managing distractibility: being able to stay focused on the right things
4) Taming self-critic: self-managing that negative inner person or voice that doesn’t believe you can
Remind and affirm yourself:
“I am capable and worthy.”
“I have something of value.”
“I’ll believe in myself before someone else believes in me.”
Do You Have an Action Plan?
By focusing on building and maintaining self-confidence through continuous learning, seeking feedback, celebrating achievements, and developing strong Flex Capacity, leaders can ensure their inner belief remains strong and reliable. You don’t have to work on it alone. Have a success network in place.
If you’re interested in learning more about your leader persona and leadership capacity, let us take you through a Pivotal Leadership Diagnostic experience. Even our most experienced and self-aware leaders have been impressed by the experience and valued the action plan they created from our coach style diagnostics debrief methodology.[2]
"There are so many points of tension in interactions and relationships, so someone has to flex. Who will it be?” – Lisa W. Haydon, CEO and Founder, Pivotal Growth Inc.
About Lisa Haydon
Lisa W. Haydon is a seasoned operational leader and entrepreneur with over three decades of experience in banking, capital markets, technology, and professional services.
With a keen vision for aligning people, processes, and outcomes, Lisa has become a driving force in the field of leadership development. She brings innovation to the forefront by leveraging data-driven strategic cohort programs, generating value-added insights, and adopting AI-enabled technology. Her pioneering work with high-growth companies and high-performance leaders led to the design and commercialization of a proprietary leadership diagnostic solution.
She is known for her unique ability to navigate complex business challenges, understand diverse leadership styles, and deliver transformational results.
Lisa and her team are a group of forward-thinking, technology- and people-focused professionals who become a trusted partner in the pursuit of leadership-driven success.
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