As a manager, your team looks to you for strength, leadership, and guidance. If you, like many people, lack self-belief, it will be difficult to provide leadership that is authentic and believable, and even more importantly: Inspirational.
If you’re constantly worried about whether you’re truly cut out for the role, that’s a lot of time wasted that could be better spent leading your team with passion and strength.
The funny thing about self-belief, is that it has little to do with ability. Some people who are extremely talented lack self-belief, while others of mediocre or even sub-par ability sometimes hold a quite extraordinary level of belief in what is possible for them.
Being aware of this paradox can be oddly freeing, as it allows you to build your self-belief while not being hung up on past university grades or career failures. In short, just because you’ve experienced failure (who hasn’t), certainly doesn’t mean you can’t have a healthy belief in yourself.
Here are some suggestions on how to grow your self-belief so that you can reap the benefits, both as a manager and in your everyday life.
1. Curb the negative self-talk.
Start to notice when you have negative thoughts about yourself, or catch yourself putting yourself down either internally or to others. At the beginning, keep a tally of how many times you engage in negative self-talk in a day- you will almost certainly be shocked!
To build your self-belief, you first need to notice how mean and doubting you are to yourself daily, and when you do catch yourself doing it, ask yourself: would you talk to a friend or colleague they way you talk to yourself? Often, the act of noticing negative self-talk will reduce how much you do it.
2. Challenge yourself.
Self-belief is rapidly built through meeting challenges. Many of us are held back emotionally by past failures, and the only way to remove that barrier is to prove to ourselves that we can try new things, face our fears, and meet goals. Self-belief isn’t something you can just conjure up, it is built through positive experiences, so get out there and start doing things differently. Set goals that are achievable, but that scare you a little, as that’s where the real progress is made. If you’re not ready for big changes, start small by mixing your routines up- try new cafes or attend a seminar, and start to stretch yourself to try more daring new things as time goes on and importantly reward yourself each time.
3. Manage your weaknesses.
You’re probably hyper-aware of your weaknesses, so you’ll need to approach this one as dispassionately as possible to come up with a battle plan.
If you know that certain tasks make you feel inept and out of your depth, then get some help in getting better at them, or learn to accept that you can’t be great at everything.
Think about it: as a manager, you don’t expect your team members to excel at every single aspect of their roles, so why should it be any different for you?
4. Boost your confidence with powerful body language.
Amy Cuddy of Harvard Business School has proven in a famous study that if you stand in a ‘power pose’ such as putting your hands on your hips for a couple of minutes before a meeting or challenging situation, your brain is fooled into confidence-boosting hormones. Not only that, but faking confidence in this way transforms into real confidence over time- which is closely tied to a healthy self-belief.
5. Show respect to your body and mind.
It is exceedingly difficult to feel good about yourself if you’re eating badly, unfit, or not sleeping well—and many of us in busy working lives are managing all three!
Exercise boosts feel good hormones and controls stress, while there’s some fascinating research afoot about how the food we eat affects our moods. Getting to bed before 10pm allows the brain the optimal night-time hours to rest, bank memories, and heal damage in our bodies, while meditation has been proven to rapidly grow our prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain responsible for our emotions.
If you can even just make one small step towards a healthier lifestyle, you’ll immediately feel better about yourself and the change will boost your self-belief.
Self-belief/self-esteem can be learnt, and the changes can be rapid and transformative with the right amount of effort. Investing your time and energy into growing your self-belief will be one of the most important things you ever do, not only for the sake of the team that you manage, but for yourself.
Until next time,
Julia
