Selective memories. Do you have one?

A lot of my clients do in one way or another – and those memories generally don’t work in their own favour. Recently, I’ve been working with a client  who had followed her husband’s job to another part of the country, which had resulted in giving up her a management post.

Two years later and in a new role, she was considering applying for a management role again. But there was an underlying reluctance.

She was remembering her past experience, and as it turns out, viewing it through a very cloudy lens. A lack of confidence in her abilities, and memories of working long hours, stress and overwhelm were uppermost in her mind as we talked.

It’s possible to lose confidence in ourselves very quickly, for a variety of reasons, which can hamper our future prospects at work.  I worked through a  simple but valuable process with my client which enabled her to leave the coaching session a very different woman.

If you need to restore confidence in your own leadership and management capabilities, then this simple process can help.

3 Steps To Restore Confidence In Your Leadership Abilities.

1. Successes
Instead of choosing to focus on things that didn’t go according to plan (and there will always be those), identify successes and strengths.

What went right? What were you/are you good at? These might include communication skills; motivating the team; emotional intelligence; being trusted by both peers and senior managers; achieving goals; objection handling and running meetings.

Make sure you identify solid examples of each strength and that you can articulate why it made such an impact. Continue until you have exhausted everything you can think of.

2. Advice
Knowing what you know now, what advice would you give yourself? Take a step back and view yourself objectively. If this objectivity is tough, imagine a colleague. What do you need to know?

You might include releasing the need to be perfect; delegate more; set boundaries; trust others more; have robust processes in place; manage your own bad habits; take risks and  develop a clear personal vision.

Again, be thorough and rigorous. What would this knowledge enable you to be, do and have?

These first two steps will really help you to build confidence and give you a more positive view of your skills.

3.Plan
Develop a plan for going forward. What do you want to achieve?

What extra resources will you need, moving forward? Do you need to plug any gaps in your knowledge or skills? How can your own line manager help you to identify opportunities that will help you? What projects could you volunteer for that would help you to develop the skills that may be missing?

If you’ve lost confidence in your own leadership capabilities, then this process can work to help you move to a more resourceful place, where you can have a realistic overview of yourself and plan for making the most of yourself.

This work sits at stage one of the Success Ladder, a new product I’m launching over the next few weeks. Everyone suffers from self-doubt from time to time, but it needn’t be lasting or have too great an impact on your career if you don’t want it to.

In order to have more impact and influence at work, we need to manage self-doubt. If you’d like a chat about how you could get your voice heard more at work, and be seen, heard and happier as a result, then get in touch. I’d love to talk to you.

In the meantime, you can download 10 Steps To Instant Influence for free by filling in your details at the top of this page – try out some of the tips and let me know how you get on.

Email me at sue@youtimecoaching.co.uk or call 0780 1502743.

I’m Susan Ritchie, and I help professional women who struggle to demonstrate how good they are at what they do. I teach them to have more personal impact, presence and influence using  a mix of coaching, NLP, writing and workshops.