The Consulting Mindset: Building Your Confidence And Tackling Insecurities
False bravado doesn't help anyone. It's important to build the right kind of confidence to become a successful consultant.
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Consulting requires a healthy level of confidence.
A common barrier to succeeding as a consultant is a lack of confidence. If you don’t have the confidence to speak in front of an audience, proactively engage a client, disagree when needed and sell with integrity, success might remain elusive.
So how do you build a healthy level of confidence?
What Is Confidence?
Confidence is essentially the degree of trust you have that a desirable outcome will materialise (hence, a confidence interval in statistics).
For example…
Do you have a high degree of trust that stakeholders will respond positively to you or not?
Do you have a high degree of trust that people will like your talk or not?
Do you have a high degree of trust that the solution you’re selling is the right one for the client or not?
Do you have a high degree of trust that people you are meeting will like you or not?
Confidence is also situational.
You can be highly confident in some situations and far less confidence in others.
If give me a mic and put me in front of a business audience and I’ll feel relatively confident. Force me on stage at an open mic night in a comedy club and my confidence in a positive outcome will drop precipitously.
There are two common ways to build confidence; stretch your comfort zone and tackle your vulnerabilities
Stretching Your Comfort Zone
One pillar of confidence is experience. The more experience you have, the more predictable an outcome becomes. You might be scared of flying. But the more you fly, the more you experience the plane landing safely (and anticipate it will do so in future).
Public speaking is the same. If you’ve never given a speech before, it’s hard to know how people will respond to it. After you’ve given a dozen talks, you have greater confidence in how you will be perceived.
This is why many well-intentioned friends will respond to any crisis of confidence with advice like “You have to face your fear”.
It’s well-intentioned and contains some truth.
We suffer far more in our heads than in reality. Once you face your fear, you usually realise the likelihood of your worst fears materialising were slim. The more you put yourself in situations which stretch your comfort zone, the more comfortable you’re going to be in those situations in the future (because those situations become more predictable).
Yet, when facing your fear, it’s also important to set reasonable expectations for yourself. Putting pressure to achieve goals beyond your abilities is a common way to lose confidence. Before I gave my first talk, I spent hours looking at TED talks to pick up tips. But these are some of the very best speakers in the entire world. That’s an impossible benchmark to compare myself against.
My advice for people giving their first talk today is to simply go up there, be on stage, say your words, and wrap up. Focus on the content and getting comfortable being on stage. The worst thing that can happen is essentially this.
This ‘disaster’ had precisely zero impact on Michael Bay’s career.
But the important thing in the first talk is to get through it and have ‘being on stage’ within your comfort zone.
In your next talk, you might want to practice intonation, telling persuasive stories, moving across the stage, or engaging the audience etc…Tackle one new skill each time.
This keeps your expectations reasonable while stretching your comfort zone each time.
However, the problem with ‘face your fear’ advice is it tackles each situation individually. Alas, there is a near-infinite number of situations in which you need a healthy level of confidence but won’t have prior experience.
You’re going to face new situations for the first time often. Facing your fear is good, but it doesn’t tackle the root cause of the problem.
Why might you lack confidence in the first place?
Tackling The Root Cause: Vulnerabilities
If there is one thing we consultants should be good at it’s tackling the root cause of a problem.
A lack of confidence isn’t just uncertainty about an outcome, but fear of a negative outcome.
Kids aren’t worried about which presents they will get at Christmas - despite the high degree of uncertainty. Uncertainty about which positive outcomes will materialise is simply excitement.
If you’re not confident about a situation, it’s not because you’re uncertain about which of the five possible good things will happen. It’s because you’re worried that something bad will happen.
That negative thing is different for every person - but often involves a failure to achieve a desired goal or social rejection.
It’s anticipating and experiencing a negative outcome before it occurs. And the primary cause of anticipating a negative outcome (as opposed to a positive outcome) is a pre-existing vulnerability (i.e. something in our past has persuaded us that a negative outcome is likely and will be painful.)
In short, fear is when a pre-existing vulnerability collides with situational uncertainty.
For example, if you were unpopular in school, you might assume you are unlikable and carry that with you. You might assume new people you meet also won’t like you.
If you were unpopular with the opposite sex in the past, you might worry your date might not like you.
If you were made to feel small or insignificant in the past, you might feel you’re not worthy of addressing important people or aren’t qualified to speak at events.
Alternatively, you might carry insecurities based on how you look, speak, feel, and behave, or based on anything you have or haven’t done in the past.
You might assume others judge your insecurities as harshly as you do - and that they zero in on your most negative traits when they meet you.
Whenever there is a situation in which there is uncertainty about whether a vulnerability might be exposed, a crisis of confidence might develop.
The challenge isn’t just to reduce the uncertainty through experience and tackle the vulnerability itself.
There seem to be two common ways of achieving this.
1) Get Support
The best advice I can offer anyone experiencing vulnerabilities and confidence issues is to get a therapist.
Even if you feel you don’t need one (perhaps especially if you feel you don’t need one), it helps to get help. The experience will pay off indefinitely. It was a game-changer for me and most people I know who have been through the experience.
A therapist (at least a good therapist) helps you to properly process past experiences which cause current vulnerabilities. It’s not a silver bullet, but it’s a way of properly addressing the things that keep coming up and impacting your life. It’s a way of accepting past pain without letting it impact future outcomes.
I love the armour metaphor put forward by Brene Brown.
When we’re young we protect ourselves against our vulnerabilities by wearing psychological armour. But, later in life, that slows us down and makes it difficult for us to accomplish our goals. We need help to realise we don’t need to protect ourselves against perceived vulnerabilities anymore.
If you find yourself constantly experiencing anxiety - especially social anxiety (fear of rejection by others), then therapy might be able to help. It’s not an instant fix, but it’s a process that I believe everyone in their life should go through at some point.
2) Embrace Your Insecurities
We all have insecurities. It’s probably healthy to have insecurities. But we have to learn to embrace them.
However hard we try, we almost always reveal our insecurities. The disconnect in our mannerisms, body language, and style of speaking almost always reveals our true selves. You’ve probably been at events and sensed when people weren’t comfortable in the room. You notice they’re not speaking much, their body position keeps shifting, their eyes dart around, and they don’t seem relaxed and happy.
Sure, we can all make a conscious effort to adopt a bold, open, body posture, and use the right intonation in our voice etc. But this never works because there are simply too many things to remember. At some point, your unconscious behaviours will betray your real state of mind. And, as mentioned before, false confidence will make us come across as inauthentic and untrustworthy.
Almost every effort to hide our insecurities simply draws more attention to them.
I remember once absentmindedly scratching a spot on my nose in a client meeting. I suddenly realised it had begun to bleed. I tried to hide it by putting my hand over my nose like I was deep in thought. It just looked a bit ridiculous and eventually, I had to tell the client what had happened. Hiding issues just draws more attention to them.
The real solution - the only real solution - is to dive into the root cause of our insecurities and learn to embrace them as part of who we are.
I have a stutter. Not a serious one, but it’s always there. Whenever I open my mouth, there’s a reasonable chance I won’t be able to say what I want to say. It makes public speaking a rather perilous endeavour. For a long time, I dealt with my stutter by saying as little as possible. I turned down invitations to speak at events and avoided presenting in front of clients.
That’s not as conducive to consulting as you might imagine.
It took me a while to realise that a stutter affected me far more than anyone around me. Sure, sometimes I’ve been with clients and suddenly struggled to say what I wanted to say. It sometimes happens on stage too. I used to become flustered, and embarrassed. Now if it happens, I simply give a wry smile, say I have a stutter and continue. It only takes a second or two. It turns out the thing that preoccupied so much of my waking time wasn’t much of a big deal at all.
Better yet, it’s part of what makes me unique. It’s not hard to find a list of major figures with unusual voices who thrived in their sectors (Mike Tyson, Stephen Hawking, Michael Jackson etc…). Once you step back and look at those doing well in almost any arena, you can see they carry flaws physical or personal flaws.
The key to moving past is to make it a part of your identity. Make it part of what makes you unique and stand out in the crowd.
Trying to mask your insecurities isn’t healthy and leads to inauthentic behaviour. Embrace whatever you perceive your flaws to be. Make them a part of you. Being memorable is far better than being forgettable. Embrace the thing you’re hiding - because, believe me, you’re not hiding it very well anyway.
Three Ways To Build Confidence
To summarise, there are three methods to build your confidence.
Face your fear (slowly). Stretch your comfort zone a little more each time. Begin with small steps that build up over time. Scared of public speaking? Try hosting a small webinar, then a larger webinar, then speaking at a small meet-up event etc…
Address your vulnerabilities. Getting help helps. It’s hard to do this alone. Forgive the irony, but none of the well-intentioned articles like this will remotely compare to going really deep with a trained professional with whom you can be completely vulnerable.
Embrace your insecurities. Whatever they are, make it a part of your identity. Be the exemplification of it. Don’t try to hide it. Simply have it as part of who you are. The insecurity is almost never the problem, it’s the effort to hide it (physically or psychologically) which causes harm.
Good luck.