Confidence, the sweet spot of being enough vs developing enough | #26

Welcome to Unleash youh Impact, Unlock Others, a podcast about inspiring leadership. We hope to bring you grounded wisdom, stories from real leaders and leave you feeling inspired. Let's dive in.

So, welcome to Unleash youh Impact, Unlock Others.

This is the latest leadership unscripted episode and the first in a two part miniseries on a topic that Rich and I get asked about a lot, which is confidence in leadership. And today we want to explore what true confidence is. Now, we're also joined by a special guest today in the studio.

It's not just Rich and I here, we have Garfield with us. Now, you might say, why is a cuddly yellow cat with you?

Well, my daughter is a big fan and when she found out this morning I was doing a podcast with Rich on confidence, she said, well, why don't you take Garfield along because he's full of confidence. So, Rich, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you. Welcome to Garfield too.

Welcome to Garfield too. Yeah. Now, I'm sure we could probably not learn that much from why Garfield is confident, but maybe we can.

So, Rich, what I'd like to tap into with you today is your expertise on this topic. And maybe just briefly before we get into the bones of this, explain why you have expertise in this area.

Yeah.

And so I did my master's degree with Oxford Brookes.

And one of the topic areas that I was really interested in, particularly because I've come on my own journey around the topic of confidence, if you like.

Yeah.

I decided that I would do my master's dissertation on confidence and self esteem in coaching practice.

Oh, wow.

So I explored this area quite deeply because I was interested firstly in, in terms of how my own personal confidence has developed.

Yeah.

And what I wanted to do was to put some theory behind some of the thoughts I'd had around that and to see then how I could help other people in the context of confidence when I coach them, particularly in the leadership area. Because if you think about it, confidence in leadership underpins every decision.

Yeah.

Every conversation, every action that you take.

So if you're overconf confident and you're overconfident in your decision making, for example, that means you might not listen to people, you might not be open to feedback.

If you're under confident or lack the confidence, say around decision making, it means that you might not make decisions quickly, clearly and confidently enough and be subject to what other people think of you and you might change your mind. So I think getting this right in the context of leadership I think is really important.

And if your confidence is healthy and sustainable, I think it makes a massive difference to leadership.

Yeah. And there'll be a lot of people listen to this and myself included has been affected by this.

We've all had imposter syndrome at some point in our lives where what I mean by that is we sort of question our own confidence. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Now that's, you know, quite commonplace depending on the environment you're in and you can get past that and you can move on from that, but it's not a great place to be when your competence is, is being affected.

So this two part series, Rich, this first episode today, what I'd like to explore with you is the core principles that underpin, like you said, what is healthy confidence in the workplace. And I know we've developed our own talk of the confidence compass. We'll dive more into that in the next episode.

But today it's more about those core principles.

And let's explore this idea of healthy confidence, not as bravado or some kind of inflated self image, but more as a balanced expression of who we are, tapping into emotional intelligence, humility and that kind of sense of inner composure that people are really confident have got. So if that's okay with you, that's where I'd like to take this conversation today.

Now, I know we did our Stamborough Abbey masterclasses last week and I know one of them you did was on the topic of confidence and gravitas.

Yes.

And maybe just any reflections on that workshop from last week.

Yeah.

So as you know, I've been developing an ebook recently which is, I guess a simplified synthesis of some of the, the research I did for my masters in this area.

Yeah.

So we've got a draft version of the ebook.

So what we decided we would do in terms of the showcase masterclass that we did last week was to design a workshop around this topic and then to give the delegates the confidence ebook along with the confidence inventory that we've developed as well. And I think we got really good feedback from that session.

So the delegates that attended that will get a free copy of the ebook and then we're going to hopefully create a final draft and make that available to the wider public.

And in the meantime, we're also going to launch our series of what some people call white papers. We call it the Connected Leadership Journal. It's called Forethought, one of the first ones of those will be on the topic of confidence.

Yes, yes.

So watch out for that. Available soon. That'll be downloadable from the Zentano website. So, Rich, let's first explore this idea of healthy confidence.

What is healthy confidence?

So healthy confidence is what I call being centered, if you like. So rather than having this constant need to prove myself, or you're constantly asking yourself, am I good enough?

Somebody with what I call authentic, true, deep rooted confidence is somebody who knows themselves and is okay with who they are, and they're okay with the fact that they have strengths and they value their strengths, but they're also okay with the fact that they have weaknesses and they understand those weaknesses, and those weaknesses don't undermine their sense of self worth. Because as human beings, you know, we all have strengths and we all have weaknesses.

So it's about developing a healthy sense of what are the skills and abilities that we have and that being realistic.

Yeah.

So we're not constantly chasing external validation around that sort of stuff. So, you know, we know what we're good at.

And also, as I said, we're not in this cycle of just constantly need to prove myself or worrying about what other people think of us.

So my experience of meeting people who I would describe as having true confidence, as you've just described it, is that also that point about humility comes with it because they don't need to keep telling you that they are confident. They just know that they are and they just let their behavior do the work.

Yeah.

If that makes sense.

Yes. And we talked about this, this concept of humility before in one of our earlier podcasts. So I'll just recount that again. Yeah, so. So somebody.

Well, true humility, if you like, is not somebody who constantly puts themselves down.

No.

Okay.

So somebody who has what I call true humility has a balanced sense of self worth and a balanced sense of their own sort of competence, skills and abilities.

Yeah.

So you can get two extremes with this. On the one extreme, you somebody who is constantly undervaluing themselves or undervaluing the skills and the abilities that they have.

So commonly people think of those deferential type of people that they often think. That's humility. Yeah. I call that diffidence.

Yeah.

So that's, that's if you like undervaluing yourself and undervaluing your skills and abilities.

At the other extreme, we have the sort of the bravado end of the scale, the arrogance end of the scale, where we have an either an overinflated view of ourself or, and, or an over inflated view of our confidence, skills and abilities. So it leads to this sort of arrogant, sort of brash bravado, actually, which is masking, if you like, a fragile.

Ego underneath, I'm gonna say, some deep insecurities. Underneath.

Some deep insecurities. Yes. Probably a better way of putting it. So just to pull these ideas together, one extreme, you have the diffidence.

Yeah.

Somebody constantly puts themselves down. Other extreme, the brash bravado.

Yeah.

In the middle, that's the true humility.

Right. Okay.

So in other words, this is what we call somebody who's centered. They have a healthy sense of self worth.

Yeah.

That's balanced and realistic and is aligned to what other people see. And they have a balanced sense of what their skills and abilities are.

So in other words, they know what their strengths are and they know what their weaknesses are and they're okay with just who they are as a human being.

I'm guessing the route to finding that nice center ground is to develop emotional intelligence.

Yes. Yes.

So perhaps you could just pick up how emotional intelligence is a key part of this.

Yeah. So a person with emotional intelligence. If we were to use the Daniel Goleman way of thinking about emotional intelligence. Daniel Goldman says.

Well, he says a number of things around emotional intelligence, but he says somebody who's emotionally intelligent is self aware and they have the ability to self regulate. So self awareness is the ability to notice what's going on with the our thoughts and our feelings.

So in other words, they have a healthy relationship with their thoughts and their feelings and they're aware of those and they can articulate those and be aware of those in a very nuanced way.

Okay.

So in other words, somebody with emotional intelligence is not caught up unconsciously, if you like, with their thoughts and their feelings and their emotions.

They're not taken along with those things, but they use that self knowledge then to self regulate and self manage, which is the other bit of emotional intelligence that Daniel Goleman often talks about. He talks about self awareness and self management.

So someone who's centered and rooted has a healthy relationship with their thoughts and their feelings and knowing what they're thinking, whether that thinking and whether those feelings are helpful or unhelpful. They use that knowledge then to self.

Manage, to bring that to life.

Then when you were doing your degree and you were doing particularly focusing in, on confidence, what were the light bulb moments in terms of you developing your own self awareness that actually, you know, took you forward and improved your levels of confidence?

Yeah. So I think for me It's. It's understanding, actually, that we all have self talk.

Yeah.

Okay. So we have self talk that's rooted in the beliefs and the values that were instilled in us from childhood.

Yeah.

And some of those beliefs and some of those values that drive, if you like, that self talk.

Yeah.

Because we're, you know, our mind is churning all the time. Some of those are helpful and some of those are really, really unhelpful.

So if I think about some of the scripted things, if you like, I call them scripted things.

In other words, the way my brain is wired from some of the things I was taught as a child, either from my mother or, you know, significant others in my life at the time, those beliefs and those values play out in sometimes very unhelpful self talk.

And what I came to realize, actually I can be aware of that self talk, so I can see it as an object as opposed to just being bound up with my thinking.

Yeah.

And I can challenge it and change it.

I like that analogy where you talk about it being an object as if it's like this cuddly cat in front of me on the desk. Yeah. So actually, if I look at it from the outside in, it's just like an object. Okay. I don't have to hold on to that object and grasp it.

Dear to me, I can just say, okay, that actually isn't helpful to me. I'm aware it's there. I know where it's come from, but I don't have to buy into it.

No, exactly.

And in mindfulness practice, for example, because mindfulness practice is one of the things you can do to develop self awareness in mindfulness practice, what you're taught to do is to notice your thoughts and your feelings as they arise and not to get too bound up with them and almost just to notice them rising and notice them going away. And I think the light bulb moment for.

For me was realizing, actually, you know, you can get stimulus in your environment, and that causes a cognitive or emotional response to us. And often what happens is we just unconsciously respond to the stimulus in our environment.

We do so, for example, in a work meeting, in an organization, if you can see somebody getting really cross. Okay.

Or angry, that can trigger some unconscious, unhelpful thoughts and feelings that can undermine your confidence or state of mind in that situation.

Okay. So before we go on to. I want to talk about that stimulus and how we respond to it in a minute. Just go back to Daniel Gomez model.

There's obviously the self awareness and self regulation side of his model. There's also the social awareness, the empathy side of it and the relationship management side of it.

Is it, is it that relevant as well in terms of developing our levels of self confidence for this conversation today?

Yeah. So I think developing a healthy relationship with how we relate to other people is really important.

So do you remember I said, actually one of the core facets of developing healthy confidence is this sense of self worth, if you like. So the degree to which we value us, ourselves as a human being.

So in human relationships, healthy confidence plays itself out in, say, for example, we were in a meeting, you and I sat across the table. My mindset would be. A healthy mindset, would be my needs are important in this conversation. Also Dave's needs are important.

So I'm valuing, I'm honouring my needs and they're balanced with me honouring and respecting your needs as opposed to deferring.

To mine all the time and.

Or thinking I know best, being the rescuer and. Or being the bully, in other words, where I try to assert aggressively my needs over yours.

So it's about balancing your needs with my needs and in that mindset of, if you like, balancing the self worth between the two of us.

And I'm guessing your route to being able to do that was, as you said, it's that self awareness and that self regulation is the route into that, isn't it?

Yes, it is. Exactly.

So let's talk about.

You introduced this idea of we are triggered by stimulus that comes from our environment that we're operating in and we respond usually subconsciously to that stimulus.

Yes.

And actually sometimes that's healthy, sometimes that's not so healthy. Let's explore how we do a better job of that to help us be more confident and find that healthy, happy medium.

Yeah. So I'd like to refer to an author called Viktor Frankl. I think I've mentioned him before in previous podcasts.

He's written a book called Man's Search for Meaning. So it's written back in the. I think it was the 50s or 60s, I can't remember.

Yeah.

So he obviously used very gendered language in the title, but essentially it's, it's. It's the human's search for Meaning.

Yeah.

Which was what the book. Book is about.

Ye.

And he was basing his experience on his experience in the concentration camps. So he survived a concentration camp experience during the war.

All his family were killed during that and he found a way to cope with that in the context of sort of extreme traumatic circumstances.

Yeah.

And one of the phrases that he coined was we need to create a gap or a space between stimulus and response. So I talked earlier about, you know, we can get, we can have stimulus in our environment.

So you say something to me, for example, that triggers me, that's the stimulus and my response is the trigger. And often what happens is there's no gap between stimulus and response.

Yeah.

So what Viktor Frankl advocated was trying to put a gap between stimulus and response.

And if I link that to the Daniel Goleman stuff around self awareness and self management, essentially what he's trying to say is to train the muscle, if you like, in your brain to consciously insert a gap between stimulus and response.

So what's interesting about that, I imagine it's not the easiest thing to do.

No.

But if a guy who's in, let's face it, one of the most extreme environments you'll ever be in, I cannot imagine what that was like for anybody in that environment where the stimulus is probably horrendous and quite. But he was still able to develop the ability to put a gap between that and his response.

Yes. Yeah.

I mean, there's a massive strength of character there.

Yeah.

How does, and you could say, well, actually, are we all built like that? If we could all do that, we'd have all survived the camps. How do you develop that level of conscious ability to do that?

Well, I think it's practice. I think it would also fair to say that Viktor Frankl had a deep rooted sense of self worth.

Okay.

So it's interesting in his book, actually he said something along the lines, this a few years ago, I read it now, but he said something along the lines of even in the face of my family being put to death, murdered, and you know, me facing the existential threat, he said actually that although I had all these thoughts going on, I connected myself to my human dignity and sense of self worth. And that's quite deep.

So he was able to recognize that these thoughts and feelings that were coming up, he didn't have to buy into those, he didn't have to go along with those. He could, he could notice that they were coming up and he would just let them, let them go. Now that's much easier said than done.

Absolutely.

Much easier said than done. So basically we can train ourselves to be aware of our thoughts and feelings as they rise and start to notice the triggers.

Now in our leadership program, we have a particular tool that we give to people.

But just very quickly, I'm not going to go into detail of the tool but essentially what the tool trains you to do is when you notice the trigger, take a moment just to stop, you know, to breathe. Notice what's going on.

Yeah.

And think actually, what am I going to do to respond differently in this situation? So it's a very simple just stop. Just stop and think, basically. And we can train ourselves to do that.

So the more we do it, the more we train our self awareness to put the gap between stimulus and response.

And for anybody listening to this who thinks, well, that makes sense and I would love to better do that. I struggle to do that at the moment. What's the starting point? Because you have to notice you're being triggered.

Yes.

Yeah, that's the thing. I mean, a lot of people at the moment are going along, very busy in life, surrounded by all sorts of triggers and stimulus. Yeah, almost. Almost.

Sometimes overloaded by that stuff. What's the starting point for noticing? What's the starting point for. I'd like to develop that skill that Richard's just been talking about.

Yeah.

How do I start?

So there's a couple of things you can do around this.

And I've talked about this analogy before, but it's about, it's a bit like football players do when they're practicing to take penalties or free kicks in the World Cup.

Yeah.

Okay. And I think I've used the David Beckham example before or talked about that before.

But you know, David Beckham is, has a reputation for being like a fantastic free kick taker.

He was. Yeah.

Under pressure, you know, and he, and he scored some iconic goals in those high pressure moments.

Yeah.

But he spent hours and hours and hours and hours, probably literally the equivalent of years actually on the training ground practicing when he wasn't under pressure.

Right, okay.

So I think that same principle we can apply to putting the gap between stimulus and response. So rather than trying to put a gap between stimulus and response in high pressure situations.

Yeah.

Just in your everyday meetings and interactions, just start to notice what's going on for you cognitively and emotionally.

Yeah.

So if you're in a teams meeting, for example, and we all get those, we all get those times in teams meetings and where we're a little bit bored, you know, people are just going on, off on one.

Surely not.

So in that moment, just, just stop, take a breath, notice what's going on and just tune in with what your, what your mind is telling you right now and what emotionally that you're feeling and then notice that and then just let it go.

So I guess what you're Saying here. Because there's a difference between responding reflexively, which is in the moment.

Yes.

And reflectively. Whereas you take some time to practice that skill.

Yes.

So actually if we. If we practice the skill and maybe not even in that meeting, practice the skill of reflecting after meetings, thinking, what was I thinking?

Feeling in that meeting, how did I respond to that?

Yeah, yeah.

If we. If we take the time to build that skill, ultimately that will make it easier to do in the moment, won't it?

Yes. Yeah, yeah. So you do do both those things. So what I was just talking about, if you like, that's a reflexive.

Yeah.

Activity.

Yeah.

And then take time with your journal. You know, if you've got a learning journal or a diary or something, just take a moment after. After meetings just to reflect on what's happened.

And both of those things start to create different neuro pathways in your brain to enable you to put the gap between stimulus and response. The other thing, just to say that's a really good practice to do this and there's lots of research that confirms this to be the case.

Yeah.

Is mindfulness practice is really good way to change that. Fundamentally change the relationship between you and your thoughts and your feelings.

So that could be as simple as. Because I think some people get scared off by the phrases like mindfulness. Or they've tried it and doesn't really get on with it.

But it could be as simple as just developing some breathing techniques that help you, particularly when you're under pressure.

I think they would help, but I think what I'm talking about here is the formal mindfulness practice where you set aside a period of time.

Yeah.

Say minimum 10 minutes. And you're basically doing brain training when you do mindfulness.

Okay.

So I prefer to call mindfulness practice brain training.

Brain training.

Yeah. As opposed to mindfulness, which can have New age connotations, which I think are unhelpful, actually.

So is that one of the things again, when you were doing your degree and you were learning about this topic, did you do less of that than you do now?

Yeah, at the time I did a little bit of mindfulness stuff and I was interested in the concept of it at the time, but I've done lots of reading over the last decade.

Yeah.

And now regularly practice mindfulness and meditation. And I find it extremely helpful in terms of managing that. If you like the monkey brain.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know that, you know the brain that's going around all of the time. Because I have a bit of a monkey brain, don't we all, don't we all? And it's helped me develop a healthier relationship with that.

So I'm not saying I don't get the monkey brain when I'm triggered. That still happens, but now I found better ways to manage that, and I've created alternative ways to respond to those situations.

And for me personally, I found mindfulness practice disciplined. Mindfulness practice really helped with that.

Do you know what's really interesting? There's lots of benefits of you and I working together because we bring quite different things to the table.

But I think I've said this before on a podcast. One of the the big benefits I've had from working with you is you're probably a bit more naturally reflective than I am.

And actually, if I don't get time to do it, I get a bit angsty thinking. I want to do more reflective learning today because I find it so valuable to take that conscious, purposeful step away.

Particularly, you know, as you said, the world is a pretty challenging place at times, but I find real value in that to say, a little bit of thinking time. I might sit outside in my garden with a cup of coffee. But that time has an impact on your confidence.

Yes. Yeah, absolutely.

And, you know, if mindfulness is not your thing, you know, reflective practice, short, a little bit of formal time with a learning journal is a really good way to help you rewire your brain. So journaling is a really helpful way as an alternative or complementary practice to mindfulness.

So I think one of the things that journaling helps us to do, again, is to change our relationship with our thoughts and our feelings.

Because what we want to do is to get the thoughts and the feelings out of our head onto a piece of paper, and that changes our relationship fundamentally with those thoughts and the feelings. In other words, we're not getting taken away with those things.

Not getting taken away with those potentially unhelpful thoughts and beliefs and patterns of thinking that undermine our confidence.

Well, I'll give you a couple of practical examples of what I've realized, I think, from developing a reflective practice technique that works for me. One thing I've done a lot more of over recent years that I never really used to do, I've got to be honest with you, is gratitude.

Okay, just recording. Very simple Gratitude, comments and statements. What is it I appreciate in life?

And I think that's particularly helpful when the chips are down, when things are tough. Even when things aren't down, it's still a good thing to do. Has been really helpful. And you know, that doesn't take any time at all.

If you sit down at the end of the day and list out three things you're grateful for, it takes what.

Five minutes maximum Actually I would add to that. It's just. I'm not prepared to say this, but I think it was an author. Her surname was Neff. I'm not sure it's Caroline Neff.

Yeah, we'll have to check that and put it in the description of the podcast afterwards. But she wrote a book called Self Compassion.

Okay.

Which is really interesting. So it's all a book about developing a healthy sense of self worth.

Now I think actually you can do gratitude journaling where actually you express your gratitude for some of the strengths and the abilities that you have as a human being.

Okay, well that's going to be my next point.

The other thing I found from reflective learning particularly this is probably more important when things are tough, is don't forget the good stuff that you've done. It's very easy to focus on what's going wrong, but actually focus on the good stuff that you've done. Focus on your strengths.

Because actually when you're in a tough tight spot, your strengths is what's going to get you out of it, probably. And it's not that, you know, I never used to recognize my strengths.

You've always said you come across as quite a self competent person, but we all have that time when we're not. And I think it's very easy to forget sometimes the high points and the successes that we have and the value we bring to other human beings.

Yeah, yeah. And again, this is about developing a healthy sense of self worth. So it's not about having an overinflated view of yourself.

But particularly people who tend to be on the diffident end of the humility spectrum. As I talked about earlier, people that tend to be on the diffident end and underplay, undervalue their worth as a human being.

Actually having some formal practice to connect them with their strengths and their abilities and to value those I think is a really good foundational practice for developing healthy confidence.

So here's another question for you then. I haven't certainly when I was younger always been the most self confident individual, but I think looking back, I had a pretty healthy Self esteem.

Now, that was down to a lot of really good parenting and grandparenting, actually, that I had at difficult circumstances. So you've talked about Viktor Frankl and what he was able to do is tap into that really strong sense of self esteem.

What about people who haven't got that, that are struggling with confidence? They haven't got that to fall back on in the same way as maybe I did, and certainly someone like Viktor Frankl. You've made that point really clear.

What do they do because they haven't got that to fall back on?

Well, again, it's about developing the self awareness, the gap between stimulus and response to spot when you've got unhealthy internal narrative that's going on that's undermining you as a human being. So again, it's about putting that gap between stimulus and response, but it's actually catching your unhealthy self talk.

And I think I'll just go back to the self esteem thing, because the self esteem movement, which sort of respawned in the 70s, there were some unhelpful elements to that, actually. Right, okay.

Because what you don't want to do is human beings to have a sense of self worth that's overbalanced and has no sense of the flaws and the weaknesses in them as a human being. So true humility is a balanced view of self where you recognize your strengths, but you also acknowledge your weaknesses as well.

So, Rich, I'd like to move this conversation on now to talk about why true humility is the foundation of confidence. And can you comment on true humility and self deprecation? They're different things, I think, as the way I understand it.

Perhaps you could unpack that a bit more for me.

Yes. So basically, that's what I was talking about just now. So self deprecation is at the diffidence ends of that humility spectrum.

So it's where we lack a deep belief in our intrinsic value. And that deep belief in our intrinsic value doesn't rise or fall with every success or failure.

And neither does it rise or fall when we're in a relationship with a human being where, if you like, our needs versus their needs becomes unbalanced. And we'll talk a little bit more about that in more detail in the next podcast.

So developing that deep sense of self belief and recognizing the self talk that undermines that is an important part of potentially your journaling practice and an important part of that, if you like, that reflexive practice that we talked about where you're putting that gap between stimulus and response.

So this concept of humility allows us to see ourselves clearly with some clarity. It allows us to understand what our strengths are, what our limitations are. It also allows us to see what our growth potential is.

And we did a podcast, didn't we, on potential and interference and how those two things play.

I watched a really interesting documentary the other day about Peter Schmeichel, the ex Man United goalkeeper who grew up in quite an interesting family situation. And he was really driven, really driven to be the best, the best, the best.

He thrived under Alex Ferguson at Man United, but at times it was quite a brutal experience. People who don't know he's now retired, but his son Casper also went on to be a professional footballer. Played for a number of clubs, Leicester City.

And he won the Premier League with Leicester City.

On this documentary, there was a lovely conversation between Peter and Caspar, where Peter went up to Caspar and said, I just want you to know that you're my son and that's always been enough for me. I know you strive to be the best you can be, like I did.

Yeah, yeah.

But I just want you to know that you are enough for me.

And I think there's an interesting balance to get here between self worth, which is just about being enough, and competence, which is about developing enough. And I thought that was a lovely moment.

It is, yeah.

It's a lovely thing for a father to say to a son or any parent to say to any child. But it is that balance, isn't it, between how do we get the balance between being enough and developing enough? And can you comment on that?

Yeah. So I really like that idea of being enough. And I think it's this deep belief in your intrinsic value being enough. That's true.

Regardless of your strengths and your weaknesses.

Yes. Yeah, absolutely.

Okay.

So actually, you know me as a human being, if I think about some of the strengths that I have and also think about some of the flaws and the weaknesses that I have, those things make for me, for me as a human being.

So if I'm honest about those things and I'm willing to get feedback on those, I can do stuff to address my flaws and my weaknesses, because I'm open to the feedback around that. And when I get feedback on that, because fundamentally I'm enough, I don't feel threatened as a human being. I just. Okay.

That's a growth opportunity for me.

Yeah.

On the other hand, my strengths, if I can value my strengths and I can see them, then we have huge Potential for us to grow as a human being.

So that balance between being compassionate about yourself, but also striving to be the best version of yourself.

Yes, exactly.

It's really important you get that bit right, isn't it?

Yes, it is.

Don't fall down one extreme or the other.

Yes, exactly. Right. Yeah.

So, Rich, I think we've probably talked enough for this episode about the foundations of what it means to find healthy confidence. Before we go on to the next podcast. Should we just do some closing reflections on this conversation today?

Yeah.

So what's your sort of main point you want to make?

So a couple of top tips. So go back to practice in a safe environment. So in those boring teams meetings.

Okay.

Practice taking penalties.

So in other words, just start to become aware of your thoughts and feelings as they arise, so you strengthen your ability to put a gap between stimulus and response.

Yeah. Okay.

I'd highly recommend some sort of practice of journaling, which we both do. It doesn't have to be long, just a couple of minutes a day.

But it gets the stuff out of your head onto paper, and that's a good way to create a healthy relationship with that stuff. The other thing you can do, and this won't be for everyone, is to engage in some mindfulness practice.

So the Headspace app on your iPhone or Android phone, for example, it is a great way to train yourself.

Other apps are available. I would like to say other.

Yes, we're not being sponsored.

We're not being sponsored by anybody.

But, you know, find a way, if that's your thing, to engage in mindfulness practice, because it's very powerful.

Brilliant. Okay, that sounds great. Top tips. So next time we will dive a bit further into the.

This idea of the confidence compass and look at actually how different sort of profiles of confidence play out.

Yes.

Yeah. Just nothing to mention. People listen to this.

If you listen to our podcast regularly, you can also register on our website for an associated newsletter that comes out called Foresight.

And Foresight has some book recommendations in it, has some top tips and practical things you can go and do based on the conversations that Rich and I have. So I would recommend that you sign up for that newsletter.

We will also put out through that newsletter when our connected leadership journal is available. And the. And that will be the first one of those will be on the confidence topic.

So please go into the website, sign up for the newsletter, and get those top tips and those recommendations from Rich and I. So, Rich, thank you to you for today.

Thank you, Garfield.

Thank you for being our special guest today. Garfield looks very, very confident sat there.

Yes.

And we will see you next time.

See you next time.

Thank you.

Bye. Bye.