How important is self confidence?

Last night, in an interview following her dismissal from the Apprentice, Lindsay Booth admitted that she had to go because she didn’t have the same self confidence as the other candidates. At the same time a friend of mine said that she wished she had some of their self confidence. It got me thinking whether self confidence is always a good thing.

Can we be too self confident? 

Is it possible to be too self confident?

I recognise that a dollop of self confidence is useful in business. It helps us to sell with conviction, to negotiate to our advantage and to drive for success, but can you have too much of it?

I suspect that your view will vary depending upon which side of the Atlantic you do business. In the USA self confidence is expected and valued whereas in the UK we tend to mistrust, or even dislike, people who are overtly self confident. We may see self confidence as arrogance; it can often look like that in the editing of the Apprentice and some people come over like that when introducing themselves. How do you respond? Are you drawn to self confident people or are you more comfortable with those who show a little vulnerability?

Can self confidence affect decision making?

I wonder if a little self doubt can lead to better decisions. When we are uncertain we ask for opinions, we listen to guidance and we stop and think. Do we do that when we are confident? I think not. Whilst it’s important to be decisive we can make mistakes when we go it alone. It can be helpful when someone challenges our decisions and enables us to see potential problems that have escaped our notice. I guess it comes down to the level of our self confidence.

If we have an unshakable belief in our own abilities to the point of arrogance we will not always make good decisions or win friends and influence people. If our self confidence is tempered with recognition that we may not have all the answers then it has to be a good thing. What do you think?

To return to Lindsay Booth…

As for Lindsay Booth I felt a bit sorry for her, she seemed too nice for the Apprentice. She is already a successful businesswoman operating a swimming academy which employs six staff and gains new customers by recommendation and experience. She is clearly self confident in her sphere of experience and I guess that’s the key. We need to be confident in our areas of expertise and perhaps to push at the boundaries of that expertise in order to grow, the problem comes when we think we know it all.

 

Watch your language!

One of the advantages of working for yourself is that you can sometimes choose the hours you work so, on Wednesday afternoon, I decided to give myself an hour or two off to watch Andy Murray’s quarter final match at Wimbledon. An earlier appointment meant I didn’t get to see the first few minutes of the match so when I switched on the television they were into the second set. I didn’t need to see the scoreboard, or even a ball hit, to know that things were not going well. One look at Andy Murray’s body language said it all. He was a defeated man.

Now if I could see that from my sitting room in Ealing then so could his opponent from the other side of the net. In fact after the match Dimitrov said that he knew Murray was not ‘on song’ even in the warm up. That got me thinking that we can sometimes be our own worst enemies.

 

What does this mean for business?

In business we can lose opportunities because our body language sends the wrong message. If the non verbals and the verbals are not in alignment then we can appear untrustworthy. If we don’t appear confident when we make a pitch our audience will think we can’t deliver. If we appear over confident we can be misjudged as arrogant.

The problem is we have little control over our body language so we have to get our mental attitude right. We may have to silence that inner voice that is undermining our self confidence. We may have to practice until we can deliver our pitch with confidence. We may need a morale boost from a friend, mentor or coach. We certainly need to be aware of our body language and the message it is sending.

So if you don’t get the planned outcome from exchanges with others think why not? Did your body language support your words? Did you inadvertently do something that upset your audience? Did you give the game away?

 

Are you afflicted by small scale thinking?

Over the years I’ve worked with many small business owners and start ups and I have realised that they fall in to one of two categories. There are those that have big, hairy audacious goals who will do almost anything to achieve those goals. Then there are those who are risk averse who tend to think smaller and more short term. There is a third group who I would call the day dreamers, they spend forever talking about starting a business but never quite get round to doing it so they never start up or become small business owners. Which category do you fall in to?

What will light your fire?

Now if you choose to be a small scale thinker that’s OK but this kind of thinking will limit the size of your business. Are you happy with that? Perhaps you are thinking small because you are juggling family and other commitments. Perhaps you are thinking small because you lack the inspiration to see a bigger picture. Perhaps you are thinking small because it’s just too scary to think big! There is a Zig Ziglar quote that it’s your attitude that will determine your altitude and it’s so true.

It has taken me too long to accept that one woman or one man bands will always have limitations. We need help. Whether that is practical help to produce our products or services, administration or marketing support to free us up to deliver, domestic support to allow us more time for our businesses or coaching and mentoring support to bolster our self belief and let our ideas fly. Help will allow us to focus on the important things.

Would your business benefit from some bigger thinking? What kind of help would unleash greater possibilities? Why not start with a free half hour telephone conversation and see where it might lead. Book yours here.

Is fear and self doubt holding you back?

Henry Ford said, ‘Whether you think you can or think you can’t… you’re right’. He had a point. What is that little voice inside your head saying? Is it saying, ‘go o n you can do it’ or is it questioning your ability, wisdom or chances of success? That little voice can be the difference between success and failure.

So often I see clients holding back, afraid to try something new or different, afraid to step outside their comfort zones. Sometimes they fear failure but sometimes they fear success. But what is fear. Fear = False Expectations Appearing Real! In my experience the reality is never as bad as the expectation and frequently leaves me wondering what I was frightened of.

So if fear or self doubt is holding you back ask your self, ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’ What can you do to minimise the risk of that happening? If you have identified all the risks and taken steps to mitigate them make that voice inside your head affirmative. Tell yourself you can do it. Find yourself a mentor or supporter to hold the safety net and then go for it. The chances are there was nothing to be afraid of and you will have pushed out the boundaries of your comfort zone and be ready and eager for ever more challenges. As Sir Richard Branson would say, ‘Just do it’.

Why not share your fears here so that we can all support each other and help you to celebrate your successes?

 

You can always learn!

‘I don’t know how’ is an excuse I’ve heard rather too frequently in the last week or two. My answer is invariably the same, you can learn! Whether it’s how to use social media, how to prepare budgets or how to develop a business, we can learn. There is very little we can’t learn if we have a mind to do so. Some things will come more easily than others but sometimes the things that are hardest are ultimately the most rewarding.

Learning stretches our minds, opens up new possibilities and extends our comfort zones and with it comes even greater opportunities for success. I don’t think there have ever been more ways to learn than there are now. We can learn any time or any place without it costing a fortune. But for many people learning is associated with negative experiences from their school days. How often did you question why you were learning something? How often were you gazing out of the window when you should have been listening? It could be that your negative experience was borne out of teaching which didn’t address your learning preferences (teaching has moved on a long way since my school days) so please don’t let previous experience stop you learning now. We’re never too old to learn!

Finding your learning preference

Learning is a constant process.

Some years ago Peter Honey and Alan Mumford did some research into learning styles and identified four preferences: Activist, Reflector, Theorist and Pragmatist, these styles tie in with the learning cycle described by David Kolb. If this is new to you the following should help you to decide how you learn best.

 

The Activist: likes to learn by just doing. Activists don’t worry too much about making mistakes, they see that as being the best way to learn. An activist will be bored by too much explanation or theory so if that’s you you are likely to dive in and only look for help if things go wrong. You might read the book or watch the video if you have been disappointed by your results or perhaps you might be encouraged and think that you could make your outcomes even better if you understood more.

The Reflector: prefers to think first and act later. The reflector would like to be shown how to do something, to have an explanation or a demonstration. They want to be able to ask questions and to take their time so should not be hurried. You might find some help on You Tube or blogs like this one may set you thinking.

The Theorist: likes to understand the concepts and apply the theories before taking on something new. You might like to start with a book, a training course or a documentary style TV programme.You want to weigh up your options before you take action.

The Pragmatist: also likes to learn by doing but isn’t so brave or perhaps fool hardy as the activist. So a pragmatist likes to try things out in a safe environment before doing it for real. If you are a pragmatist you might favour classroom learning so long as you can see the relevance between your learning and a task you have to perform.

So how does this tie in with the learning cycle? 

Kolb found that true learning is a circular process that involves concrete experience, reflection, understanding concepts and experimentation. In effect these are the four learning styles identified by Honey and Mumford but what Kolb found was that we have to apply all four in turn for learning to be effective. So the activist needs to stop and think after trying something new. What worked? What could have been better? The activist might then be ready for some new ideas or concepts which they will test before ‘going for it’ again.

The reflector will prefer to join the cycle at the ‘reflective observation’ stage moving on to the concepts and theories then the safe experimenting before doing it for real. The theorist will start with the concepts, experiment with the ideas, then try for real before thinking about what they’ve learned and how it could be better. The pragmatist will start with the ‘dress rehearsal’ before having a go, reflecting and then applying concepts.

What are your learning options?

Read! Read books (on paper or digitally), magazines, articles or blogs. If you are an activist or pragmatist find books with activities you can try out. Read a few pages at a time and then take some action.

Watch and listen. Watch videos, TV programmes, listen to podcasts and the radio. Tune in to webinars (online training).

Attend courses online or physically. Join an evening class or part time programme.

If money is a problem there are lots of free opportunities online or off. A word of warning though most free stuff is a taster for a sold programme so be prepared for the sales pitch. If someone invites you for a day’s free training you may well learn something useful but they will want to upsell you on to an expensive programme so leave your credit cards behind.

I don’t want to hear ‘I don’t know how’ as an excuse for anything unless it is accompanied by ‘but I’m going to learn.’

If you would like to improve the results in your small business I would like to invite you to ‘Focus for Results’ a four week online personalised and interactive learning programme which I am delivering with Peter Newton of The Business Conductor. To find out more please visit www.thebusinessconductor.co.uk. We start on June 2nd and the four sessions are followed by a one to one coaching session with either Peter or me. You’ll finish the programme with a full year’s marketing plan tailored to your business goals.

Is indecision holding you back?

One of the biggest obstacles to progress that I see is indecision. Indecision is paralysing. It can lead to lost opportunities. So if you sometimes struggle to make a decision here are a couple of tools that should help.

SWOT analysis

This is one of my favourite tools when I have any kind of decision to make.  It’s virtue is that it is very simple and very visual so making reaching a decision relatively easy.

If you haven’t used the tool before it is usually represented as a grid as shown in the illustration. Strengths and weaknesses refer to the ‘internal’ elements of the issue you are considering, the ones you have control over. Opportunities and threats are ‘external’ and are the extraneous elements over which you have little control, things like the economy, government policies etc. As you will see the strengths and opportunities are the positives and weaknesses and threats the negatives.

The beauty of this simple tool is that you can see very quickly whether the positives outweigh the negatives which will help you to reach a decision quickly! Use it to evaluate ideas, premises, suppliers, applicants, just about everything.

Here’s a template and a few questions to help you.

Grid Analysis

This is another tool that I find really useful, especially when a SWOT analysis hasn’t produced a clear winner or when I’m comparing a range of options. In a grid analysis you determine you assessment criteria, the things that are really important to you, and then you score each of your options against each of the criteria. I usually use a score out of 10. When you’ve allocated a score to each criterion and each issue you total them up and hopefully will have a ranked order of preference.

You can  download a template here  I’ve included some potential items to consider but you can change these to suit yourself.

Where did the time go?

Did you do the analysis? Do you now understand where your time goes? Are you happy that you are using it in direct proportion to you priorities?

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I refer back to last week’s post when I talked about the lack of time being an obstacle we often put in the way of achievement. I suggested that you track your use of time over the week perhaps using toggl.com. Did you do it?

What’s holding you back?

Did you find that you were spending longer than you thought on a task? Were there some bad habits that you can break? Did you find too much time taken up meeting other people’s agendas rather than your own? Or are you simply trying to do too much?

Helpful hints

I’m not claiming to have all the answers here but I do have a few tips that work for me:

We are in charge!

• Limit the size of the ‘to do’ list. The experts say that we can only work on a maximum of three significant tasks in a day. I agree but I know we have more than 3 things on our ‘to do’ lists. I find it helpful to have a master list on a tool like Simpleology or Asana and then to have a daily list of not more than 3 major tasks.
• Use a timer to keep you focused. Set the timer for 20, 25 minutes or an hour and don’t allow yourself to be distracted during that time. At the end of it reward yourself with a short break. Take a 15 minute power walk, spend 5 minutes catching up with social media, or get a drink (water will do you more good than coffee!) Use the timer on your phone or a tool like http://www.tomato-timer.com/#
• Break the tasks down into bite sized chunks so that you can feel yourself making progress.
• Turn off your emails and social media. Tell your contacts that you don’t deal with emails until after noon. If something is really urgent use the phone. This will get people to consider just how urgent getting in touch with you is and means that you spend the first part of the day at least working on your own agenda not someone else’s.
• Do the difficult or distasteful things first. If you don’t they’ll be hanging over you all day or even longer. Get them out of the way and then you can work on the fun stuff.
• Break huge tasks into bite sized pieces. Start somewhere and get the momentum going, you might have to make a few changes later but at least you will be making progress.
• Work on the important tasks before they become urgent.
• Get some help. Share work with a colleague, bring in a virtual assistant, put the kids on the payroll. My daughter, aged 11, loved getting a ‘payslip’ and some cash for helping me to stuff envelopes. My son makes his money helping me with websites and computer tasks.
• Bin tasks that are not in line with your goals. If things have been on your master to do list for weeks and never made it to your daily list they can’t be that important and if they are you need to find a way to do them. (Note to self: book time out for new website & writing book!)
• Say ‘no’. I’m still working on this one!

So there you  go. I hope these tips are helpful and that you will be able to say that a lack of time is no longer an obstacle. If you have any tips to add to the list please share them in the comments section here. We can all use all the help we can get.

My timer is about to go off so I’m off to get a glass of water and then move on to the next task.

Forget perfection, it’s not achievable.

My husband frequently gets more done than I do. It’s not that he’s quicker; he’s not. It’s not that he works harder; he doesn’t.  It’s not that he’s cleverer; he’s not. The reason he gets more done than me so often is that he accepts good enough whereas I always want perfection.

The drive for perfection is an obstacle that some of us put in the way of achievement. It’s a time waster. It holds us back and we need to let go. Perfection is not something we human beings can achieve. We can always see something that could have been a little bit better, something we could have improved.

 

So will you join me in a pursuit of excellence and leave perfection to greater powers? Will you learn to accept good enough in order to make space for the next goal? Will you acknowledge that the pursuit of perfection is an obstacle to achievement and that excellence is a pretty good standard to aspire to?

I don’t have enough time!

Are you blaming a lack of time for your lack of achievement? I know that it’s an excuse I frequently hide behind. I’m a busy person. I am a wife and mother of two who runs a business and two networking groups. I am Chair of Governors of a large primary school and take a turn on the church flower arranging rota. I like being busy. I get more done when I’m busy but I am guilty sometimes of choosing busyness of business. Is this a trap you fall into too?

Are you making excuses?

How do you choose to use your time?

‘I haven’t had time’is an excuse I frequently hear from my clients. Lack of time is an excuse not an obstacle. We have the rime for what we want to do. So if you find yourself saying ‘I haven’t had time ask yourself why. The chances are that you are not committed enough to your goal, that you have allowed other people’s agenda to dominate yours or that clutter, mental or physical, has taken over.

 

 

 

 

Where does time go?

When we really look at our use of time we can be surprised by the results. How long does it really take to make that item, write that piece or prepare for that meeting? How long do we spend checking emails or social media?

Knowing how long a task really takes is vital where there is a connection between time and money. It’s very easy to underestimate how long a job takes and therefore to under price our work. But knowing how we spend time will also allow us to work out whether we are using time in proportion to our priorities. If we’re not we need to make changes.

Track time

If lack of time is an issue for you track you ruse of time over a typical weel or at least a few days. Note down what you do every minute of the day. Use a tool like Toggl.com which can run in the background on your desktop, tablet or phone. The free version is adequate for this analysis. You can record your time usage against client, project or product etc. and at the end of the day or week you can see exactly where your time went. Be honest! Don’t think you can skip the time you spent on Twitter or the coffee in front of the  TV! I’m not saying you can’t spend time on Twitter or in front of the TV but that is a choice you make and if you choose to make it then you can’t complain later that you didn’t have the time to spend on your priorities.

Action points

• Track your time usage for the next week
• What surprises you?
• What could you do less of to make time for your goals?
• What do you need to change?
• Come back next week when we’ll consider some changes and the tools that might help.

 

 

 

What’s stopping you?

What obstacles are stopping you from reaching your goals? If you are like most of us your list will probably include some or all of the following:

• lack of time
• the children are too young
• lack of finance
• too few customers
• the children have exams
• insufficient knowledge
• lacking a skill
• lack of ideas
• the children are at a tricky stage
• lack of staff
• can’t find reliable suppliers at the right price
• my partner needs my support
• lack of clarity
• don’t know what to do

I suspect your list won’t include your biggest obstacle. You! That’s right, most of us are our own worst enemies. Look at the list above, is it a list of obstacles or excuses?

All too frequently we blame obstacles for our lack of progress when what we are really doing is making excuses. So I want you to raise your level of consciousness this week; look out for your excuses. What excuses are you making? Why are you making them? What would it take for you to make progress rather than excuses?

I’ll be doing the same. I already know that my biggest excuse is lack of time but what other reasons am I giving for limited progress? I’ll be revisiting this subject in the next few posts, looking for ways to overcome the obstacles, to give up on the excuses. Do join me,