Episode 6 How to boost your leadership confidence

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Welcome to Unstuck and Unstoppable,

the podcast for ambitious female

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leaders who want to create more impact,

income, and influence in their careers.

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feel connected to their passion

and purpose, but without

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selling out or burning out.

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I'm Sarah Archer, a leadership coach

and career strategist, helping women

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like you thrive in leadership roles

while staying true to your values.

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I'm the founder of CareerTree

Coaching and have over 15 years of

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coaching experience and significant HR

leadership experience to share with you.

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I know as a female leader it can

be hard to find time to focus

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on your career aspirations.

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The day job can be all consuming.

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Plus, no matter how senior you are,

there are always going to be times

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when you feel stuck, when you have

self doubt, or feel like an imposter.

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And that's where unstuck

and unstoppable comes in.

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Each week I'll be sharing practical

strategies, insightful interviews and

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inspiring stories to help you boost

your confidence, lead with purpose

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and achieve sustainable success.

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If you're ready to stop playing

small and unlock the incredible

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potential you have within you and feel

unstoppable, you're in the right place.

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Let's get started.

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Hello.

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And welcome to episode

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six, how to boost your

leadership confidence.

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I wanted to talk about this because,

when you are a leader, there are huge

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expectations on you all of the time.

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There's expectations from your

team, from your boss, from the

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senior leadership team, the board,

to, , have impact, to, make decisions,

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to move things forward, to deliver.

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And,, that can create a

huge amount of pressure.

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Plus, the types of decisions you might

be making as a leader have a huge impact,

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, have impact on people, they have impact

on the business, they have impact on

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your team, and that can weigh heavily

and play on your confidence as well.

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Plus, as a leader, you often have

to deal with lots of different

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situations and scenarios, which you

may never have dealt with before.

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So you're, constantly having to take

on things and take them on without

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maybe saying, I need help with this.

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I need support with this.

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I haven't done this before.

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I'm not sure about, the

direction I need to take.

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Your frame of reference can be role

models of previous leaders you might

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have worked with, some of which

who may have been great, may have

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been really inspirational, and some

which may have not been so great.

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So that will play into your leadership

confidence as well in terms of who you may

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have worked alongside or for in the past.

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And all of this together can make

you question who you are as a

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leader, what your leadership style

is, how effective that style is.

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And it might make you think about how am

I going to get the results I need to get?

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How do I motivate my team

to be high performing?

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And this all together can make

your leadership confidence

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feel a bit wobbly at times.

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And that's the key.

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completely understandable wobbliness.

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, because, you are having to step out

of your comfort zone, , on a regular

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basis, to take on all these things

that you may not have done before.

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, you might be finding that you are

second guessing your decisions.

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Maybe you're thinking, is this

the right thing that I'm doing?

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Am I leading in the right way?

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It might make you feel doubt

about the direction that you're

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embarking on with your team.

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It might, , if you have people

pleasing tendencies, it might push

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those to the fore because it might

feel like you're trying to please

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your team, please your boss, please

your clients, please the board.

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And again, that can play into

feeling a bit wobbly in terms

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of your leadership confidence.

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It might trigger imposter feelings.

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Who am I to be this leader?

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What do I know about this?

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How can I be the one who, makes

the decisions or takes that stance?

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And if you're surrounded by peers who seem

to be on the exterior, very confident,

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then obviously that can exacerbate

your confidence wobbles as well.

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The first thing to notice that it's okay.

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We all experienced these wobbles and

even those very confident colleagues

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who may look super confident, maybe

having those inner confidence wobbles.

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, they , might look at you and

think you look super confident

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and that you don't have those

wobbles, but, we all have them.

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I work with lots and lots of female

leaders and, , all of them will

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have some sort of wobble going on.

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Now, what you don't want is for that

wobbliness, that confidence, self

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doubt, shakiness to be an ongoing thing

because that can really take its toll.

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So if you're noticing your confidence is

wobbling, It's important to think about

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the action you need to take to support

yourself and to boost your confidence.

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What I tend to notice with my clients

is that it's the inner work that we need

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to do that will give you the foundation

for ongoing leadership confidence.

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, if you do the inner work, then you're

going to have this inner core of

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self confidence, which will help you

navigate all of those decisions, the

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direction you're taking, the boundaries

you have to set, the saying no around

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the kind of people pleasing, that

inner self confidence will support

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that because leadership confidence,

like any kind of confidence, it's a

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muscle, you have to keep working it.

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It's not something that is just.

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fixed, you have to keep giving yourself

that boost, which is a bit like that

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physical confidence, , if you work out

at the gym, , working on your inner

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core supports all the other exercises,

all the other activities that you're

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going to undertake by having that

strong inner core, it's the foundation.

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And it's the same with

your leadership confidence.

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And Doing that inner work, means

that it will increase, because you'll

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have that inner self confidence,

it will increase the trust people

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have in you, people around you, your

team, the board, the management team.

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client, it will then give them that

confidence in you because they can see

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that inner core, even when you're making

tough decisions that they don't like.

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So the question I'm sure is,

well, what does that actually

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mean in terms of inner work?

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And it starts essentially with our

beliefs that we hold about ourselves

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and the story that we tell ourselves

about who we are as a leader.

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And if we don't work on this, then

it's harder for us to be authentic.

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And that impacts the trust that

people have in us and around us.

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For example, I was working with a

head of HR recently, and when we

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started to unpack some of her beliefs

that she held around herself, What

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emerged was that she felt she had to

be super professional all the time,

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and that to reveal anything about her

personal life was a vulnerability and

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a weakness, and therefore she really

didn't bring any of her personal

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self, her self outside work, into work.

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What this meant is that she wasn't

bringing her whole self to work,

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and therefore people around her

found it hard to engage with

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her, hard to connect with her.

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It impacted her relationships, the

strength of her relationships, and it

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meant that for her team, for her boss,

for the stakeholders that she was working

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with, were able to their level of trust

in her professionally was, was good,

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but as a person, they couldn't find that

connection with her and therefore it made,

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hard for them to feel she was someone

that they could really work alongside.

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And she could see that, see that it was

becoming very limiting for her and so

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what we did was we had to work on the

narrative that she was telling herself

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about bringing her whole self to work and

then once we'd worked on that narrative

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and that belief she was then able to start

to experiment with bringing more of her

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personal life into work and the impact

was huge when she started to do that.

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And that then reinforced the belief work

that we did and the ultimate confidence

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. Now, the reason obviously people find

the inner work more challenging is

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because,, it is , hard to do because

a lot of the beliefs we hold about

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ourselves are unconscious beliefs.

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A lot of them were formed in childhood

or our early life or our early career.

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And what tends to happen with beliefs

is that there can be a result, maybe

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even of a throwaway comment or a bit

of feedback that we've got and we

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then believe that to be true about us.

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And what we do is we look for

evidence that supports that belief

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that we have about ourself and

therefore we discount the evidence

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that would disprove that belief.

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And so we just build up all

this information, evidence about

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ourselves that becomes ingrained

and therefore it becomes more work

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to unpack and change that belief.

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But the good news is you can change

those beliefs, you can reframe them,

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and you can start to embed a new

belief about yourself as a leader.

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You definitely can work on that.

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And then once you do it

can be transformative.

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But because they're unconscious,

they're a little bit hard to notice.

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And one way of noticing it is, Noticing

what you're triggered by, noticing that

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certain things are triggering you, and

you're having quite a, , impactful or

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overwhelming reaction to something, that

can then,, give you information about,

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okay, why is that so important to me?

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Why is that triggering me?

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And underneath it, you

can begin to spot beliefs.

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So again, I had another, , client,

the book is, A Guide to the Truth,

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and, He was a head of marketing

and what she noticed was that, , she

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was being challenged by a very

confident peer in the management team.

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who was not only confident,

she was very direct this peer.

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She was a very fast decision maker

and, my client had a huge reaction

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when she was being put on the spot by

this person around a particular decision

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or a direction that they were taking.

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And it triggered a belief for her

when we unpacked it that she wasn't

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good enough, she wasn't sharp enough,

she wasn't able to think on her feet.

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And in a way it was helpful that

that colleague had enabled my client

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to work out something was going on

because she had such an overwhelming

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reaction to being challenged.

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It made her want to think about

what was happening for her.

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And then what she could start to do

was unpack that belief and start to do

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the work around changing that belief.

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So you could think about, am I being

triggered by something or some things

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at the moment, and just get curious

about what they may be, because

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they will be contributing to your

confidence, maybe taking a bit of a dip.

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, and then what you can start to do

as well alongside that, because

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they are interlinked, is to notice

the story that you might be telling

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yourself about what is happening.

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Because you can change the narrative

and we have narratives that are

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positive about what we do and narratives

that are negative about what we do.

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. when something's gone really well,

we might notice that narrative we

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tell ourselves about a leader is

really, , positive and up there.

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And,, we're really great at what we do.

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And then when something doesn't

go well, or we're, having to deal

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with a lot of challenging things.

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Our narrative might change.

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It might be around, , how we're not

good enough, or we're not dealing

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with things really well, or we don't

know enough, or whatever it might be.

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So again, it's just giving yourself

the space to notice what stories

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am I playing out to myself?

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A lot of this is unconscious, but it's

bringing it into our consciousness

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around, this is not a helpful

narrative that I'm playing out here.

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And I certainly experienced

all of this as well.

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But I've done a lot of inner work, , when

I worked as an HR director, having to do

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a lot of things around, restructuring,

redundancies, things I hadn't necessarily

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done before or led before, I definitely

experienced a lot of the self doubt

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and the, beliefs about myself and the

narrative I would tell myself about

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what was working, what wasn't working.

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But I did the inner work.

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I did the inner core work because

I knew I needed to in order to be

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resilient to the leader and inspire

confidence in the people around me.

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, and you can do that work as well.

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, And one of the things that I've

noticed recently is I've been

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working with quite a few of my

clients in my Ambition Plan program.

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And in that we do some work around

leadership brand, noticing what our

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current leadership brand might be.

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What are the maybe 10 things

we're known for at the moment?

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With one of my clients, this exercise

was transformative for her because what

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she started to notice is actually the

things about her leadership brand that

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made her different to her peers and were

real strengths in the business that she

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hadn't been valuing and that she'd been

telling herself a story about because

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it was different to her peers and because

it meant that she had to challenge them

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on certain things because that was her

strength and it linked her specialism

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and she started to see by us shaping

her leadership brand how important it

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was to the business and how actually it

was enabling her peers in the management

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team to be better at what they did

because she brought this strength.

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So it was a light bulb

moment for her around.

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what was actually unique to her and

a strength to her and how she could

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change her narrative to actually support

this being something really valuable

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rather than seeing it as a negative

because her peers found it challenging.

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Doing that little bit of reflective

work can be really helpful at helping

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you understand Actually, I might be

finding this difficult, but I'm finding

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it difficult because it's the strength

that I'm bringing and it's really

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useful to the team and to business.

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Our goal is for us to be authentic and

to recognize and amplify our strengths

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as a leader and get comfortable

with our vulnerabilities, but be

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able to recognize, and own and

reinforce our own leadership identity.

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, because what you bring will be unique and

it will be added value to what your peers

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in the leadership team might bring or your

team that you are actually working with.

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So the takeaway I'm going to suggest

to you today are a couple of takeaways.

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One is to recognize what's going on.

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Is your confidence wobbly at the moment

because you're having to step out of

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your leadership zone a lot because

you're having to take on lots of new

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things that you haven't maybe done

before and therefore thinking about

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what support you need to help you

navigate those comfort zones because

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you can ask for support as a leader.

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The second thing would be to think

about, what might be triggering you,

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if you are being triggered, and what

that might be, giving you in terms of

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information about some of your beliefs,

and whether you want to start doing

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some belief work, to, change some of

the unhelpful beliefs that you might

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be holding about yourself as a leader.

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Similarly, thinking about what's

my awareness around my narrative?

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What do I tell myself that's

positive about myself as a leader?

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What do I tell myself that's

negative about myself as a leader?

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And thinking about the leadership

brand exercise that could then reinforce

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the positive so you could amplify that

leadership narrative that is about what

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you bring that is unique and different.

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And just to get curious about what's

going on around your leadership identity,

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because we always want to be growing as

leaders, it's never going to be static.

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And so if you're having a confidence

wobble, it might be that you've

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gone through a growth phase

in your leadership identity as

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well, and being more confident.

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Okay with that and not, not beating

yourself up if you're feeling a

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little bit low in confidence at the

moment because that's not helpful.

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confidence, work can be challenging.

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So if you felt that you wanted

some support around any of the

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areas I've mentioned today,,

then please do get in touch.

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I love doing confidence work.

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It's one of my specialisms, particularly

with female leaders, helping you.

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Amplify your impact and, really

own your unique leadership identity.

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You can also watch this

episode as it is available as a

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recording from my LinkedIn live.

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And I'll put a link in

the show notes for you.

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And if you're over on LinkedIn,

then please do connect with me.

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If we're not already connected.

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Thank you so much for listening

to this episode of the Unstuck

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and Unstoppable podcast.

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I have lots of free resources you

can access on my website, ww.career

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tree coaching.co uk, and I'll

also put links in the show notes.

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If you found this episode

helpful, then please subscribe

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so you don't miss the next one.

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And please do share it with a

friend and leave me a review

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and I will personally thank you.

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Remember, you're capable of more

than you know, shine brightly.

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Lead boldly and unlock the

extraordinary potential within you.

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Be unstoppable.