How to grow your team’s confidence

Confidence is a key leadership success trait and a dynamic asset which drives you and others to impactful behaviors: it drives, it influences, it projects, and it attracts.

As a leader, you know how important confidence is: both for yourself and for your team. Having the ability to move through life, through your career, through your organization with confidence allows you to avoid action inertia and move towards your ‘extraordinary’.

When you and your team are confident, you are driven, focused and taking actions to accomplish your goals.

But, when confidence is shaky, everything seems to hold still, right? A lack of confidence stops you and your team in your tracks.

Everything starts in the mind, and I’d like to help you understand and work with yours, not against it, so that you not only understand your own brain but you also understand your employees’ brains.

Confidence as a state of mind

Confidence is a challenge as long as you believe you either have it or don’t. Without it, reaching your goals is hard, as your confidence impacts your courage to act, and thus your success.

Confidence is not innate. It is not something you are born with or without; you can acquire it at any point in time.

Did you know that the word ‘confidence’ comes from the Latin word ‘cōnfīdentia’, where ‘cōnfīdō’ means believe, ‘con’ means ‘with’ and ‘fīdō’ means ‘trust’?

This gives us such a straightforward definition of the word: believe with trust. Confidence is the conviction you have in yourself, and your skills and abilities.

Confidence is a state of mind where we think confidently, feel confidently and act confidently. A state of mind that we can consciously step into every single day.

Let’s do it and together learn three actionable strategies to rewire your brain for confidence and boost that confidence of yours to establish a confidence state of mind in your team.

THINK confident

You might think you are clear on your team’s goals, but a lack of confidence often stems from confusion in the team. As their leader, boost your team members confidence by ensuring that all members are clear.

A great strategy to do that is to break each of your goals into a series of chunks. In order to avoid feeling overwhelmed by one of the goals, which can be paralyzing, this step helps them take your big goals and chunk them down into smaller, specific and manageable steps.

These steps take the fear out of the big ‘how’ question too. Focusing on a chunk and then another one and then another one helps them engage better, as it makes your goals more attainable.

In addition, you can also add dates to engage their cognitive control at an even higher level. Studies have shown that when it comes to deadlines, we respond with a higher sense of urgency when it is phrased in a number of days.

So in addition to your goal-completion date and step-completion dates, do also specify these in deadlines – in other words, avoid thinking of a quarter deadline for instance and instead think of it as a 90-day one.

FEEL confident

Knowledge gives us the confidence to move forward, and as their leader, your team members will be looking up to you on how to confidently move forward.

A great strategy to do that is to help them expect what’s going to happen. Expectations are beliefs that things will unfold a certain way. They help us to make sense of our world. Most of our expectations are formulated at an unconscious level, and that’s where you can stand out. The key here is to manage these expectations so they are not managing you and your team.

See this as data research: this step helps you collect the data so you can alter and adjust your behaviors as necessary to set positive, realistic and successful expectations for your goals.

Getting your expectations right, by accurately expecting what will happen, is important as it keeps your team motivated to keep going. The only thing you need to do in order to uncover your expectations is to make the time to pause and ask: ‘What do I expect to happen?’ Think of one of your goals, and answer that question with the how, the how long, the when, the where.

When you consciously expect, you know what you are after and it helps you and your team match your actions to meet it.

ACT confident

A lack of confidence often results in being frazzled and disorganized. As their leader, help your team boost their confidence by guiding them to approach their workload in an organized and effective way.

A great strategy to do that is to encourage your team grey matter to be more consistent with habit formation. This is based on a simple, yet strong model, discovered in the 1990s, called the Habit Loop. This model was first discovered – using mice, a maze and chocolate – by a team of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The model comprises three parts: Trigger –> Routine –> Reward. The trigger is the cue that kick-starts the loop. It could be anything that encourages a behavior – a prior action, a specific time, a feeling, a location, an event; make it predictable.

The routine is the behavior itself. The reward is whatever you want: make it creative, fun and satisfying; it needs to be so attractive that you do the behavior to get it.

These actionable strategies help you to engage your brains to their best as you and your team take action. Your actions are moving you and your life, career, organization forward.

Leadership always starts from within, and leading confidently not only impacts you but also others around you.

Confidence leads you to a much richer path.