As a business owner, professional woman, leader, coach or consultant, you may find yourself teaching others what you need to learn yourself. In my journey, I’ve discovered a profoundly positive lesson that has transformed the way I am able to interact with my clients and my work. I believe this insight will also be valuable for you as you navigate the challenges and opportunities of self-leadership.
The most common barrier: Self-Doubt
The most common barrier to thriving that I’ve witnessed in upwards of 80% of my coaching and mentoring clients over the years is self-doubt. It comes in all sorts of flavours and creates a myriad of actions or inactions.
Procrastination. Undervaluing. Hiding. Settling. It’s responsible for so many constraints on our behaviours, for so many regrets, for so much self-recrimination.
Under this misbelief is an identity of Not Enough, or as one of my (distant) mentors, Brene Brown would say “a sense of unworthiness”.
It’s a restrictive identity I carried for many years.
Its genesis was in my childhood and through selective perception, I worked hard on reinforcing this self-image. Talk about arguing for my limitations!
I now see that what we need to know is doubt is an emotion, and like all emotions, it can be navigated with self-awareness, flexible thinking and emotional intelligence, all key principles of self-leadership.
Self-doubt just doesn’t make sense.
I’m not suggesting that we need to become bulletproof, immune to uncertainty. That’s neither desirable nor possible.
Because doubt is natural. It makes sense to experience a little doubt when you’re approaching a growth edge.
But:
- What doesn’t make sense is immediately veering away from the growth edge as soon as you feel doubt fluttering inside.
- What doesn’t make sense is putting yourself through an emotional wringer of doubt when a situation comes up that you’ve successfully navigated before.
- What doesn’t make sense is allowing doubt to constrain you to fit a narrative that is old, outdated and easier to update than you might imagine
- And what doesn’t make sense is to allow doubt to prevail by ignoring all of the evidence that exists that shows just how competent you really are
Avoiding the lesson because the teacher seems a bit scary is just not a good idea. What feels like a relief in the short term is likely to extract a higher cost than you might imagine.
That next iteration of you that often feels just out of reach? It could be just a small step away if you choose to front up.
What have I discovered?
It’s been 5 months since I returned from my sabbatical, feeling revitalised and ready to focus again.
At first, I assumed I could simply attribute my higher levels of clarity and confidence to the break itself. But over time I began to realise this was something more significant.
I felt tangibly different.
I was newly aware of a sense of certainty and presence that seemed to be readily available to me now. It was playing out in conversations with potential clients, friends, and colleagues and in the ideas I was developing.
It was particularly apparent when I was looking at my diary for the weeks ahead. I have several new clients booked in for workshops, clients with big personal goals, and exciting business projects. Sessions that I am really looking forward to, with NO accompanying stressful feelings or thoughts discoloured by the old familiar doubt about my ability to meet their needs.
It was a delicious, welcoming, grounded feeling and I wanted to understand it more.
Navigating emotions with self-leadership principles
Self-knowledge is one of the five self-leadership principles in my framework. One practice that builds self-knowledge is reflection and a tool for this is guided journaling, an experience I wrote about in my recent blog on perspective-taking.
In my most recent journaling exercise (with the wonderful Ingrid), I found some answers – the extract below is verbatim from then:
“I’m celebrating this feeling of delight, this realisation that it is so very possible to CHOOSE to shift my focus to supportive thoughts.
What have I been believing in the past? In the not-so-distant past, I would have been believing, worrying, and ruminating that I could not necessarily deliver what these new clients want and need, that their expectations would be huge.
I now know that that’s a projection from me. My relentless expectations of myself have been the course of much of the pressure and subsequent doubt I’ve felt”.
Trusting your inner guide
What’s more, I’ve too often guru-fied mentors, coaches, course providers and event hosts in the past, absolutely sure that someone “out there” had the right answers for me.
That outsourcing of my authority has never delivered me what I was searching for.
I’ve discovered that external resources could connect some dots, and deliver some specific skills, but could never determine my direction, what’s right for me at this time. I know by now that my growth comes from guidance and searching questions, not by being spoonfed answers. Just because they’ve worked for someone else, it does not mean they’ll work for me.
And yet, I assumed that my clients would be demanding that I have all their answers when they came to me and, more pressingly, I felt that I had to deliver them!
The truth is that our clients recognise the part they play in the process. Are they seeking results, new frontiers? Absolutely! But those answers are inside of them and so our role is to be a catalyst, an accomplice, a mutual explorer on their journey. Someone who is perhaps more familiar with the terrain, and so can suggest optional paths to the destination, but never one who insists that one path trumps another.
- You don’t need to have all the answers
- This creates the opportunity for a true partnership with your clients
- It means you can spend more time posing questions that dig under the issues and opportunities
- That you can trust your deep experience and subsequent ability to respond in the moment rather than try and predict and prepare for the moment
- You can take these realisations into the fabric of your own client sessions – “let’s see what we can create, discover, explore, examine, unearth, develop, evaluate, and decide together
And the weight, the heaviness, the pressure lifts and is replaced by anticipation and the genuine delight of creativity and discovery.
It’s from this space, from this orientation that genuine magic can happen. The Broaden and Build theory from Positive Psychology tells us that when we are buoyed by positive emotions we are much more likely to notice opportunities and possibilities that are just not as readily visible when doubt is in the room.
The shift from teacher to student to teacher
I have been teaching these concepts to my own clients for years.
And what I believe has now happened is that I am now, finally, anchored in the truth of “I am enough”.
It’s no longer intellectualised.
It’s actualised.
I finally, truly understand this concept and I am beginning to embody it.
I say beginning because I know I will move from teacher back to student, back to teacher and again to student as I continue to learn and to integrate what I learn, just as you are and do.
Building your own unique framework:
At a deep level, I recognise this shift is also because this work, the Self-leadership framework that I have developed is my truest, most authentic, and most powerful expression because it comes from the coalface of personal experience. I can now see that even the self-worth focus that I had in my previous chapter, although resonant, was still borrowed! It was a chip off the block of Brene Brown. Now I’ve built my own block.
This body of work is not new.
It has not been quickly developed in response to a market need that I found and decided to cater to. Rather it’s an expression of my experience. It’s a reflection of who I have become, just as your work is a reflection of who you are.
It’s not linear. The pieces within the framework are interdependent and synergistic, and I believe this is why it becomes uniquely personal, iterative, generative, and effective for each person who explores, adopts, and adapts its principles.
I continue to be the student, even as I am the teacher.
And I can now serve and contribute from this clear, calm, and confident space at a far higher level, which benefits everyone. The ripple effect allows certainty to be passed on to those I’m working with who then begin to radiate that same energy to those around them. Growth and momentum are the result…
I know you can move to this space if you’re not already there.
It doesn’t need to be about striving anymore. The energy of trying to prove yourself is very, very different from the energy of being present. Self-trust is no longer a destination. You’ve arrived. You just need to remember that.
It’s no longer a performance for your clients. It’s now a partnership because you are fully present, responding to the person in front of you rather than preparing and planning to cater to the person and the need you’re imagining.
Because you, your work, your ideas. They’re all enough. That’s an irreducible truth that a Self-leader recognises, embraces, and celebrates.
Embracing self-leadership and shifting from performing for your clients to partnering with them can lead to a transformative journey of personal growth and empowerment. You have the capacity to be a catalyst, an accomplice, and a guide for your clients as they navigate their own paths.
