The Confidence to Take Action
The one thing I found that has the biggest impact on someone's willingness or likelihood to make a timely decision to take action - to get results - is a lack of confidence. When I say lack of confidence, I don't mean a general lack of self-confidence. I mean a lack of confidence that impacts you as a leader, and your ability to take real action.
I actually had two issues with clients just over the last week, where a lack of confidence was really impacting their ability to take action. With one, it had to do with something very personal around asking for a promotion. With another, it had to do with taking massive action around a new business strategy. Now, don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that every time you don't take action, it's because of a lack of confidence. I'm not even saying every time you have a lack of confidence, you should move forward - sometimes that lack of confidence means you should delay, or you should go to get help, or you should not make a decision at all. But what I want to focus on here is in having those conversations with my clients, we actually came up with a framework that I think will be really helpful moving forward.
When you look at lack of confidence driving a lack of action, it really comes down to two things. The reason why we have that lack of confidence is a combination of:
Ability
Risk
If we have high ability and low risk, we're going to take action. If we have low ability and high risk, we're not going to take action. Pretty simple, but I want to drive it down one layer further to make it really actionable.
Let's take a look at ability first. Within ability, if you want to raise your ability, they are really two levers that you can pull. One I'll call "real ability." How do you increase your real ability to get a job done? Well, that's going to be some combination of training, coaching, mentoring, or asking for help. Raising your real ability is going to take time. So if it's about an action you need to take now, raising your real ability is not going to be much help. Although you can raise your real ability by using your team and asking for help - that's one way to do it. Now, the other ones - training, coaching, mentoring - take some time.
The other type of ability is perceived ability. Sometimes we have the ability, but we don't perceive that. We don't think we have that ability. So a way to raise your perceived ability, the ability you perceive in your own mind, is to look back at previous challenges. When have you had a similar challenge, a difficult challenge, met it, and succeeded? One of the things I do every day is I journal, and part of what I journal is my wins each day. One of the ways you could raise your perceived ability is by journaling those wins every day, which builds your confidence, and then going back and reviewing all of those wins. That really raises your perceived ability. Another way to raise your perceived ability is to make sure you have a supportive community around you, who will pick you up when you need it and inspire you when you need it. The last way I'll say to raise your perceived ability is all about your mindset, and that could be a gratitude exercise every morning, that could be affirmations, meditation. There are a whole number of ways to improve your mindset. So you really do have the ability right in the moment to raise your perceived ability. If you raise a combination of your real ability and your perceived ability, your confidence to take action will go up.
Now, I said there were two sides of it: one was ability, the other is risk. Risk is also a combination of two things, two levers to look at. One is: what's the risk of taking action? What will it cost you if you get it wrong? Make sure you think about that, even document that. What will it benefit you if you get it right? That's the risk of action. Then, look at the risk of inaction. What will it cost you if you delay action right now? I've had clients that delay responding to an email for three weeks until they know they've got it right, and by the time they respond, they've lost the game anyway. They needed to respond right away. So what's the cost if you delay action?
So again, framework for a lack of confidence: if you feel like you're not taking action because you have a lack of confidence, you've got two big areas and then two sub-areas to look at. You've got ability and risk. Within ability, raise that real ability, raise that perceived ability. You're more likely to take action. Within risk, understand the risk of action and the risk of inaction. Once you understand that, optimize those things. You will either realize it's not a good time to take action, or you'll take action now.