Some weeks feel like they move in fast-forward, don’t they? One meeting blends into the next, deadlines sneak up, and suddenly it’s Friday and we’re left wondering where the time went. It’s funny how much leadership and life depend on our ability to navigate, adapt, and just keep moving.
This week, two themes kept popping up for me: confidence (how we build it, keep it, and grow it) and creativity (finding unexpected ways to make the most of our time). They showed up in very different places from the stage in a keynote to the driver’s seat of my minivan at 6:30 pm on a Tuesday night and both came with lessons worth sharing.
LEADERSHIP: Confidence: Permission, Desire, Belief, and Experience
In almost every keynote I deliver and in many coaching conversations, the word confidence comes up. Organizations want it. Leaders crave it. Teams are told they need it.
Imagine this: You want to be more confident when leading team meetings, but no matter what you try, it ends up feeling flat. You’ve practiced your talking points for meetings, tried speaking more slowly, but your voice still sounds stiff, you fidget with your pen, and you feel awkward the entire time. You leave the meeting thinking, Well, that didn’t help.
But confidence isn’t a single skill you check off a list, and it certainly doesn’t magically appear. It’s a mix of four ingredients, actions, and persistent energy. Here are four things that I have found to build confidence:
Desire – Leaders who want to grow, influence, and have an impact (those have the desire and are willing to roll up their sleeves put in a bit of effort) are far more likely to stretch themselves…and that drive fuels confidence.
Permission – Sometimes we need permission from ourselves. Give yourself (and your team) the go-ahead to try things, make the call, and learn along the way. Waiting for someone else’s approval to create confidence is a killer.
Belief – Even a flicker of belief that you can figure it out, rally the right people, and course-correct if needed is enough to start. That belief is contagious.
Experience – Confidence comes from doing, not from overthinking. Every decision, pivot, and challenge builds your leadership muscle. Many times we will get it right and many times we don’t.
It’s like the pep talk you’d give yourself in the bathroom mirror: If you want to be more confident, give yourself permission to show up in a new way. You can figure this out, you always have. Once you’ve done it a few times, it will feel like second nature.
Confidence is built brick by brick, and sometimes we have to rebuild or reshape it. For me, it often boils down to one question: Can I figure it out? Not “Can I do it perfectly the first time?” but “Can I keep pivoting, trying, and improving until I get there?”
That’s where real leadership confidence lives, not in flawless execution, but in the willingness to believe it’s possible, take action, adapt, and try again. I often find myself saying to teams, We might not have all the answers, but I’m confident we can figure it out.
If we focus less on knowing everything and more on figuring things out and invite our teams to go on that ride with us, confidence stops being a wish list item and becomes a daily practice.
Your challenge this week: Where can you give yourself (or your team) more permission to build confidence? And, to just figure it out?
LIFE: Who Cares How It Gets Done, Right?
Lately, I’ve felt like a full-time chauffeur, shuttling my kids back and forth to sports. This year, we joined a new soccer team, which means three nights a week we drive a little farther for practices. Great for skill development? Yes. Extra time on the road? Also yes.
Somewhere between drop-off and pick-up, I realized something: this window of time could work for me instead of against me. When my son runs off to join his team, I pull out my trusty, blue, scuffed-up lawn chair and my lap desk, a nerdy black cushion with a hard plastic top, from the back of the car and get to work. Evenings aren’t my “golden hours,” but they’re becoming my “catch-up hours.”
Sometimes I sit. Other times, I prop the cushy part of the lap desk on the hood of my minivan (yes, creativity counts) and knock out emails, a bit of planning, and all those “I’ll get to it later” tasks. Suddenly, they’re getting done.
We often have a picture in our heads of how our day should go, or convince ourselves our schedule doesn’t allow for certain things. But maybe the time we’ve been wishing for is already hiding in plain sight. It may not be perfect. It may feel a little messy and chaotic.
And yes, people might think you’ve lost it when they see a laptop perched on your hood, but if it gets done, who cares, right?