Speaker #0Well, Well, hello there, hello there, it has been a minute. it has been a minute. I am coming off the high of our sharpen and elevate event in Detroit yesterday. I am coming off the high of our sharpen and elevate event in Detroit yesterday. And I wanted to share how we opened up the day. And I wanted to share how we opened up the day. And so what you're about to listen to is the opening, And so what you're about to listen to is the opening, where I focus on our inner voice, where I focus on our inner voice, that inner voice that is whispering to you and sometimes yelling at you. that inner voice that is whispering to you and sometimes yelling at you. and helping you manage that to help produce and protect your confidence. and helping you manage that to help produce and protect your confidence. And it was very helpful to the people there. And it was very helpful to the people there. I know it's been helpful to me and the people that I have worked with. I know it's been helpful to me and the people that I have worked with. And I think you will love it. And I think you will love it. So So I'm sharing that with you, I'm sharing that with you, hoping that we see each other soon. hoping that we see each other soon. For the Speak by Design University members, For the Speak by Design University members, we have already set our date for next year. we have already set our date for next year. We will be sharpening and elevating in Chicago. We will be sharpening and elevating in Chicago. And the date for that, And the date for that, please save it is July please save it is July 15. 15. July 15 in Chicago and in Chicago is we heard you all it's a very good location central location for our clients in the United States and summertime is the best time in Chicago too. July 15 in Chicago and in Chicago is we heard you all it's a very good location central location for our clients in the United States and summertime is the best time in Chicago too. As we are preparing for As we are preparing for fall certification. fall certification. That's where my focus is going to be. That's where my focus is going to be. I don't want you to think that we'll be putting out more of these podcasts, I don't want you to think that we'll be putting out more of these podcasts, but I didn't want you to miss this message. but I didn't want you to miss this message. So we're thinking of you and hoping you are having a wonderful summer. So we're thinking of you and hoping you are having a wonderful summer. Take care, Take care, everybody, everybody, and enjoy. and enjoy. Most people don't fail because of a lack of skills or knowledge. They fail because they can't picture themselves as successful. They see their present limitations louder than their future potential. They even focus on these limitations and not the potential. Think how much you focus on the criticism you receive in a performance report. And that's a problem. Because if you can't see it, you can't be it. We are living in an era of unprecedented opportunity. but also paralyzing overwhelm. Just look at the anxiety levels and how they're increasing at every age. Look at the over-dependence we have on Xanax. Every single one of us is navigating rapid change, growing expectations, and the pressure to inspire people in every physical room and virtual room that we enter. You feel the pressure to be consistently compelling, to be crystal clear in your communication, to be 100% convincing to every single person you speak to. But it's not happening. It's not working. It's not coming together. Why? Because of the inner voice, that inside voice that is speaking to you. Confidence does not come from a title. Leaders have doubts. Confidence does not come with knowledge. Experts have doubts. And what does it sound like? The lack of confidence? It sounds like sentences like, we are monitoring the situation closely. We haven't decided anything yet. Well, it could be many things causing the problem. It could be this, it could be that. There's so much stuff we need to look at. Or you might want to think about fixing this problem at some point down the road. Those are people avoiding decision making. Why are they avoiding it? Because of how they're talking to themselves. Because they lack inner confidence. Producing and protecting, protecting your inner confidence is part of the leadership communication toolkit. It is the foundation. It is your operating system. All good, confident behaviors and clear communication come from good, strong inner confidence. I want to share some research. This is all from Harvard Business Review, their articles and different pieces that they put out. And I've assembled a series of statistics that just point to how important your inner confidence is. So the first one, confidence building programs. So these are training programs that are meant to build confidence, lead to a 73% improvement in handling tough conversations. We are better at handling conflict, at disagreeing with one another if we have strong inner confidence. That makes sense. It also makes sense that you can be taught, you can learn how to be bold. I believe that every one of us was born with perfect confidence, but that it gets socialized out of us. And then we have to learn how to produce it again. Another piece of research, leaders with a growth mindset are 47% more likely to lead successful innovation. Well, with the onset of artificial intelligence, which will touch every part of our businesses, every process will be impacted by it some way, either the inputs or the the middle points in a process or the outputs will feed our artificial intelligence systems. We need a high pace of innovation right now, we need successful transformations. So we're going to require this growth mindset? What's a growth mindset? It's the desire to intensify when things get hard. It's the desire to understand obstacles versus shrinking from obstacles. Now another one, weekly reflection improves decision making accuracy by 23%. Now this weekly reflection, that's people getting clear on what the answer is. You have to be able to turn off the noise, all the outside stimulus, and get inside your head to ask yourself the very important question, what's really the answer here? And that reflection is going to help improve decision making accuracy. And then mindset coaching, mindset coaching, which is practicing new thoughts, managing your thoughts, examining your thoughts. That kind of coaching increases leadership satisfaction and retention by 33%. We have to be able to manage our stress. And the only way to do that without medication is by managing our thoughts. So the confidence is a feeling. Confidence is a feeling. It comes from your thoughts. Your thoughts create your feelings. Your feelings create your actions. So if the action we want is clear, Communication, compelling communication, confident behavior. We have to look at what thoughts are going to produce those feelings of confidence that will turn the actions on that we want to see. But you can't think that, oh, I'll just do 100 presentations, and then I'll be confident. Well, the reason you're confident, if that does work for you, is not because you delivered 100 presentations. There's some people who only needed to do it once, or maybe never even needed a test audience. They practice so much on their own, and they believed so much in themselves that it worked the first time or it was good enough. But there's so much to examine in this belief that I need to deliver 2000 hours in this discipline before I'm good, before I'm good enough, that what The reason that has worked in the past for people is because it is generating a lot of positive thoughts about someone's skill, but it's taking more time than it necessarily has to. The way you think changes the way you speak and how you speak shapes what you create. Your words are incredibly powerful on your audiences. But no one teaches us, no one teaches us how to talk to ourselves. And even if they did, they can't control how you talk to yourself. Only you have 100% control over what you think. And companies are held back not because of a lack of strategy, lack of ideas, but by people's internal hesitation. And many of us have outdated self- perceptions. We're hanging on to an old self image we had from our childhood even from our families, the way our, our nuclear family sees us. We carry that self image into our adulthood when we're no longer even living with those people, and no longer that person. So the dilemma is that the self-image is wrong. And when the self-image is weak and unsure, we under-communicate our power. And the cost of the silence and the hesitation is so high. It's high to our company. It's high to our team. It's high to you. It's high to your family. The fastest way to accelerate your transformation is to start acting from your future self, not your past. You want to live into the person you're becoming before the evidence even shows up of who that person is going to be. So you don't need to wait until you get the promotion. You don't need to wait until your boss tells you you're good enough. You step into that version of yourself, that picture of yourself that you have five years from now. that already exists in your mind and that version of yourself who is more confident, more resilient, and crystal clear in their thinking. Inner confidence is something that you can build through rehearsing new thoughts and practicing these thoughts again and again until you truly believe them and they turn into personality traits. And these thoughts, the way you think and talk to yourself, shape the conversations you have with yourself and shape who you become. The most compelling leaders you've ever watched deliver a presentation or run a meeting, they are talking to themselves in a nurturing way. They have talked, at one moment, they were having to talk like their future self, not their fearful self. not their past self. And there's little examples I could give you on this. Think of a common sentence a lot of people say when they're preparing for a presentation. They'll say, I want my presentation to be as good as the one I did a year ago. That's a limiting belief, because you're comparing yourself to your past self. A thought that will propel more creativity is My next presentation will be incredible. And then I'm not comparing myself to the past. Or people who say, I can't wait till this presentation is over. Are those people going to deliver a good presentation? No. I can't wait until board week is complete. They want to get through the board week. And so they're not going to listen. as well as they could and really should. If you don't start embodying yourself now, you will continue losing very valuable time in your career. And you don't have a lot of time in your career. The average career span is 45 years. And some people are much shorter than that, a few are longer, but 45 years and many of us are already getting close to that window closing. This is the perfect time to leap forward in your mind. We don't want to waste productive work time in old feedback loops, thinking about something you were told years ago about how you could be better in meetings or presentations, how you could command the room better. You probably changed in an instant when you received that feedback. So no more playing small. No more watching less capable but more confident people take the lead. The University of Michigan research showed that 76% of employees hesitate to speak up in meetings due to self-doubt and fear of judgment. I think we've all seen people hold back in meetings because they were worried that what they were going to say wouldn't be pleasing, wouldn't be correct. or would be out of permissible for somebody at their level to say that. And so they hold back. And that silence is costing companies very often from hearing the best ideas. But it's also costing the individual promotions and influence. We don't want to wait for the room to be ready to hear us. We have to give ourselves permission now. to speak like that future self. Speak like the person you are becoming. Your future self is already whispering to you. You've heard your future self. Every time you imagine yourself leading that critical meeting or launching an initiative and walking into a room with calm, command and control, that's your future self showing you the way forward. Now when you've got that voice in your head saying, oh no, it's going to be a terrible meeting, that's your anxious. future voice. We want the nurturing voice that believes in possibility. And you have so many voices in your head. Give your future self voice the microphone. Even give it a megaphone. Let that voice drive the bus of voices in your head. And let that voice drive the bus today and tomorrow and the next day. Focused mindset work will boost your decision making. You will take less time to make a decision. Your team will be more engaged. You will feel more resilient. You will feel your stress level drop. Confidence and clarity are two of the most consistent predictors of leadership advancement. Confidence and clarity. Focus on Only those two things right now, confidence and clarity. When Amazon shifted from PowerPoint decks to narrative memos, that was a big deal. And they did it because they wanted more strategic clarity. And it skyrocketed because people had to take more time to think through their ideas. They had to be more reflective on what the answer really was. And they shut out the noise. that could happen from PowerPoint meetings or large audience meetings where everyone had a different opinion. And once people could read the narrative, they could get on the same page, literally. This reduced surface level conversations and created space for deeper, more rigorous thinking. We want to take the bloat out of our meetings. for faster execution and more team accountability. We want more frequent message testing. What does this mean? This means refining how we say things, not just what we say. And the best way to do this is by rehearsing with your team, especially when the senior team rehearses together and refines their messaging. That's when you see credibility from the senior leadership team. increase significantly. But you have to rehearse together. You cannot just rehearse by yourself, although that is very important for working on your body language and voice. It's when you rehearse with other people and peers are better for this because they will have interesting perspectives and better feedback for you. In economic downturns, the companies that keep internal messaging clear. lose less revenue, and retain more talent. When you put all this together, clarity is not a soft skill. It is a strategic lever. And it will be what differentiates companies in the marketplace during this super cycle of technology and innovation around AI. It's going to be the thing that sets winners and losers apart in the marketplace. I'll never forget this woman I was coaching. This was this year. Her name was Anna, and she was a brilliant strategist. She knew exactly what her client needed to do. And she was from a management strategy firm. She was receiving feedback that she was not senior enough in meetings. And she took this very personally. And it was creating a lot of mental chatter. She would soften her voice in meetings, and she was told that she would get quieter when there was a crowd, that she was full of life and creativity one-on-one. But as soon as the senior clients were in the room, she became small and hesitant. And she admitted she was second-guessing herself in those situations. So we looked five years out into the future and imagined that everything had fallen into place and that she loved. herself completely. She loved who she was at work, who she was in her personal life. She loved how she behaved in small group meetings, in one-on-ones with senior leaders, in large audience settings with 200 people or more in the room. She can imagine how good she was with humor, how good she was when people challenged her point of view, and that she would intensify under conflict and not shrink. We imagined the sound of her voice and she described it out loud to me. She described all of this in a three to four minute monologue about what she was like in the future. Then we did it again and we changed it to present tense. And she imagined that that was who she is right now. And we started then practicing an upcoming message that she had from this mental place of who she is becoming in five years. She started rehearsing all of her messages with me from that future state. within three months. She was already having conversations about her next role in her firm. It was so obvious that she was ready for it because of how she was behaving. The fastest way to accelerate your transformation is to start acting from your future self, not your past self. You have to live into the person you are becoming. Before the evidence shows up, we can't wait for other people to say we're good enough, that we're ready. We have to tell ourselves that we're ready. We want to step into the version of ourselves that already exists in our mind. And it's the version with more confidence, more clarity, and ultimately more resilience. Now, imagine a team where everyone on the team is operating from their future self. They are all imagining that they are the type of talent that can achieve this business outcome. Let's suppose your team's goal is to grow by 10% and the whole team is operating as though they've already achieved that 10% growth. They know they can do it. That incredible belief in themselves and each other. And they walk into a meeting with these four beliefs. And these are the four beliefs to work on practicing. Number one, they love each other. They believe in each other. They are there to serve one another. They don't need to prove themselves. They're there to love each other, even take care of each other. That's number one. So love your audience. Number two, they believe that each one of them brings incredible value to the team. Great perspective. Each person is believing that they are an expert. Number three, everyone believes that they're fighting to solve a serious problem for the organization or the end user. They're not just clocking in and out. They are warriors for their organization. They are fighting to solve a serious problem. And the fourth belief, is that they each believe that progress is going to happen today, not someday in the future, not even tomorrow. Something's going to happen today. We're going to make progress today. Can you imagine if a whole team came in with that energy to every weekly meeting and they're bringing a sense of urgency and hope into every room? That is how you make a high-performing team, a producing team, a magnetic team. When you believe in your power, you speak and listen differently. Now, not everything is mindset alone. There's mindset and behavioral work to do. You need the skill to be practiced because we always fall back on our habits. And your habit might be twirling your hair or saying um and you know and like or lots of ly words like actually and basically. Whatever it is, that requires practice too. The very best way to work on developing yourself into the leader you were meant to be is to work both on mindset and behavior. Let your future self take the microphone. Let that version of yourself, that confident, clear, and compassionate version you can see in your mind's eye, guide your words, guide your decision making. And if that voice ever wavers, Remember, you are not here to rehearse your past. You are here to live into your future. Do something today that will make your future self proud. Develop your relationship with him or with her. Get so clear on what that person is like and know that they believe in you and let that belief help you believe in you today. If you liked this and want more of this type of voice in your head and want someone to practice with, set up a call. We have program designers ready to talk to you about the perfect program for you. One that is going to help you develop incredible inner confidence and message clarity. Let this be the time you take a giant leap forward and we would love to be your guide.
