In the Age of Twitter, audiences want something and someone REAL.
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Like the definition of porn – “you know it when you see it “– real confidence is something we struggle to define. But when we’re in the presence of authentic confidence, we know it.
Body language experts have dissected all the “tells” of a confident person. Apparently, they:
- stand up straight
- never cross their arms
- never put their hands in their pockets
- always look directly at others
- never say “um” or “uh”
- smile easily
- have a voice that’s not too soft and not too loud
- never get cavities, parking tickets or shirt stains
But I can tell you about scores of people who are supremely confident, leaders in companies whose products you use and covet, who regularly break all these “rules.”
And I can tell you about hundreds of people I’ve seen, just in the last year, who follow these rules only to undercut their authentic confidence before they’ve said a word. They felt something wasn’t working. But what went wrong was a mystery to them, because they worked so hard to do everything “right.”
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To be sure, no one becomes a leader by being constantly indecisive, wishy-washy and quick to change positions according to the prevailing winds.
But pretending to be confident doesn’t work the way it used to. False confidence is just as bad as no confidence. Leading with FAKE confidence – where you’re paying attention to looking as if…is dangerous stuff now. If your attention and intention is on showing a hyped-up side of yourself instead of on what you need and want us to do with your content, we read it a mile away.
False confidence is like a shield between you and us, in the audience. It’s a layer on top of who you really are, a thick paint that obscures the sharp edges and rough spots and, yes, brilliance that you possess. In the Age of Twitter, audiences want something and someone real.
As workplaces fill with more Millennials who have highly tuned radar for false confidence, it’s going to become less of a coping crutch and more of a liability.
The truth about confidence is this: audiences want to be confident. We want to be confident in you, as a purveyor of ideas that will somehow make us better than we were before we walked in the room.
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What we need from you is clarity, certainty, and authenticity.
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What we need from you is clarity, certainty, and authenticity. That will make us feel confident. If WE are confident, we’ll see you as confident.
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Here are some things you can do to make sure you are confident, rather than pretending and hoping you don’t get caught.
Know what you want us to do. What’s the ONE THING you want us to do at the end of your talk that we wouldn’t do without listening to you? Don’t stop at “I want you to know XYZ.” Be clear how you want use to react, what you want us to do with that information. The more clear you are about where you are taking us, the more we’ll experience your clarity as confidence.
Know what you’re saying. Even in a very low-stakes, casual presentation, take the time to know what you want the audience to walk away and repeat from your talk. One sentence, short enough that a listener can remember it. Don’t plan to figure out what you mean along the way.
Take time to actually own the ideas you’re sharing. Challenge yourself. What are you saying that you don’t buy? Where are you stretching the truth and indulging in hyperbole? What adjustments do you need to make to get behind every word you intend to utter? If you don’t believe it, we won’t either.
Be nervous. Statistics tell us that 75% of Americans put fear of public speaking in the top of the list of most common worst fears. You’re lucky if you’re in the other 25%. But if you’re nervous, even a little bit, let that be ok. Don’t tell yourself to ignore the symptoms of anxiety. That just makes your mid-brain work harder to alert you to what it perceives as danger. Let yourself be conscious of whatever you’re feeling, rather than trying to tune it out.
Let go of The (Bullshit) List Of What Confidence Looks Like. If you’re thinking about what your hands are doing, you aren’t thinking about what we will be doing when we put you ideas to work.
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Don’t wear “Confidence” as a shield. The more confident you make the audience, the better able they are to take your ideas out of the room and use them, the more genuine confidence you own. That’s the kind of confidence that audiences in the Age of Twitter are looking for.
Photo by Michael L. Baird, flickr.bairdphotos.com
The post How Your Fake Confidence is Hurting Your Real Confidence appeared first on The Good Men Project.