When my grandmother was suffering with dementia, her go-to question was, “What am I supposed to be doing?” She couldn’t identify the day or time, or her role in either. She had been a student, professional dancer, wife, mother, organiser of women, carer. She had lived in Scotland, England, Barbados, Jamaica, Nigeria, the Persian Gulf and Qatar. But she could no longer reliably access her knowledge and skills.
Her excuse was iron-clad. I wonder if ours is as strong when we feel that we are all at sea.
The sailor’s perspective
It seems to me that we very often decide, despite our many years of life, that we are a passenger rather than a sailor. In our worst moments we feel that the ship has gone down, and with it the keys to our survival. We pray for a passing saviour.
We’re never in the water hanging on to flotsam, though. We’re all sailors. We’ve all been shown lots of life’s ropes. Even if our organisation sinks, it doesn’t take our skills and experience down with it. They stay with us. We carry a sextant within.
So, do we really struggle because we’re suddenly on a boat in the middle of the ocean and have no skills, or because we merely forget how to access our skills in challenging weather? Is developing one’s confidence about adapting to conditions?
Personality profiles
It certainly is in my household. My husband, who uses psychometric profiling tools in his corporate training work, has identified himself as Clarity and me as Impact – in other tools we’d be Owl and Peacock, or Analytical and Expressive. You get the picture. He’s absolutely right. While he wants to gather data to shore up his confidence before acting, I want to jump in and have an experience, and let that experience teach me. Those are our favourite positions. But when the boat we are on rocks, we have to find firmer footing.
A long time ago, I was flown by a client to a regional management meeting in Taiwan. He was very concerned about the team communication and wanted me to come along and give the group some feedback afterwards. Being a younger me, I jumped in. After sitting through the nine-hour meeting, during which I was witness to a good deal of shocking behaviour from people I’d never met before, I had half an hour to offer them my reflections. I asked myself whether I should soft-pedal my reaction a bit, or give it to the straight, and decided not to honey the arrow.
I was terrified, with all the trimmings. My breathing was shallow, my mouth dry, my hands freezing; most problematically, my legs were shaking so much I could barely stand. Being a singer, I know how to control my voice, but my lower body was going bananas. I needed support. What was available? I stepped closer to the head of the table and leaned my thighs on it. When the water in the glasses in front of everyone started to tremble, I stepped right away again.
The power of reflection
If I were invited to do a similar feedback session now, I could give myself a better chance for a firmer footing. I could gather more data on the group and ask more questions about how my client envisioned me helping, in order to reflect beforehand. In that way, if the weather turned on the day, I’d have more internal tools ready and waiting, and wouldn’t see the table as a lifesaver.
All of this means to me that my confidence question needs to be “How can I help?”— not just audibly “How can I help you, my client?” but also, internally, “How can I help myself to help you?”
Enough about me, though. Let’s have a think about your confidence question.
A bit of advice? Don’t jump to it. Sit quietly. Take a deep breath. Now send your plumbline down into your depths. If it gets caught in the shallows, up behind your breastbone, you’ll be reckoning with choppy surface-water. Take another breath and release it to travel further, through the viscera, to what is fundamental to you.
From these depths, you can identify and state your values, helping you to navigate, to hew a steady course. Stay there for a while. Are you encountering churning? I wonder, are you behaving against your values? Is your organisation? Or is it calm . . . until you imagine being put on the spot? Are you sure? Or is that the surface being troubled, when deep down you know many things for sure?
Re-framing loneliness
What else can you ask yourself to help maintain your balance and, by extension, that of your team, situation to situation, weather system to weather system?
The most painful aspect of a lack of confidence, I find, is that it has us feeling utterly alone and in danger of annihilation, even (sometimes especially) in a room full of people. Suddenly we imagine ourselves on a raft, sharks circling. The beauty of developing confidence – through whatever suits you, from quiet questioning to a gruelling survival course – lies in the understanding that we will no longer feel stranded in this way. Confidence means that we will always have our self, in all our depth, with all our values and hard-won tools, along for the journey.