The Most Relaxed Person Is The Most Powerful: How To Have Calm Confidence
Relaxation is the new power! The most relaxed person in a room or in a situation will always be the most powerful. Why? When you are relaxed, all your energy is able to flow unblocked and can be channeled into problem solving whatever the issue in question. People who are relaxed, are able to focus. When we are distracted by trying to manage our thoughts, fears, insecurities, other people’s opinions or any other internal noise, our energy is diverted and it is harder to have optimal clarity of mind. Clarity my friends, is the super power of problem solving.
Focus and clarity comes from an ability to remain calm even in the most challenging of times. This ability to remain calm under challenging situations is referred to as “grace under fire” by Sylvia Ann Hewlett, the author of Executive Presence: The Missing Link Between Merit and Success who is also a noted expert on workplace power and influence. Remaining calm and collected even under intense pressure is possible, but it takes practice over a period of time to be developed if this isn’t a person’s natural disposition. We will take a look at actions that can be taken to build this competence but first we will review why we are so distressed to begin with (watch the Youtube video related to this blog post here if you would rather engage in video and listen while you do something else!).
Why have we lost our calm anyway?
High levels of stress have a root cause. The increasing demands on our time in society and high expectations for example increases the level of stress. Some stress is good for growth and development but beyond a certain point it becomes counterproductive. With so much demand on our time and attention including consistently connected to technology and social media, stress levels skyrocket. Other contributions to individual stress can be caused by financial worries, disease, relationship challenges, work stress, natural disasters, and the broader social and geo-political environment. Everyone, has a certain level of stress that is a part of their reality, living in a modern world. These stress levels have a compounding effect over time.
Women and minorities also have additional levels of stress due to the environment we live in and the related social narrative as it applies to who we are. Women may be concerned about safety due to gender abuse, violence, harassment, etc. Even if these issues are not an immediate concern for someone, just wait, there is more. For those in the workplace many have to deal with overcoming biases both conscious and unconscious and is something that layers an additional level of stress/anxiety. Ethnic minorities experience similar “out-group” induced stress. Statements made by others undermining their contributions or questioning their merit serve as micro-aggressions which may not immediately appear to damage one’s esteem but is like a slow leak, or death by a thousand cuts. You begin to try to live up to unrealistic standards, question your own worth, wonder if you are imagining the bias or are just too sensitive as you are being told that you are. Overcoming narratives that you are not the right cultural fit, not qualified enough to lead, not smart enough, not attractive enough and the myriad of other negative messages from society, contributes to levels of stress and gives our mind material to feed insecurities that has been conditioned into us from the very society we are expected to perform well in. So, don’t be surprised that you are worried, and anxious there is a root cause! Actually, many root causes. Our life experiences have conditioned us to be this way. The question is what do we do about it? At least on an individual level.
How do we become internally cool and confident?
The vast majority of advice out there on how to achieve confidence focuses on external actions such as the idea of faking it (i.e. faking confidence) until you make it, and power posing made even more famous by Amy Cuddy’s Tedtalk on body language. While I believe that there is a place for all of those things, and have successfully used some of these techniques myself in the past, we must realize that they are ultimately just temporary band aids for a deeper issue. We can learn techniques to hack a meeting and influence a room but we can’t hack our lives for the rest of our lives. The kind of long term result we need requires deeper work which results in true transformation. This long term transformation can only come about by creating new habits. These new habits will allow us to learn how to decondition ourselves from the destructive messages and resulting habits that we were born into and go through the process of reconditioning our minds with a new empowering narrative and actions that contribute toward our success rather than detract from it.
We know that athletes have to train their bodies to achieve peak performance when game day comes. In the same way, if we want to “WIN” in our endeavors, whatever winning means to us, we have to incorporate practices that will train our minds to achieve peak performance when our own game day comes. The difference between training for an event and real life is that our game day is not a one time event, it is every single day! We need to incorporate habits in our lives that condition us to win, daily.
Noisy ego driven confidence v.s. authentic internal calm confidence
Before we discuss the actions to take to build internal confidence, let’s recognize that there is a difference between true confidence which is internal, authentic and calm versus anxiety driven confidence which is external, noisy and in reality not confidence at all.
Some of the signs of ego driven, imposter confidence are being flashy or showy. The ego tries to over compensate by being the loudest and most talkative person in the room because deep down it is insecure and it hopes that all these external activities will cover up the fact that deep down the person is still deeply uncomfortable in their own skin. We generally think we recognize lack of confidence in more introverted types because we see a reluctance to speak up and own their voice. The flip side of this is the overcompensation by constant chatter because the person lacks self assurance. This can show up as the person trying to prove how good they are to others because they don’t believe they are really that good. This includes consistently comparing themselves to others, competing, criticizing others or interrupting and speaking over people. Being around folks like this can be extremely exhausting. So how do we save ourselves from either extremes of being overly flashy or shrinking in the background like a wallflower? I am so glad you asked! Below you will find 5 actions to take.
5 Steps To Developing Calm Confidence & Truly Own Your Power
1. Know yourself and celebrate your difference.
What’s your background? How were you raised? Where did you grow up? What is your story? In
order to truly be internally confident with who you are you have to spend sometime studying your background and how it has contributed to the person that you are today. Don’t try to cover it up or hide it. Be willing to share it because there is power in your story. There is even more power in owning it. Even if there were struggles, recognize how those struggles have caused you to be resilient and determined. Think about how your life experience has contributed to your current passions, vocation or perspective. You have a great story that can be a powerful source of inspiration for yourself and others if you know how to leverage it and use it as an opportunity to
distinguish yourself. One of the most prominent and successful ways I have seen someone use their unlikely story to change the trajectory of their leadership potential was listening to Senator Barack Obama when he talked about being the skinny kid with a funny name that believed America had a place for him too. This speech that he delivered back in 2004 at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, MA many say was instrumental in him becoming the 44th President of the United States of America. He figured out how to use his story as his differentiator not as a detractor and I believe we can all do this no matter what our background. For more information on how to leverage your uniqueness as your competitive advantage, read this blog.
2. Identify old conditioning (aka stories) and break up with them.
Due to the imposter syndrome, we all struggle with different insecurities based on stories that we have told ourselves, our family, or the broader society has told us over an extended period of time. We have internalized and accepted these stories as our truth. We have entered into a long term committed relationship with these stories. In order to achieve a level of quiet internal confidence, it is essential to expose the lies we have been conditioned to accept as truth, reject these lies and re-write positive messages that will empower us and propel us forward. It is all about perspective, and if we want to overcome the messages from the inner critic, whatever its source, we have to realize the stories are not objective truth, but that we ARE good enough!
3. Learn to listen to people’s advice but be unattached to their opinion.
A wise leader knows how to listen to the counsel of advisors to inform their opinion and perspective. But there is a difference between listening to counsel or feedback and being bound to another person’s opinion of you. In the end you make a choice based on good judgement and data on what actions you will take. Then you make an empowered decision. Freedom to choose, is your birth-right, own it and accept it. Everyone will not agree with the choices you make, and it’s ok because you don’t need anyone’s permission to live your life. Just like they don’t need your permission to live theirs. Accept your power to choose. Celebrate your power to live your life, and move on.
4. Practice being calm through stillness, silence, and deep breathing.
You cannot be a calm person if you have not incorporated daily practices where you
allow your nervous system to be retrained to stay calm. We spend so much time stimulated that we need the opposite practice of stillness, silence and deep breathing to retrain ourselves to get into a calm state. Most of us have accumulated lot of practice on how to be anxious and very little on how to remain calm. Realize society has trained us on how to be anxious and we have spent a lifetime practicing anxiety, so we have to be intentional about incorporating practices to train ourselves to be calm. Meditation and deep breathing exercises have a positive effect on conditioning our nervous system to relax. Practice this daily for anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes and you will be surprised overtime just how much your response to challenging situation changes. You may not see an effect on the first day, but the benefits are cumulative overtime, so trust the process. You can check out the insight timer, meditation app for guided meditations to get you started. This is the most effective way to develop the executive presence ability of grace under fire that is so admired in some of the most effective leaders.
If you want to learn 8 practices/mindset shifts to put you in the position of power in any business situation you can download this free eGuide 8 Relieving Things Every Business Woman Should Know About How To Create Authentic Calm Confidence . The guide will help you give birth to more Inner Power (unshakeable confidence), Creativity (clarity to innovate/problem solve), and Focus (undistracted by internal chatter).
5. Keep your eyes on the prize … focus on the goal, mission and value
There is no more effective way to stay calm and focused than by keeping first things first. Discovering and reminding ourselves daily of what our priorities are, what is the goal of the thing we have set out to do, what is our primary mission? This is the most effective way to release ourselves from the distraction of smaller things. One of those smaller things are critics and naysayers, I wrote about how to Overcome Your Fear of Criticism previously but it is worth repeating that the most important thing we can do in allowing ourselves to stand in our purpose, is to shift our focus to what actually matters and what brings us closer to that purpose, and to release the distractions. The things that don’t matter serve as a distraction from the bigger purpose that we are here to play out. We need to be fierce about refusing to be distracted by a smaller story. Let’s be more committed to our purpose of contribution, service and impact than to anything else that would distract us from our higher purpose.
What is your higher purpose?
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