Episode 174: Building Confidence - For the Office and in Life
Everyone, from time to time in one form or another, experiences self-doubt and questions their success and purpose in both personal and occupational roles. Where does self-confidence come from and how is it related to our jobs in philanthropy?
Welcome to another edition of Around with Randall, your weekly podcast for making your nonprofit more effective for your community.
And here is your host, the CEO and founder of Hallett Philanthropy, Randall Hallett. It's such a privilege to have you join me, Randall, on this edition of Around with Randall. As I record this, this is probably other than some holidays that mean a lot to myself and my family, my favorite time of the year. It is NCAA basketball tournament time and let me promise you that I'm not going to spend a great deal of time on this podcast talking and breaking down the brackets. But in watching games and in seeing outcomes, it brought me to this conclusion of how we look at ourselves and also how we think about self-confidence.
Just to give you a hint of how much I love this season here in Omaha, Nebraska, we were lucky enough to be hosting one of the first and second round site series of games, the finals. And I sat on a Thursday for 13 hours watching basketball in person and then did it for five hours on Saturday with the two games it followed. So, four games winners plays to two games. I love it. And what I love most about it is that when the tournament begins, there is a genuine belief amongst most if not nearly all of the teams that they can win a game to or more.
When you think about the basketball tournament, that's kind of far fetched when you understand the likelihoods and you look at the numbers year after year. But where does self-confidence come from and how does that connect to us in the nonprofit world? Well, I want to tell a quick story of Oakland University. Who is not in Oakland, California, but in the northern suburbs of Detroit. They played this year having been in the tournament for a number of years on and off playing the number three seated in their region Kentucky.
Now many of the experts in the so-called experts, it can talk you to go to the final four that they had rhymed the pump, so to speak, with their team peaked at the right moment. They're off to the races. And then there's Greg Campy, who is probably a name that nobody basically knows who's the head coach at Oakland. He's been there for 40 years has taken them through lower levels of basketball into division one has had great success has been to the tournament and now is playing Kentucky in the first round.
The question of self-confidence in this context comes from what he says to his players before they go out on the floor. Do you believe that Greg Campy said, okay, guys, here we go. We're going to do our very best, but there are a lot better. So let's just eight were just didn't have fun. Which sounds a lot like what I try to tell my 10-year-olds when I coach my son's teams and his friends at art school. I know Greg Campy a little bit. He when I was in a previous life in athletics, he was in our conference.
There's no way Greg Campy said that great campy walked in at the aquarium says if we do what we should do, we got a shot to win this. And if you don't believe this, get out because I believe in you and I believe in us. How many times have we looked at our jobs at the goals, at the various aspects of what we're trying to accomplish and we just cannot figure out or don't believe that I can get it done. And I'm finding out more and more as I do more and more coaching with gift officers with chief development officers working into the C suite with my book and how CEO should engage in philanthropy that there's a lot of doubt that permeates a lot of what we do.
And I seem to be the one trying maybe to mirror Greg Campy who's saying, I think you get this done if we are smart and if we have a good plan, we believe in ourselves. Today I want to talk a little bit about this idea of self-confidence work comes from what you can do about it so that you can look at your professional life and realize you can probably get done can do can be more successful than you actually think. I will relate different parts of this podcast to more detailed former or previous podcasts.
So there's one on self-actualization on Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, how to obtain, which is different. Self-actualization isn't self-confidence. Self-actualization is knowing who you are and realizing it and elevating as much as you can. Self-confidence is how you look at situations and what you can accomplish. What's possible? So self-actualization is episode 41. I'm also going to talk about a little bit around self-determination and that's episode 145 where you actually have more control of your life than you think you do.
Episode 129 was on the imposter syndrome, which kind of relates to this like am I actually who I think I am and can I get done with it? What I need to or others going to find out that I don't have any clue. The final one is dealing with emotions, episode 97 because when we don't have a lot of self-confidence and we'll talk about this in a moment, maybe some insecurity, emotion comes into it rather than the softness of confidence about what I need to do to be successful.
So if you're looking for more detail on self-actualization, episode 41, self-determination, episode 45, the imposter syndrome 129 or dealing with emotions 97, there's more detail in those and there may be aspects of what we talk about today within those particular episodes. There's a real difference between confident people and insecure people. Although they from the outside might appear even though they behave and act differently like their confident, they're actually not.
You know what to look for? You can actually identify self-confident people and insecure people based on their behaviors because they have traits that's not meant to be perfect. This is not a pure identification system, but there are habits or gestures or garbage or behaviors that come from each one of these categories. Confident people celebrate group or other success. Confident people are open-minded and optimistic. They're looking at the world through a more positive lens and they're willing to consider how things get done in a way that's maybe different or opportune to what they need to accomplish.
Self-confident people laugh at themselves. I'm accused of being self-deprecating too often. I don't like the attention. Although I do this podcast, it's actually internationally and all kinds of conferences. If you have the day, I'm self-deprecating as I like attention. Self-confident people laugh at themselves, particularly when they make mistakes. They're decisive. They admit their mistakes and accept responsibility. I think those come more naturally when you look at them in terms of identification. It's the insecure people that I'm always mystified by because there is an external shell of what they think of as pseudo-confident.
I don't believe it actually is. I think it's actually really illuminating their insecurity. They are incredibly, most of the time, outward going, almost overly pushing because they're judging and they're closed-minded. They seem to know every answer. Some of the best people I've had the privilege of being around from friends and professional colleagues, I love because they're open-minded to learning something new. I try to model that behavior. What can I learn today? They're also afraid, insecure people are afraid of change because they don't know what they don't know and they're not willing to accept it.
In doing so by making themselves and know it all and being indecisive and really not being open to change, they make a lot of excuses and they tend to blame others. This one we can begin to identify this insecurity and that it's really a damaging issue for them if they're a leader for their team, for their career, for their relationship. What we know it is that when we have confidence, we have real confidence, not manufactured confidence, we have outcomes, results. When you're a confident person, the studies tell us that you have better performance, not perfect performance, better performance.
You also have healthier relationships. If you have a sense of self-confidence and it's truly not manufactured, it's truly part of who you think you are. You actually have better, stronger, more long-lasting and it's said healthier relationships with others because there's respect, there's understanding, there's knowledge of what you're good at, what you're not and where other people can be helpful and where you can help others as they may look to you. You're all more open to trying new things.
There's a sense of it's okay if I have to deviate 20, 30 degrees from my path because it may get me to the end result faster. It's kind of like a map. I don't know any success story that's a straight line. There are ups and downs or if we make it too dimensional, left and right. You're going on a straight path and there's a hard right because something happened. You're in a wall. But if you were willing to deviate a little bit, several steps back, you get to that right turn. Turn out to be able to look at it more quickly because you've taken the hypotenuse, a little geography for you or a geometry for you to shorten the distance. That comes from being open and not being so regimented that you can accomplish something.
The last thing is that people who are confident are more resilient. They bounce back more quickly. They accept challenge, defeat, failure, whatever, learn from it. We got to move on. Let's go. How do we get better? So we talked about how to see confident and insecure people. We've talked about the value of comments to the tactical. How do you build confidence? There's actually ways to do it. It doesn't happen instantaneously. It takes time, a lot of self-reflection, a lot of communication and a lot of realization.
So let's start at the top. One thing is to think about building your confidence. We'll begin to relate this now into the nonprofit world, the work we do everything. The first is look at what you've achieved. I have a lot of friends that are looking for jobs. There seems to be a concept to steal from Irma Bombeck, a name which most of you don't know. The grass is always greener on the other side of the septic tank. He was a writer and a commentator of life many decades ago. I love her work still do.
Short book called Life is an Always Greener on the other side of the septic tank. The premise is, it's not always better over there as it is here. But a lot of people looking for jobs right now. It's interesting because they all or most seem to be honing in on the negative parts of their job and their results or successes are lack thereof. I'm like, look at what you've accomplished. You did A, B, C, and D. If you're honest with yourself, you can see a lot of positives even when things don't go perfectly.
And we tend to only see the end result, which is a binary choice too often of failure or success. But yet there were many successes along the whole way. What did we learn from it? It reminds me of the show How do I met your mother and Barney where he gives himself a cell 5, 5 cell 5, 8? Well, in some ways, that's really what we need to do more of. It's not meant to jade and or shade the problems or the challenges or where failure existed. But there are always good things we learn as we go.
And if you're in a job and you have a goal, let's say as a gift officer, what did you do last year? How was the growth? Did you build better relationships? Did you change what you do to be better? What you did? If you're infrastructure, you provide better results. If you're CEO, did you commute? It wasn't meant to be perfected, but there's positives that come from the work we do. Too often, all we see is the binary end result. And if it's not perfect, it's a failure. And that's just not true.
Growth is the objective. And as I tell my 10-year-old, the journey is the important thing, not the destination. Because it's the people and the things you learn along the way that are actually most important. Number two, is it really hard to look at realizing what you're good at and maybe more importantly, what you're not? And this brings up the thought process of trying to compete with everybody on everything. Are there people in my life or in my world that I look at and look up to and realize they're really smart, they're really good.
They do you bet. Absolutely. But nobody's perfect and nobody does everything well. The ability to know what you do well and to accentuate them. And then in some ways realize what you don't do well can be an incredibly powerful, confident booster because then you end up doing the things you do well, which in and of itself builds your confidence with success. The basketball team to go back to my NCAA experiences of the last week or so or a little more and love of the game.
Not everybody's a score and I'm having this conversation with my 10-year-old son. He's really bright. He is a remarkable intellectual basketball player, but he's not a score. He's the best rebounder. He makes the best decisions taking the ball out of bounds. He's the hustle guy. And I'm like, what, but I didn't score all the points. You weren't supposed to. But look at all the things you did as a leader that nobody else wanted to do that made the team better. And he began to embrace those things. The team got better.
Same is true of our professional life. What do you do? Well, what is it you can work on to do more of so that you're really good at it? And in the spare time work on the things that you maybe deficit with, which brings us to our third point. In those deficits, in those things that maybe we don't quite have the strength of, can you find partners to help elevate you? Two kind of sub-points here. Number one, can you find people who are honest with you, but not harsh, positively constructive criticism?
Or I do this really well. You do this really well. Why don't we work together and we'll elevate together? If you can concentrate back to what you're saying about what you're good at and you can find other people that really elevate, compliment you. What you get is a better result and build confidence. This is the essence of my marriage. There are one or two things that I'm really good at. And I happen to trick a girl into marrying me just short of 25 years ago, who doesn't do these things very well.
But man, she does everything else brilliantly. We are a team, partnership. We elevate each other. And that's inside of a very interpersonal relationship. Same is true in our office. If, and let me give you another example, I had a client who finally realized that she, or the person, the client's office, she wasn't very good ask her. She just didn't want to do it. But she's one of the best relationship people I've ever seen at a young age. So what we did was when she finally admitted it and said, I'm not very good at this and I really don't want to do it.
We positioned her in stewardship where she's just killing it. She's setting up more gifts based on the fact she was able to realize that she loves this work and she's really confident in it. Do what you're good at, find other people to elevate you. Number four, set realistic goals. I have a client who I'm having really, I'm interesting discussions with where leadership thinks that the first year gift officer should raise $3 million a year. I'm like, that's just not realistic. These are really high-quality fundraisers. What it's doing is destroying their confidence because they're looking up at people that they think they should believe in and all of a sudden, well, I'm doing something wrong. I'm like, no, so I'm actually becoming kind of a psychoanalyst at a very amateur inappropriate level to say, no, you're really good at this. I'm going to keep talking to you. I can't at the end of the day change the dynamics, but possibly I can convey why just going from zero to three million in a year. It's just not realistic. Realistic goals give you confidence when you reach them. Realistic goals when not met, destroy confidence. This is why you want to constantly reevaluating those goals. What a goal is for this six month period, maybe different from the next six month period or three month or quarter or whatever. Those realistic goals are critical. Number five is talk yourself up and each other up. I always find it interesting the stories and there's a couple of famous ones in basketball where the player is going to the free throw line with a few seconds left.
They're either tied or up down one and they got to make free throws. And the coach looks in square in the eye and looks at their esoteric team and says, when Johnny, when can he makes this free throw, not if they make it, when they make it. We're going to do this in this or you have people in sports say, imagine the success. You're basketball again at the free throw line taking that shot and you just that release can you picture the ball going through the hole into the basket. This idea of talking yourself up and being able to look yourself in the mirror and say, I can get this done. I have the steps in the process back to realistic goals and having sub-goals and I can get this done. And this is important because it kind of leads us into a sixth one, the bigger picture.
Imagine your future. What would it look like feel like if we did all of these things? If this was successful. If you can sit quietly close your eyes and imagine where you might be. If you were being realistic doing the things that you are required to do, you build confidence. This is the confidence is building when you talk to yourself, I can do this. It's affirmation. Self-affirmation is powerful and what's even more powerful is when you do it with someone else and tell them they can do it and close their eyes with them and say, I see you making the basket. I see you closing that gift. I see you reaching your goals. I see your career elevating.
Talking to yourself and picturing the successes is really, really important. The final thing is that you should try to find constructive trusted feedback outside. If you can't find what you're looking for inside your own office, find mentors outside of it who can be honest with you but can help you grow because that will build confidence when somebody else says, I think you can do this. Here's how I would do it. They can help put in a plan. They can help you imagine they can talk about goals. They can become a partner. They actually help you realize what you're good at and finally, they may help you understand what you've achieved. All of these seven are critically important to building confidence but the last one, which is really not one of the seven, it's just an extra.
It's really important. When you are trying to build confidence, when you're trying to achieve growth, details out more so than you realize. It's the small decisions about end results or big parts of the process that can make all the difference in the world. In basketball, if you're the underdog, it's the last two minutes not turning the ball over and not fouling so you give yourself the best chance to win, which is what Oakland did against Kentucky. In the office, it's doing the little things whether it's putting stuff in the CRM and building a plan which nobody really wants to do, but it can help.
Or if it's showing up a little early and staying a little late. Or if it's thinking about how you say what you say before you say it, to sound in the most positive, embracing, endorsing voice in terms of personality and direction. The small things matter, details matter. And so as you go through this in your building confidence, no matter what step of the process realize that the true honest details can help you in any one of those seven levels that building your confidence or your success. And yes, you can get it done. Don't forget to check out the blogs at helplanes3.com, 92nd reads twice a week.
If you'd like to communicate with me, it's podcast helplanes3.com. Confidence will help you get to where you want to go. And when you get there, you're helping your organization and nonprofit charity people, community be better. And that's powerful. Don't forget my favorite thing. Some people make things happen. Some people watch things happen in there, those who wonder what happened. We need a world where we have more people like you, like your donors, like the people who support the organization, like philanthropists who want to make things happen because we seem to have more and more people who are wondering what happened.
Great thing about philanthropy. It's not about money. It's about love of mankind, love of humankind. The ability to make a difference. And that is what we should spend more time thinking about, talking about and believing it. Not only will build confidence, it will build a better community. I appreciate your time today and I look forward to seeing you next time, right back here on the next edition of "A Round with Randall." Don't forget, make it a great day.