Professional and executive coaching and 16 ways low confidence shows up in meetings.
Meetings and board meeting can be a space and time for collaboration, ideas, change, development and inspiration. However, they can also trigger a variety of feelings, emotions, thoughts, and fears. One of the most common experiences is experiencing a lack of confidence within meetings or board meetings.
A lack of confidence shows up in many ways and it can hold you back from communicating your skill and value as well as supporting you with career progression and success and your contribution to your team, company, organisation or firm.
How can low confidence show up within within meetings?
So how do you experience a lack of confidence within professional, executive work meetings or board meetings?
Professional and executive coaching: 16 ways low confidence shows up within meetings
- Fear of being heard or seen: Not feeling comfortable or feeling too exposed to speak up, be heard and seen
- Speaking too much without listening to others.
- Experiencing Imposter Syndrome, self-doubt and feeling that in order to be accepted by others you need to play a role in the presence of certain individuals, colleagues, or board members.
- Experiencing the Dunning Kruger effect: overestimating your ability, skill, knowledge and competency. Low confidence happens when you acknowledge that you may not be so competent or knowledgable within a specific area and you need to work on your growth points rather than embracing a false sense of confidence.
- Experiencing the Peter Principal: This is when companies organisations and firms promote professionals, executives, and leaders into authority roles based on their current level of performance. These executives and leaders will continue to perform well until their performance plateaus and their confidence dips. They then need to invest in their own professional development due to new or changing skills, responsibilities, and requirements.
- Becoming too agreeable and saying yes to everything.
- Sitting on the fence or becoming too complacent.
- Fear of working through confrontation, conflict, disagreements, difficult conversations and needing to make and communicate difficult decisions.
- Fear of exposure and becoming a best kept secret
- Perfectionism and the fear of making mistakes.
- Feeling the need to carry, rescue and overcompensate for other people or firefight situations.
- Feeling the pressure to be an expert in multiple arenas. As a result, if you are not able to show your expertise or knowledge, you might doubt your self-worth and value.
- Feeling the pressure to think on your toes and in the moment.
- Feeling the pressure to juggle and carry everything and everyone yourself.
- Lack of public speaking confidence and a fear of being judged i.e., mincing your words, rushing your points, forgetting what you need to communicate, feeling overwhelmed, anxious, stressed, and dreading the very idea of meetings.
- Reacting rather than responding within meetings.
Next steps
If you experience a lack of confidence within meetings or board meetings and you’d like to increase your clarity, confidence and success then why not connect with me to find out how executive coaching could help you.
