Women In Confidence with Ros Cardinal - Women In Confidence

Episode 27

Confidence in being a leader with Rosalind Cardinal

The Leadership Alchemist also known as Ros Cardinal is the Founder and Managing Director of Shaping Change; a consultancy specialising in improving business outcomes by developing individuals, teams and organisations.

She is also an inspirational speaker and award winning coach. She is the author of The Resilient Employee - a great read to help people thrive in today's workplace

She helps people improve their work performance, interpersonal skills and resilience within our ever changing world that can throw so tricky and challenging moments at us.

To find out more about Ros please use the following links:

Shaping Change: https://www.shapingchange.com.au/

Rosalind Cardinal: https://rosalindcardinal.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/CardinalRos

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ShapingChange

To find out more about me (Vanessa Murphy) please check out my website: Link to Vanessa Murphy website

If you enjoy Women In Confidence, please rate, review and share as widely as possible.

xx Vanessa

Transcript

Women In Confidence with Rosalind Cardinal

[:

Every week. I introduce you to amazing women who have interesting stories to tell about confidence through their stories, insights, hints, and tips. You realize that lack of self-belief or low self-esteem is common and also very human, but by listening to them, you'll take away what they have done to show up confidently on the inside as well as on the outside.

hat I launched an episode on [:

And her consultancy specializes in improving business outcomes and developing individuals, teams, and organizations. The rose also has inspirational speaker award winning coach and author under her title as well. So she is an incredibly qualified and a great guest to have on women in confidence, Ros Good morning and welcome to women in confidence.

[:

[00:01:39] Vanessa: Oh, you're really welcome. And so pleased to have you on, can you tell me where you are in the world right now? I like to do this because I really want to get a sense of where all my guests are and also help my listeners understand

where

you are.

[:

[00:02:08] Vanessa: Yeah. So you must be the most Southern part of Australia

[:

[00:02:23] Vanessa: So that just spit says to the lessons how far south you actually are, because a lot of my listeners are in north America and Canada and the UK.

So you're way

[:

[00:02:40] Vanessa: Yeah. That gives you some sense of probably the weather that you might get at times as well. We should absolutely get on with the. What I like to do Roz is asking my guests this question every time when we get going, and that's a warm up the conversation leading nicely into the conversation around confidence.

So what does having confidence

[:

Concerned about what people are thinking about me and what they're going to say about me and all of those sorts of things. So it is that sort of confidence to jump in and do things, even if you're not a hundred percent sure that you're going to be able to do it. So is that, give things a, go stretch yourself.

It's that space for me of constantly learning and growing, because we're stretching ourselves, we're doing new things. We're trying things out, even when they're a bit scary. So I know it's one of those sort of typical sayings, that fear feel the fear and do it anyway, that for me, And when

[:

[00:03:45] Ros: some fear?

start that sort of thing of, [:

Or if I get a particularly challenging group of people that I'm dealing with. So sometimes when you're facilitating, you've got a plan for the day and then things can get derailed by issues that come up for the team and learn on the day. And I occasionally get that little bit, where's this going? And then I have to trust myself.

It's something I say to myself all the time is trusted. Because I know I've got a good price. I know that if I listen to people and hear their concerns and adapt as we go. So adaptability for me is a big part of confidence as well, that knowing that you can flex and change and do what's required.

[:

[00:04:35] Ros: these days? Yes. But it's a fairly recent thing for me. It's something that going back probably 15 years, I wasn't and I spent a good part of my life and my working career, not being confident at all. That would probably surprise a lot of people who knew me back then, because I used to put on a big bluster face, the sort of fake it till you make it thing.

And, I would've looked really confident, but underneath not at all. And what

[:

[00:05:06] Ros: Look for me, it was one of those things where I was a very shy child when I was growing up and I'm very introverted and still have.

So I didn't have a lot of friends at school and I went, we changed schools quite a bit when I was young because we started off in Australia and then my parents moved to England for a while. And then we went and traveled around Europe in a VW Kombi van. So I was homeschooled in a VW. It was the seventies.

What can you say? And then came back to Australia, went back to school here for a couple of years. My mother took us to Fiji to live for a while, so I moved around a lot and I did a lot of that sort of new kid in a new school. In a different country and, so that sort of exacerbated my shyness.

tting out there doing stuff, [:

I was going to fail.

[:

So how did you take yourself from low inner confidence to where you are now?

[:

So it's a kickboxing instructor for many years. And when I took on the instructor role, having to stand up in front of people and teach and be confident and things like that started, it's one of those things where the more you do it, the better you get at it. The fear goes, the wise I've made, it was very much a practice where you get it [00:07:00] right.

And it was a fairly big event that happened. And it's terribly embarrassing even to this day. But I do tell the story because it's, there's a lot of good learnings in it. We're always taking a class and it was fairly early on. I just qualified as an instructor. So I yeah, there doing my own thing for the first time.

And I was in a gym. That's got, if you remember the old aerobics costumes, it had the big mural. Yes, we won't get to say themselves, but it was behind the instructor and we had those big microphone, heavy microphone packs, cause that's back in dinosaur, Bluetooth. So everything was like, why didn't you have this big packet is why that connected to the headset.

And it was a heavy pack and batteries in it. And I was in the middle of demonstrating, particularly complicated kig and the elastic in my pants. And so my pants and I'm wearing a g-string and I've got my back to the mirror. So the entire class is here's my bumps. And it's also when those things were up.

terribly embarrassing, but I [:

But it's with that sort of thing of nothing worse can happen than that. So that was like the start of these developing a bit more confidence around things like being in front of people in public spaces. But the second big event that really happened in my life was getting diagnosed with cancer back in 2010.

So when that happens, it's and look, I think it happens to most people who have some sort of life-threatening illness, because when you're diagnosed with cancer, before you have any information, they just tell you've got cancer. And the first thing you go to is I'm going to die and that's it. And that's the end of everything, but it puts everything into perspective.

So you get a for me anyway, I got this. I spend a lot of time in those sort of first couple of months thinking about my regrets. Like all the things I wished I'd done and hadn't done because life had been too busy and things got in the way, and there was always a really good excuse not to do things, not to step out and do the thing, take the holiday, travel overseas, whatever it was.

And when you realize that [:

So there was if you going back to the kickboxing thing, there was a bit of that kind of developed my confidence in speaking and standing in front of people and doing that. But the real inner confidence piece came from that huge realization that life is just too. Yeah. And

[:

And I wonder why do we always need that sort of cake or that really that moment to just say, okay, I'm going to reassess my life and I'm going to do things differently and do all the things I don't have an answer for it. I don't know whether you have, but shouldn't, we just be able to normalize these.

ple where they reassess. And [:

[00:10:01] Ros: Look, I think it's because for me anyway, I felt like I had lots of time.

So I'll do that one day. So things like starting my business and traveling overseas and things like that, role things that we'd get to one. Because we've got plenty of time and that's how it felt. It was always, when you think about things, it was always, let's look at starting a business. For example, it's challenging and it's risky.

And I had a really good job. I was a senior manager. I was getting paid really well. I had really good benefits and so on, and the kids were at school. So there was always the, always when the kids grow up, when we've got less financial pressure, when we paid the mortgage off, when these, when that, when the other, because it's used to feel like you've got this huge amount of time and.

spot, it's you know what, if [:

And you'll miss out on all of it, if you haven't done it, because that, for me, that's sitting there going, maybe this is it. Maybe I'm going to die in six months was the sense of all these things I wanted to do and really wishing I'd done them by then. And how long

[:

[00:11:20] Ros: It was about six months. It was really quick actually, as soon as they discovered the cancer, they had me in hospital within a week. So I think it was about three or four days before I went into hospital and had a lump removed and then they had to go back and back 10 days later and have another go because they didn't get all of the cancer out and then let that heal.

And then I had radiation treatment that is

[:

So other than the cancer, what sort of brought about the shaping change and being, your own business?

[:

And that was, I guess the real catalyst for me was we were doing really great work. I had an interesting job. We were doing good things, but it was limited to that stage about 1200 people that worked in the organization. So I always felt that, yeah. Particularly around helping leaders be better leaders.

There are so many people in the world that need that help. And I felt like it was always going to be a lot more impact than I could have with that. So starting my consulting business kind of made sense around that. I did toy with the idea of joining somebody else's consulting firm for a while, but then it's, one of the things I know about myself is I have a high need for autonomy.

it was really that kind of. [:

And so the focus had gone completely off leadership and culture and engagement and all the things that I did. And the focus was just on. Let's get ready to move. So the organization was trimming down and leaning up, and I looked at that and the merger was two years away and I looked at that and went, I don't know that I could hang around for two years in a kind of downsizing, type of environment.

So I made the decision to buy out that.

[:

[00:13:52] Ros: Lots of sexually. It's one of those things. I'm a bit of a diagnostics nerd, so I'm accrediting things over 25 different [00:14:00] psychometric tools. Now. So I know rather a lot of that myself from learning all of those sorts of things, but the key things that I work with clients on that I think is really important for people is understanding their values is probably the most important thing.

Once you understand what's important to you, you can get clarity around. Why you do the things that you do and it helps you gives you a decision making framework. So whenever I work with somebody who's tossing up between, I've got an offer of a job somewhere else to sustain here. I take them back to value is what's really important to you.

And do you think you'd be values aligned in that new job versus the job you're in? So values is really important, understanding your personality and how that works for you is really important. Understanding what you're good at and, having that really good sense of self-awareness and emotional intelligence is a really key piece as well.

Being able to understand. Where you're at, where the other person's at and being able to manage emotions in the moment so that we get good outcomes. I read

[:

[00:14:59] Ros: would agree [00:15:00] with? Absolutely. Yes. And look, I've worked with some incredibly intelligent leaders who are just don't have HQ at all and they struggle.

And look, I'll give you an example of how this actually works. I was working with an executive team once it's a while ago now. And the CEO was he wasn't great with his EQs. And something happened in that he made an announcement in the organization that his executive team, most of them disagreed with.

And half of them actually resigned that day because the announcement had been made. And when I was in speaking to him, he didn't understand why he's I don't understand what happened. We were just having an executive meeting and the next minute everybody resigned. And when I spoke to one of the team, they actually.

How could he not have noticed? Like I looked around the room when he'd made the announcement. Everyone's jaws were on the table, people were shocked. Horrified. You could see this distress in the room. How could he not see that? And, but he literally didn't say it. And for somebody with low IQ navigating that the world is.

It can be [:

Navigating emotions in the moment. You can't actually do that particularly well. And it's one of those sort of things that everybody says, but it's true that you can teach skill. Higher for values high for emotional intelligence, high for culture fit, and then you can teach them.

[:

[00:16:36] Ros: Oh, you can absolutely develop it. Yeah. It's actually I had somebody in one of our programs who one of my AI programs who turned up early while I was setting up the room and he said to me, I came in early because I wanted to have a chat to you.

erwards, he said, once I was [:

All that time, because I knew I wasn't good at it. So I've really spent a lot of time practicing, recognizing emotion for example, but it's actually relatively easy for him because it was about pay it's about pattern recognition because faces make certain patterns and those patterns mean certain things.

And expression of emotion is universal. No matter where you are in the world, faces do the same thing. Everybody's smiles. So once you know that a small means people are happy. That's just pattern recognition from there on so you can absolutely learn it. I've worked with people. Who've changed their IQ quite dramatically at the time because it's just paying attention.

Emotional management is strategic, so it's about, I see the emotion. I feel the emotion. I know what's going on for me. I know what's going on for the people around me. And then I make some decisions about what I do.

[:

Is it a more female trait or is that just me stereotyping

[:

They can learn to do it, but women to, it's that whole caregiver thing, we're much more attuned to other people's emotional states. And in a lot of ways, it's for people. It's a survival mechanism because you go back to caveman days and our ability to survive was dependent upon our ability to connect with other people.

Because being in a tribe there's safety in numbers. And for example, if we're being attacked by another tribe, it is useful to us to be connected to the strongest people in our tribe because they'll protect us. So it's that sense of being able to read what's going on for other people and connect and engage with that?

odd percent of the [:

And how do you usually describe it to them? It's a bit like having Google maps on your phone and there are people who will open it up and just see that. Yeah. And there are people who overlay the 3d version of it and they can see the buildings from above. And then there's the Google street view where you're standing in the road and looking around in the 360 and actually seeing everything around you.

And it's like that, most people got the map, but other people have got those, deeper nuances of it.

[:

[00:19:46] Ros: The first, this there's really four key skills involved. First one is being able to recognize emotion, which is, can I recognize it in myself and also recognize it in you and the best way to develop that and an activity I give to clients all the time is find a movie [00:20:00] you haven't seen before. Something that's got quite a lot of drama in it and get to a point where you can tell that two characters are about to interact with the about to have an emotional conversation and then turn.

And just watch the body language, watch the faces and see if you can figure out what's going on. And then when the same finish, just rewind it and watch it again with the sound, see how you go, because that's a really safe way to practice because it doesn't matter if you get it right or wrong because people can, once you get used to it and get used to what patterns of the faces look like, it's quite easy to pick.

So there's that there's understanding how emotions work and that sort of sense of knowing that emotions escalate over time and they deescalate and you know how those things work and you can have blends of emotions about something well at once. And they can be quite congeal, contradictory emotions. There's how to use emotions.

And this is something that almost everyone's done. When you sat down to do something, you've gone. God, I'm not in the mood for this. And that's mood task matching. She's knowing that then doing something with that, rather than just founding it anyway, going I've got choices. I can leave the activity for another time.

I can maybe put it off [:

[00:21:03] Vanessa: it. And I think that sense of control of your emotions really important and. Just taking it back to confidence. So lack of competence, knowing that you can control your emotions. And it's probably the one thing you can actually control cause you can't always call it control.

The external environment is so important. And particularly going back to your role in shaping change around leadership and developing leadership and being better leaders that controlling of the emotions,

[:

And it's not like that. It's not about that long in emotion. It's feeling the emotion and then go, what do I want to do with this? So I'm feeling really just say, for example, something happens and I start to feel really angry. It's not about me stopping, being angry. It's me saying, isn't it interesting that I'm feeling angry?

elp, but you can control the [:

So you go, I'm feeling really angry. That's super interesting. What am I going to do with this? And then you've got the choice about how you respond to it. When you got brought that,

[:

Say to myself, that Vanessa, where the heck has this come from and you need to, so I was really aware of it and he rose and then once I'd acknowledged, it was there, I was able to then do something about it. And my choice was like, okay, I'm going to acknowledge that it's there, but I'm going to let it go because.

Yeah, there wasn't really a dangerous situation, those is just, that's just one tiny example of where I've been able to acknowledge

[:

Can you get a bit, not road rage, [00:23:00] but it annoys me is if we're, you're in a big line of traffic and somebody gets on the shoulder and zooms along and then joins at the beginning right at the front of the line. And I hate that because it gets back to fairness because it's not fair. Everyone else is sitting in a queue and this person's tearing up to the front to get to the traffic light and what I've had to learn to do with that.

Is that just because it doesn't feel fair to me doesn't mean it means anything to the other person. Maybe they, on the way to hospital with a vomiting child, I don't know this. Maybe they'd been called, maybe their shift worker works. I don't know. Maybe an ambulance worker who's just been called in for an emergency.

I don't know this story, but what I'm doing is overlaying my story of what's happening. And my story is that it's not fair to cue.

[:

[00:23:42] Ros: So autonomy is right up there. Making a difference to me is really important.

Fairness, respect, and learning. And how did

[:

[00:23:51] Ros: They come to you? No, I've got a really lovely process that I use with clients and I've done it. I do it myself every sort of five years or so just to check in, but. It's a [00:24:00] set of values cards, and there's probably about 200 cards that, there's obviously a lot more values than that.

But what we do is you sought the card out and the first thing you do is you just count all the ones that don't mean anything to you. So you Chuck them aside. And then you're generally left with I've had people who've been left with any property, anywhere from a hundred. 20. And then we go through and you put them into piles of things.

That means something similar. So for me, learning, I've got, things like wisdom, education learning, or sit in that same pile. And then when you've got piles of things that mean the same things to you, most people end up with about five to eight piles, and then it's choosing the word and it doesn't have to be a word off the cards.

If there's another word that resonates more for you, that, you can keep that word instead. And then out of your, set of five to eight that you ended up with, we then put them in hierarchical. If you had to choose between, for example, respect and wisdom, which one would you choose? And then you end up with a hierarchical order.

So that's the process of basically deciding

[:

[00:24:58] Ros: I think. So some people can't [00:25:00] choose and then they'll end up with two number ones and that's okay. Because what it's about is just getting people to narrow it down because.

You can have situations where people's values can actually be in conflict with each other. So if, for example, you have the value of being true to self, which means doing what you want to do and ultimately doing what's right for you. And you've also got another value around emotional security.

You can have conflicts in your personal life, for example, where you're having an argument with a partner and part of you wants to be true to self and say what you think. And the other part is I need emotional security, so I don't want to upset to relationship. So then knowing which of those two values is most important.

Hope you decide to how to respond in that situation. I think that's

[:

I suppose my confidence in some ways, cause I'm like I'm not [00:26:00] this and I'm this. And I'm flip-flopping how would you start to unpack some of that?

[:

Let's go back to your values. When you're, you've got values conflict there, whether it's conflict between two of your own values or conflict between your values and someone else's values, it's deeply disturbing. And we find that if people are in organizations where there's values conflict, it actually makes them physically sick.

Over time, people get stressed, they get ill, they get rundown, they get, stress-related illnesses come up because it's so very difficult for humans to be in a situation where their values are out of. And I think

[:

And I see that a lot around this stress-related illnesses, and I'd never thought about it as values and there's a conflict with their values, but yet they may be one of their values is [00:27:00] I need security. The other one is I don't need whatever it is, that's in that culture. And that can lead to all sorts of stress related.

Wellnesses and sometimes that I have seen this when people then leave that organization. They are like a changed person and genuinely happy. And I say this because I've made people redundant in the past and they actually thank me for it because they realized their own values are so out of line with the company values.

And you must have seen that

[:

And sometimes when the decisions might fool them through a redundancy process, for example, you do get that relief. When we were basically preparing for this merger of the company I was working for. People were being made redundant. I remember seeing lucky, Hey, bumping the people in the streets, eating high.

n the straight all the time. [:

I've got a better job or I'm doing whatever, but people generally said, that's the best thing that happened. Yeah, maybe

[:

Being made redundant or dismissed or whatever it is a good opportunity. It's one of those moments in time to say, what do I want to do next? And there's an opportunity to say. Actually I want to go in a different direction. So I think, I don't know where I'm going with it, but it's, I've been made redundant twice.

I know what it's like, but actually it is a great moment to just think about your values to some extent

[:

What lights you up? What kind of work do you love? It's often quite redundancies in particular, quite freeing for a lot of [00:29:00] people because you've generally got a packet of. So for most people, there's not the, I've got to start work tomorrow because I've gotta be able to put food on the table.

It's, I've got a buffer of a couple of weeks or a couple of months, or even up to six months to think about what I want to do next. And, obviously if you land a job in the meantime, that's fantastic because you redundancy then goes to pay the house off or whatever, but it's that sort of sense of people often get that.

I've actually got some freedom to think this is a, she's not the CEO anymore. She left that organization, but she took a year off and she said, dad, he said, some guy. Potted about, did the gardening just thought about what I wanted to do next? And she's a consultant now as well?

[:

That's you've had to think that through that. Hasn't just, I imagine happens just naturally. You've had to think about it and give your [00:30:00] space yourself space to a service, assess, understand yourself, set your values. So people who are listening, what would you say to them around this freedom to think? And they think, oh, I'm so busy.

I can't

[:

I had a client in Melbourne as CEO and I was flying over there every couple of months and spending some time with him and his executive team. And he used to just sit me in his office and he'd just talk furiously and he'd whiteboard and he'd talk about problems. And I hadn't said anything to him and he says the white board and talk.

er than saying how you going [:

I think, and for him, he thinks out loud. So what he was thinking was coming out of his mouth. And he said, if I don't actually pay you to come and do this with me, I'll put thinking time in my diary. But then it gets overtaken my meetings because it's not seen as a priority, but because I'm paying you and I know you're showing up and expecting me to be here, it forces me to actually do.

And he said it was the most valuable part of his month or every second month was sitting down and actually being able to just talk about what was going on for him. And, we restructured a busy executive team at one point during one of those conversations. But so it's making time. But it is unless you've actually got a commitment to it.

And for him, it was paying me to be there and there's a commitment to it. It's, I've written my own, the other.

[:

And I love that saying, because there's so many things that light me up and I think absolutely this is going to get the best out of me, but [00:32:00] shaping change it does that

[:

those don't lock me up. But it does, I was actually talking to somebody about this yesterday because she came to see me and she's in a situation where she's had a huge promotion. So she said to me, it's almost like I critique this freedom where I don't have to worry about, what happens if the car breaks down, for example, I suddenly don't know what I'm doing or where at one it's I've lost my purpose and we had this really good conversation about it.

But for me, you know what I said to her, as I said, the things, when I think about some of the work that I do. I do it with, I wasn't getting paid for it. I could just keep it, it energizes me. It's that sense of coming to do this particular piece of work? It doesn't like to me, I love it. I look forward to it.

s quite okay if you haven't, [:

You don't have to rediscover your purpose tomorrow, be, just take some time to enjoy where you're at and you'll figure it out. But it's finding something that's really something that you love, something that, people will pay you to do. It that's even better because it was just a hobby.

Yeah. Most of the work that I do. Let's get to

[:

I know you, you do both men and women, but I want to understand through your work and your observations, what are the characteristics of a confident leader?

[:

Somebody who's genuinely confident is they've got this sort of relaxed presence about [00:34:00] them, where the confidence shines through, but it's coming from a space where there's, you could describe it. I'd probably say yes, that. Confidence about it, where somebody who's blocking the confidence is this sort of sense of anxiety or sense of urgency that you can pick up.

If you study them, it's it's quite pushy. It's almost like this in your face type of confidence. And I can say this because that's where I was at before. I discovered what real confidence look like for me is that I was achieving lots. I was pushing myself really hard. I was pushing my team or I was getting stuff done.

It was getting stuff done because my ego was attached to my ability to deliver on time. No, I got my sense of self worth from being really good at what I did, but it was like this fake thing, because underneath it was this sense of I'm going to fail all the time, being terrified of failing, pushing myself harder to prove something to somebody.

the difference between real [:

Because somebody who's in that real solid sense of self-esteem when something goes wrong. It's well, that was interesting. What did we learn from it? Did we fix it? Is the client okay. We sorted the problem and let's figure out how we fix this. It doesn't happen again where somebody who's got that sort of false bravado type of confidence, they start blaming everybody.

So we jumped to blaming people, even blaming themselves, but this sort of sense of it all becomes about the problem, not about the solution, let's beat everybody up about it, where somebody who's really confident goes I didn't expect that to happen, but that was interesting.

[:

Which seems to be very popular and even my kids get taught it now, which is amazing. So it's about, rather than going to say, going on the sort of hunt for a scapegoat, it's actually using the opportunity to grow

[:

Whereas when your confidence is at that veneer topic, confidence, anything going wrong, feels like a, the end of the world, because it's [00:36:00] basically showing that I'm not as competent as people think. I am not as confident and competent as how I portray. And so it becomes a direct almost an attack on the.

[:

[00:36:22] Ros: confident? I reckon in all of my coaching career, I think I've probably met about. Maybe a dozen people who are genuinely confident like that, who genuinely solid.

Self-esteem completely self-confident in who they were. But the key tell, like I said, he's the lack of ego because they're not proving anything to anybody they're just being themselves. And so there's this lightness about it. There's this joy because it's not that sort of push to show how confident I am.

resting experiences and they [:

Then I have this fear and I remember actually when I started my business, I had a close friend who is like that. And I remember saying to her, when I was making the decision about leaving my corporate job saying. What if a file, what if I'd start the business? I completely screw it up.

And she said, you just gotta get another job when you and you, her ahead. It was that simple. That to me, it wasn't because of the way ego attachments. What if I fail? Failing was a terrible thing. She's it just means it didn't work out for you. Just go get another job. And she literally didn't understand what the big deal was.

And these people

[:

[00:37:51] Ros: Most of them have, most of them have had, when I've spent time with them talking to them, most of them have had to work at it.

naturally like that, and it [:

It does grow that sort of sense of natural. Self-actualization. In a child, whereas the majority of people have not had that, because parents don't mean to mess people up, the kids that come with a handbook. We send messages to our children. That's about being good at school or being such a good kid or so helpful or so tidy or whatever.

All of those messages that we send to kids gives them the impression that's what they're valued for. And then the co you know, that sort of sense of self-esteem is not real. It's like a house of cards and some of the confident people that I've met. Learned it themselves. Like they've developed that over time.

st naturally very confident, [:

Showing how competent she was. And she said, it keeps seeing from time to time, look at me now, and then she'll call me and she'll say, I fell off the wagon. Can we have a coffee? And we do we talk about it, for her, it's developed through a lot of hard work.

[:

That person, the next day, it does take time. And you're talking about a CEO who has been with you for a very long time and is still going through that learning and growth and the iterations of herself. So I think that's really important to state. So what's your one piece of advice to people who are listening and they say, I want some self-belief.

I want to build my confidence. What would you advise

[:

You can't move your head. And I just had this strong memory of roller coasters being associated with hurting. And so I didn't go on roller coasters, these knees, and was always quite scared of them. And then we went, my husband and I went to Disneyland in 2011. I think it was just after my cancer dog. I just thought started finished treatment.

And I said to him, I'm going to get out of this year, rollercoaster. This is stupid. So we went to Disneyland and we went to the little kiddie roller coaster that kind of like going over gentle speed bumps and online up for this little kiddie roller coaster. And there's always five-year-olds around me.

And when I got to the front of the queue, the guy putting everyone. The cheers was assumed that I was with the children because he's which ones of these are yours? And I'm like, none of them, I'm just here by myself and he's okay. And I didn't die, and it's I didn't die. I didn't hurt my neck.

dn't quite get there, but it [:

So it's getting over the fear by taking that sort of baby steps, like gradually stretching your comfort zone, bigger and bigger over time. It's probably the best advice that I can give people. So whatever it is that your makes you feel, under-confident go and do that. But don't, if you're scared of public speaking, don't stand on the stage in front of 20,000 people on your first gut, stand up and talk at dinner in front of your friends or join Toastmasters or something like that.

And just get over it bit by bit.

[:

[00:41:45] Ros: that. I'm still working on myself because I do have I have a tendency to be hypercritical when things aren't going well.

ize really critical of other [:

As most of these things are when things are not going well for them. My feeling critical of other people is my defense mechanism, which is, I might be feeling really incompetent right now, but at least I'm not as bad as that person over there. So that's something that I'm working on and we'll probably always have to work on.

It's definitely a lot better than it used to be because I can pull it up. Now, when I noticed it before it becomes a big deal. So that's something that I'm going to continue to work on. And maybe for my whole life, I'd like to hope that eventually I'll get over it, you never know.

[:

[00:42:38] Ros: can people find you?

They can get in touch with us through my website. So shaping change.com.edu, or my email is Ross R O s@shapingchange.com. Today you can go through the websites easiest way to get hold of me or.

[:

[00:42:59] Ros: [00:43:00] law?

I'm not on I'm on Instagram, but I need for personal reasons. So you get photos of my cat and dog sunsets and things like that, but I'm on Twitter. I'm on LinkedIn and I'm on Facebook as well. So Roz Cardinal on Facebook shape and change his Facebook page. At Cardinal rules on Twitter. And it's pretty easy to find on LinkedIn.

[:

Leading founding and being the CEO of a shaping change. Thank you very much.

[:

[00:43:45] Vanessa: Thank you so much for listening to women in confidence, and I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, then please like it. Share it, comment on it. And if you want to sponsor it, if you'd like to take part in my podcast or know somebody who would make a perfect guest, then please email me on [00:44:00] contact@vanessa-murphy.com.

That's contact@vanessa-murphy.com. Until next time.

About the Podcast

Show artwork for Women In Confidence
Women In Confidence
The podcast for ambitious working women

About your host

Profile picture for Vanessa Murphy

Vanessa Murphy

Vanessa is a HR Consultant, The Founder of Boom Podcast Agency and a Podcast Host.
Vanessa got her first proper job in 1998 when she joined as an Officer in the Royal Navy and then after 15 years doing that, she transitioned into senior HR and Culture roles working for organisations all over the world.
She now has 2 strings to her bow....
Firstly, she is an empath, avid people watcher and she likes to observe people when they were operating with confidence and self-belief and learn strategies, tools and techniques from them. She helps women with confidence at work and her Women In Confidence podcast is a way for her to share her knowledge and her network with a wider audience.

Secondly, she has always been fascinated by what makes a company great to work for and now devotes her time to creating workplaces that not only have impressive performance but are also human centred - hint... they are not mutually exclusive. Her Conversations About Company Culture podcast is her way of sharing ways to build great organisations.