Leading with Emotional Intelligence: Hands-On ... - always yours

SELF-CONFIDENCE TOOLS AND STRATEGIES 119
for something she had failed to get around to. Her confidence was
affected and her negative self-evaluation started to influence others.
Perhaps she wasn’t as competent as they had thought she was?
In one of our coaching sessions, Andrea achieved a breakthrough
when I pointed out that she had apologized three times in 30 minutes.
It was obvious she was overly critical
of herself. She became painfully aware of
how automatic this evaluation system was
and, more importantly, recognized that it
was quite possibly inaccurate. Andrea also
became aware of how pervasive this pattern
was in all of her interactions and that it
undermined her leadership abilities as well.
Andrea started out saying she was on
her own case 80% of the time. Through
talking about this pattern’s impact and
building awareness, she was able to get it
down to about 40%. It was important for
Changing our
self-evaluation
greatly improves
how confident
we feel and
allows us greater
awareness of
how we evaluate
others.
her to understand that she was not trying to eliminate Being on
Her Case, but rather reframing it into Being on Her Side. With some
real commitment and practice, she developed the ability to catch
the pattern faster and redirect it from Being on Her Case to Being on
Her Side.
Andrea became more On Her Side and, as a result, was less
demanding of her staff and more on their side as well. She even
encouraged her staff to be more realistic about the amount of tasks
they were handling and to cut back on their commitments. In order
to help her track this pattern, in each successive meeting I would
ask what percentage of the time she was Being on Her Case versus
Being on Her Side.
Changing our self-evaluation greatly improves how confident we
feel and allows us greater awareness of how we evaluate others.