Cultivating Executive Presence – A Guide for Executives and Professionals
Leadership is a skill set requiring us to constantly sharpen the ax. Developing and refining the skills of leadership has a serious return on how our team, and we, perform. Within the sphere of leadership, executive presence plays an important role of how we handle challenges and how people perceive us. In our blog we’ll explore how we can cultivate a stronger executive presence to enhance your leadership skills. We spend a lot of time cultivating the information in our guide for entrepreneurs and we’re offering it as a gift for you. We put together a FREE guide identifying the Top 6 reasons businesses fail and give you actionable steps you can take on every one of these to make sure it’s your competition failing and not you! It’s our free gift to you. Access it here! Executive presence can feel intangible and yet it is made up of very tangible components such as gravitas, decision making, appearance, confidence, awareness, and communication. The benefits of executive presence extend to inspiring confidence in your team, projecting authority and engage others. We’ll outline some tools you can use to develop your executive presence to the next level. 1. Appearance Although executive presence requires much more than a ‘good’ appearance, we often make impressions within half a second and appearance counts. For executive presence it’s less about defining what ‘good’ means and more about making sure we are well groomed, conscientious, and diligent in our appearance. This means that the initial driver of executive presence means preparing how we want others to view us before we ever set foot in a room (virtual or real) with them. Dress well and with intention Maintain excellent personal hygiene and grooming Display strong posture and body language 2. Confidence Confidence is the foundation of executive presence. Confidence can be established physically, vocally, and mentally. It provides your team with inspiration and security and helps you cement loyalty. Have faith in your decisions regardless of results Accept responsibility for your actions and your teams Be willing to take risks Also read: How to find and grow your confidence Tips To Build Confidence Quickly 3. Awareness If confidence is the foundation of executive presence, then awareness is the cornerstone. Understanding our own skill set, how we react and respond and how others perceive us is essential if we want to better develop our executive presence. Create a feedback loop and receive feedback from transparent and trustworthy people Understand your triggers and the red flags that identify when you are reacting instead of responding Review and assess your own skills and repeat the behaviors that are beneficial Also read: Self-Awareness: Do You Have It? Self Awareness And How You Self-Sabotage Yourself Every DayTips To Build Confidence Quickly How do you develop your executive presence? Let us know your thoughts, you can email us at info@jbandthedoctor.com! Did you know we work with professionals and leaders with 2 on 1 coaching that marries the expertise of a Doctor of Psychology and mindset coach with the business savvy of a former Fortune 50 sales executive. We specialize in helping entrepreneurs and professionals like you master your soft skills to evolve you to your greatest potential. To learn more about our coaching you can contact us here! Feel like you need coaching but not sure you can afford the investment in yourself? That’s ok! We have a scholarship available to diverse candidates of need. You can apply for our scholarship for our coaching and our courses here. Not enough time in the day, we get it. Check out our AYOP course, 2x Your Time, right here. We walk through everything from time management and calendar basics to how you can supercharge your days weeks and months through practices and techniques that are grounded in experience and proven by science.
What it means to be courageous in business
When you hear courage, you probably don’t immediately think about business. You may think of police officers and heroism, or service members overseas, firefighters from 9/11 but you aren’t too likely to think of business leaders. Yet everyday professionals and business leaders exhibit courage in business. What it means to be courageous in business is to develop and display the skill sets of risk/reward decision making, to admit you are without all the answers and to stand up for what is right. 6 Methods To Make Sure Your Business Doesn’t Fail Stay strong! Did you know that 70% of businesses will fail? We put together a FREE guide identifying the Top 6 reasons businesses fail and give you actionable steps you can take on every one of these to make sure it’s your competition failing and not you! It’s our free gift to you and you can access it right here. Courage Through Decision Making Taking calculated risks in business means to identify and take action on potential failures. It also means to weigh the risk of that failure with the reward of success. Great business leaders display strong risk adjusted decision making and continue to push the boundaries of what their business and they are capable of. This is a skill best developed through experience, mentorship and wisdom. The Courage to Not Know As business grows more complex our ability to be an expert in all aspects hits a wall. Our willingness to openly admit our own limits of knowledge is an essential skill for professionals and business owners today. Better to admit lack of knowledge and ignorance than pretend to know what we do not. The Courage of Standing up for What Is Right It’s easy as professionals and business owners to sacrifice integrity and ethics in the pursuit of business. After all, plenty of people and businesses are willing to look the other way or blatantly break the rules if they think they can get away with it. Standing up for what is right takes courage. It takes a willingness to accept losses that otherwise might not be taken. It also leads to a culture of excellence that will be unmatched by any other company or professional that is willing to compromise their ethics and integrity. Is courage in business important to you? Let us know in our private Facebook community, the EML! You can join here! Join our community We can work with you individually and in a group setting with our unique 2 on 1 coaching that marries the expertise of a Doctor of Psychology and mindset coach with the business savvy of a former Fortune 50 sales executive. We specialize in helping entrepreneurs and professionals like you master your time, sales, and confidence, to evolve you to your greatest potential. To learn more about our coaching you can contact us here! Feel like you need coaching but not sure you can afford the investment in yourself? That’s ok! We have a scholarship available to diverse candidates of need. You can apply for our scholarship for our coaching and our courses here. Not enough time in the day, we get it. Check out our AYOP course, 2x Your Time, right here. We walk through everything from time management and calendar basics to how you can supercharge your days weeks and months through practices and techniques that are grounded in experience and proven by science.
Affirmations or Ask-firmations how to make affirmations better
Popularized back in the ‘60s affirmations are something TONS of coaches, influencers and even psychologists will recommend their clients practice regularly. There’s science to back up the effectiveness of affirmations, too! After 60 years it’s worth asking, can we make affirmations better and the answer is, yes! Instead of a practice of affirmations, a practice of ask-firmations can make this practice even more effective. Before you read on we thought you might be interested in downloading our free guide: 70% of Entrepreneurs Fail – The 6 methods to make sure it’s your competition and not you! In this guide we walk through the most common ways professionals fail and most importantly provide you with immediate action items you can implement to make sure you’re ahead of your competition and successful! You can download the free PDF here. Affirmations are positive phrases or statements used to offset and challenge negative thoughts or beliefs. For those of us caught up in negative self-talk or looking to raise our self-esteem or create a more positive narrative of ourselves affirmations can be incredibly helpful. Research done in the 1980s as well as the last couple of decades shows the positive benefits of affirmations. They help to drive our self-identity and regular, consistent use of affirmations can shift how we think of ourselves. Talk about a powerful tool. After 60 years of popularity, it is worth exploring if simple affirmations can evolve and if we can level up the results we get from this practice. I first heard of ask-firmations from Coach Machen Macdonald, who joined us on our podcast. If you would like to hear him talk about ask-firmations you can head over to our podcasts here. Ask-firmations are another way of saying an affirmation. A traditional affirmation likely will have a clear formula of: Visualized and present tense, declarative sentences. For example: Today I am experiencing tremendous gratitude and am drawing my ideal clients to me. An ask-firmation on the other hand will rephrase this into a question formula: visualized and present tense, interrogative sentences. For example: How can I experience tremendous gratitude today and draw my ideal clients to me? Coach Machen isn’t the only one talking about ask-firmations, however. In one of my favorite sales books out there – To Sell Is Human, by Daniel H. Pink, Pink mentions the strength of ask-firmations. Both Coach Machen and Pink establish clear and logical rationale for an ask-firmation instead of an affirmation. Ultimately, affirmations are build me up declarations and ask-firmations are questions. The difference in how our brain reacts to being told vs being asked is immense. In sales, telling isn’t necessarily bad, but it’s not all that effective. The best sales tools use good questions. This is because people respond MUCH BETTER to questions than they do to being told. What’s true about other people is also true about us. Asking ourselves a question about how we are going to make our traditional affirmation happen, does something to our brains. It makes us problem solve! By asking ourselves a question we are much more likely to try to reason out ways we can achieve our affirmation. If our affirmation is to experience gratitude and draw clients to us, we will start thinking about HOW we can experience gratitude and in what ways can we help our clients find us. The difference can be startling, and we encourage you to try this methodology out. Run an experiment and see if it’s a change that benefits you. For more direct help with changing your behavior and your mindset you can always contact us directly for our 2 on 1 coaching. This is a truly unique coaching paradigm marrying behavioral modification expertise with blue-blood sales and presentation expertise. You can contact us here! If coaching is on your bucket list but you’re concerned it’s not something you can afford, that’s ok! We offer scholarships to deserving individuals. You can request us to review you for a scholarship right here! Not a member of the Entrepreneur Mastery Lab yet? For direct access to JB, The Doc and a ton of other professionals you can connect with us personally in the EML, our FREE, private Facebook community.
How to find and grow your confidence
Business professionals today struggle with any number of challenges. Time and again we hear from professionals struggling with their mindset and getting the trash out of their own heads. Confidence plays an absolutely central role to our mindset and if you are struggling with challenges related to your head-space then learning how to find and grow your confidence is a great process to work through! Developing confidence leads to all sorts of benefits beyond addressing the specific challenge you are facing. It can help improve our health, our relationships, our happiness, sense of self-worth and performance. It can reduce our anxiety, fear, FOMO and the impact of rejection. Self-confidence is the spark that starts the engine, without confidence there is no action. Our favorite way to think of confidence is the line in the sand between where we are and risk. We are all aware that we need to take action and action and change lead us to risk…and reward! What stops us from taking action? Confidence. Confidence is either the fence that prevents us from taking action or it’s the gate that opens and allows us to cross to a new universe of opportunities. This is why confidence is so important to us! Finding our confidence sounds simple and easy. Like most things in life, just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s easy for us to do. Commonly, we get in our own way with our confidence. Whether you’re brand new to something and trying to fake it until you make it or you’re a vet that got splashed with a hefty dose of imposter syndrome, confidence is not a constant. In fact, our confidence can and will change in an instant. Think of it almost like a light switch in a room. In an instant, the switch can flip and we can go from bright to pitch black. This is what makes it so important to be able to find our confidence. If we think of confidence like a light switch in a room, then we can also consider that even when the light switches off, our confidence is still there. In fact, if we’re comfortable in that room, we have a pretty good sense of where that confidence is. We can use our instinct and our concrete knowledge to map out the room…ok here’s the desk, I know the chair is over here, the other door is over there, oh, here’s our buffet…ok, got it, this is where my confidence sits! How do we find our confidence? We go back to our fundamentals, our most concrete knowledge. Drawing ourselves back to square one and retracing our steps does an amazing thing. It creates perspective on our progress. It allows us to remember a starting point and connect the dots between that starting point and where we are today. When we begin to connect the dots and visualize our progress we remember our confidence. That room that was pitch black with the lights off, now has a dimmer switch. The more dots we connect, the brighter the light gets in the room and the easier it is to grab a hold of our confidence. You may already have some illumination (pun intended) on growing your confidence. Progress develops confidence. Knowledge, mastery and experience grows our confidence. Feeling confident right now? Hit reset in your mind and treat today as if you’re at the start line all over again. What progress can you start making right now to grow and develop even greater confidence? Put an action plan in place to continue pushing your progress and watch your confidence flourish. Interested in hearing what great confidence sounds like? You can listen in to our most recent podcast with Tyler Foley, here, as the inspiration for our conversation about confidence. If you’re trying to find or grow your confidence, we can help. We offer one , two hecks of a value proposition with our 2-1 coaching. We bring business and behavioral expertise to help you evolve to your greatest potential. You can learn more about our coaching here! Trying to get the benefits from coaching but can’t stroke the check? That’s ok, let’s put our ego’s aside. We offer scholarships to deserving candidates and you may be one! You can apply for a scholarship for our services right here. If you just want to get a better feel for us, we get that too! Join us in our private Facebook community, The Entrepreneur Mastery Lab and meet like minded professionals and engage with us directly. You can request access to this free community, right here!
Tips To Build Confidence Quickly
Confidence above almost everything else will determine if you’re going to be successful. A specific type of confidence is essential to achieve your goals in business and life. This is not a confidence in your skills so much as it is confidence in your ability to achieve your goals. We call this type of confidence – self efficacy. Self-efficacy is defined as: our belief in our ability and capacity to execute the behaviors necessary to produce specific performance. You can be confident in some areas of your life but not have self-efficacy. Positive psychology recently had a great article written offering some tips to improve and increase self-efficacy. You can visit the full article here! The fact is, we love this article so much we STRONGLY recommend you visit the site and read about it. Not only does it discuss self-efficacy it focuses in on self-mastery which is a journey we discuss all the time in the Entrepreneur Mastery Lab. If you’re unfamiliar with the lab you can request to join our private community here! We also encourage you to check out our podcast if you haven’t. This blog topic was inspired by our conversation around confidence in our most recent live Q&A podcast episode. You can listen in here! Or on any of your favorite podcast apps! In the mean time here are two very simple tips to start building and improving your self-efficacy and confidence! 1. Divorce yourself from your short term results. We know this can be a crazy idea to a lot of people but it’s important to recognize that a lot of our results will not be a reflection of how capable or good we are at what we do. Often times individual results do not correlate with our longer term goals and the results we are trying to achieve. If you get too caught up in short term individual results you run the risk of reducing your confidence when you might very well have been well on track to hit your bigger goals. Keep perspective and don’t let poor individual results hurt your confidence. 2. Break down your goals as small as possible. There is a reason people talk about micro-habits and establishing very small wins early in the day like making your bed. It’s because by achieving one small goal of waking up early, making our beds, or flossing our teeth daily will translate to a lot of small wins. Those small wins will build on each other and build up your self-efficacy and confidence. Enough small wins and all of a sudden you’re winning the bigger wins too! A big goal can be daunting. When broken down into a single activity or an hourly goal it becomes much more manageable. Use these tips to continue to develop your own self-efficacy!