I tend to believe that the reason people lack confidence comes down to 2 things. One, they’ve been beaten up emotionally over the course of their lifetime and thus don’t know how to find confidence on their own. Two, their lack of confidence stems from the unknown.
In a strange way, those tips and most of the other posts I write on this blog are geared towards education of what good leadership principles are and how they can be used. I also hope I talk enough about the types of outcomes one can expect if they put some of these principles into action.
Sometimes it’s not enough to tell someone what to do. For instance, if I tell you how to pick up a box of groceries that’s pretty straight forward and you’ll obviously know why you’re doing it and what the expected outcome is going to be. You probably don’t even need me telling you how to do that.
But if I’m trying to give you a leadership tip like how to bring team members together when they all act more like individuals, I can’t just throw something out there and expect anyone to follow it without knowing why I’m saying it and how it should manifest itself once it’s implemented.
If I tell you that you need to learn delegation, figuring that if you don’t understand why you need to do it means you’re either a micro manager or are afraid of what people might think of you if you do it, I then know I need to explain the benefits of delegation, while at the same time telling you not to give all your work away because, well, you need to still do something, and some things will take you much longer to teach than to just do yourself at some levels.
When people know the outcomes of things by explanation they gain confidence that the action will work, and then they gain confidence to do those things. That works across the board, whether it’s with leadership or not. It might take time and practice, but if shown that something will work, people are usually confident that they can do it as well.