Tag Archive for: being present

Radical Self-Trust: Eight Ways to Build Embodied Leadership (Pt. 2)

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build trust embody leadershipAs recently covered, the prerequisite to building trust as a leader is to cultivate a deep sense of self-trust. The most important (work) relationship you have is with yourself.

Executive presence has nothing on embodied presence. When you trust yourself, you carry yourself differently. A real leader is embodied. Trusting yourself means you move with more clarity, consistency, and congruency between your values, words, actions, and outcomes.

When you internally source your power and authority, it reflects in the quality of your presence, the willingness to take decisions, the faith in your movements, and in your adaptability and resilience amidst challenges.

As Maven Miara writes, “So why do so many women leaders struggle with self-trust? Because we’ve been conditioned to seek permission instead of power. Not anymore. Self-trust fuels confident leadership.”

Here are eight ways to build your sense of self-trust, and tips on how to apply each:

1) Know Thyself

To trust yourself, you must remain true to yourself. That means a willingness to un-know yourself and re-know who you are now. This means staying connected and listening within.

Self-awareness means recognizing the beliefs, patterns, conditioning, identities, and expectations that shape how you perceive and how you show up—yet, they are not your limitations. They are protective layers.

Beneath the layers, your essential self is always there. And wherever you are living in a way that is disconnected from who you really are, the truths of your being will be seeking to reach you.

Developing self-trust means coming back to trusting your own senses, instincts, values, preferences, perspectives, and intuition. You are able to sense what feels right to and for you and to discern what is not for you. Validating your intuition and inner knowing helps you to build self-esteem. Inner congruence reflects in your vitality.

Apply: Create moments of solitude to check-in with yourself. Keep small intentional rituals such as a five minute morning meditation. Journal to insightful questions that guide you to strip away stories and reconnect with your inner voice. Practice asking yourself what your needs or preferences are.

2) Practice Compassion and Emotional Awareness

Self-trust is also built on being connected to and responsive to your emotions and creating inner safety. Speaking to relationships, Linda and Charlie Bloom write in Psychology Today that self-trust is “having the conviction that you will be kind and respectful to yourself regardless of the outcome of your efforts.”

Self-trust requires you can trust that you will not be self-punishing when making mistakes. If the inner critic is constantly blaming and berating you, you will not feel safe to experiment and learn. If you are caught at self-protection, you will be unable to examine your experience for new insights.

Yet integrating the wisdom learned through mistakes is part of building self-trust and growing. It’s hard to do that as a non-forgiving perfectionist.

When self-criticism is usurped by self-compassion—the ability to be as understanding, supportive and encouraging as you would to someone else you deeply care about—you are able to expand as a human and leader.

Apply: When feeling triggered, breathe and check in with yourself about what you need. Ignoring your needs corrodes self-trust. Practice allowing feelings to be felt and pass through you, while garnering insight they may offer.

Create a self-gratitude journal where you acknowledge what you appreciate about yourself, challenges you’ve taken on, decisions you’re proud of, wins and successes and ways you trust yourself.

3) Be In the Present

If you lack self-trust, you are caught in past ruptures of credibility or you are worrying about the future. Sometimes, you are simply looking at the entire mountain, instead of taking each step as it comes.

Either way, you are caught in stories and removing yourself from the potent present moment. And, you are displacing your personal power instead of stepping into it exactly where it is—in the here and now.

Regret, worry, or burning out to make it work can parade as certainty and be oddly comforting. We project a false guise of certainty backwards or forwards, even if it’s unwanted: I won’t follow through or I won’t succeed or if I don’t force, it won’t happen.

The familiar story may feel safer to a tightly wound nervous system than embracing uncertainty and trusting in the moment (and yourself) to guide you and give rise to the right decisions and right actions.

As the Blooms point out, the paradox is fear and worry do not exist in the present, so being in the present is the ultimate protection.

Apply: Serious question. Have you ever thought of building your tolerance levels for being in the present moment? Without distraction? What would it would mean for you?

4) Release External Validation

At some level, when you don’t trust yourself, you will feel like an imposter not just at work, but in life. So you will be caught in seeking external approval and validation.

Chronic reassurance-seeking outsources the emotional labor of fear and anxiety and is crippling to self-trust. According to Gravitas Founder, Lisa Sun, the self-sustaining confidence of knowing your worth is most common among women over 50 years old. Tempering the urge for external reassurance certainly plays into this.

The ability to intentionally examine various angles or perspectives of an issue is a gift. Chronic second-guessing is a nightmare. When you have self-compassion, you are more willing to embrace uncertainty and make decisions, because your worth is not on the line.

Apply: Before you turn to someone else for an opinion or advice, get quiet, and ask your own. You may wish to both write the question and answer yourself. You may be surprised how much wisdom you’re sitting on.

5) Honor Your Boundaries

As Paulo Coehlo wrote, “When you say ‘yes’ to others, make sure you are not saying ‘no’ to yourself.” Author Caroline Myss talks about how ‘boundaries’ emerged into our everyday social language as we began to recognize ourselves as not only physical but also energetic beings.

Boundaries matter because self-trust requires a ‘sense of self’ to trust, and a sense of self requires discernment. When you lack integrity, you can be pulled in any direction or towards any whim, regardless of whether it’s aligned or resonant to your own inner truth.

Boundaries are not to keep others out, but to keep you whole and integral. They reflect an inner valuing and authentic contract with self. Some people even create an inner boundary with their inner critic. Your boundaries discern between what resonates and nurtures your being and what does not.

Sure, you could commit to your boss, meet every deadline, and keep every promise you’ve made to your team. But let’s say you’re entirely misplaced in this area of work and burning yourself out to do it. Will you trust yourself? Well, you may trust yourself to betray yourself.

Keeping promises to others does not alone build self-trust, if the promises violate your inner knowing or are inauthentic to you. Real self-trust and organic boundaries come from being aware enough of what your inner truths and values are, and knowing that you will not betray them.

Apply: Identify where are you saying ‘yes’ when it’s truly a ‘no’ for you. What would ‘no’ feel like? Is there anywhere in life where you are violating your own boundaries?

6) Keep Your Word With Yourself

If you habitually break your word with yourself, how can you build self-trust? Lying to yourself, even in small ways, wreaks havoc within. When you don’t believe yourself, you don’t believe in yourself. But nothing builds self-trust faster than keeping your word with self.

Keeping promises with yourself means validating what matters to you and assigning this as much importance and priority as outside demands. When you meet the commitments you make with others, but always compromise the ones you made with yourself, you are sending your cells a message: you don’t matter.

If someone treats you like you’re not important to them, do you trust them? In order to rebuild self-trust, you need to treat your word with yourself at least as importantly as you do your word with others.

Identify what is really important to you, and be transparent with yourself about it. Show up consistently to yourself in small ways, and let it build, step by step, towards momentum, results, and more self-trust.

Apply: Listen in and clarify what is important to you. Where are you ignoring this? Where are you keeping your word with self and where are you bending it? Set reasonable and achievable commitments, treat them as real, and acknowledge when you fulfill them. Be realistic.

7) Take On Risk And Challenge

If you rarely take on new challenges, explore new expressions, or take yourself out of your comfort zone, you won’t have the experiences which build more self-trust.

One risk you can take to build self-trust is to speak up in a room where you’d normally hold back. Put your weight behind the value of your voice and your perspectives, rather than asking permission to.

Expanding into new skills is a way to build self-efficacy and increase a sense of personal competence. Through putting yourself into the valuable role of beginner in unfamiliar territory, you learn you are capable and adaptable to challenges and setbacks. You may discover gifts and capacities beyond the ones you knew.

Apply: Choose one thing you are already curious about and invest in growing in that area. Check the first challenge that comes to mind—is it truly out of your comfort zone? If you’re an adrenaline junkie, a marathon may not be the challenge. Yin yoga might be.

8) Practice Accountability

When you take accountability for your own perspectives, actions, behaviors, and outcomes, you build self-trust. Accountability is a sign that you trust yourself, because when you err, you do not collapse into shame or deflect responsibility. Rather, you see the moment as an opportunity to step even more into integrity.

Even more than to others, ownership demonstrates your credibility to yourself. Not only do you hold what happened differently, you feel and experience it differently, too.

You know you have grown when you can own your part in an undesirable outcome. Or when something that would have wilted you becomes an insight from which to learn. Equally, owning your part helps you to discern what is not yours to own or internalize.

Being accountable also means a willingness to see and honestly assess the reality in front of you. Because when you do this, you can move from a place of grounded empowerment. It means being honest even when it’s hard to, including with yourself.

Apply: Notice how taking accountability, and owning your part, has helped to liberate you and for you to grow. Where in life would you like to see more clearly and take more accountability? How can you start?

BONUS: Trust in Life

Self-trust is not hyper-independence and it’s also not being a control freak.

It’s trusting yourself enough to cultivate dynamics of interdependence, because you are able to extend that trust to others who have also earned it. Connection, collaboration, and co-creation depend on this. How we trust others (or don’t trust) reflects our self-image and how much we trust ourselves. If you required others to always do exactly as you wished, you would never trust them.

If you require yourself to flawlessly do exactly as you wished, you will likely never trust yourself. From models of understanding such as Human Design, not everyone is meant to work or create or make decisions the same. What makes us effective and what fulfills us expresses differently. Being curious about how we work helps us to build trust.

But it goes even further, if you require life to always be exactly as you wish it to be, you will not trust in life. Paradoxically, self-trust requires a willingness to surrender. When you trust in something greater than yourself, call it life or universal forces or the divine, not everything comes down to you and what you alone can control.

When you value yourself, humility breeds self-trust. And the more you are able to release your grip on the wheel, and be receptive to be guided by life, the more willing you may be to trust when you know your hands belong there.

By: Aimee Hansen is a long time writer and heart coach with theglasshammer.com. Her recent work includes “This Book is a Retreat” co-written with Marianne Richmond.

If you would like to work with Aimee or any of our coaches including Nicki Gilmour our head coach and founder, please click HERE for a free, exploratory call with Nicki who can match you with the right coach for you (we have six coaches, all with different backgrounds who can help you depending on what you need).

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Want More Confidence? Cut Down These Five Negative Thought Patterns

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develop confident mindsetWhen it comes to developing a more confident mindset, much of the self-help industry centers on positive thinking. But the truth is, the bigger mindset leaps come not by piling on positivity, but by cutting down the noise of habitual negativity.

Less negative or pessimistic thinking is a stronger predictor of physical health than increasing optimism and has more ripple impacts on your life.

How Habitual Negative Thinking Undermines Growth

Habitual negative thinking—such as self-criticism, chronic complaining, or imagining worst-case scenarios—clutters your mind, clouds your energy, and drains your life-force. To be clear, we are not talking about the discernment of saying something is not okay, authentic anger in the face of injustice, or negative emotions that guide you to value-based action.

Rather, most habitual negative thinking, like thoughts in general, are unconscious and repetitive. The negativity-biased hard-wiring of the brain keeps you stuck in survival and victimhood. Until you cut down on negative clutter, the positive growth you try to build on top struggles to take root.

Habitual negative thinking distorts your perception of reality, robs your motivation, erodes your self-trust, and drowns out inspiration. In essence, trying to grow confidence in a mind overrun with fear is like planting flowers in a weed-filled garden.

The Impact of the Five C’s and How to Clear Your Mindset

According to change management expert and author, Price Pritchett, “If we want to increase our belief in the self, one of the things we can do is start removing pessimism and negative thinking.”

Pritchett points to five C’s which comprise the majority of negative thought loops: complaining, criticizing, concern, commiserating and catastrophizing.

Disrupt the loops by identifying and challenging them.

1) Complaining focuses on problems and shortcomings rather than solutions or positive aspects. If where attention goes, energy flows, then complaining keeps you problem-focused.

Complaining or venting can feel rewarding as it provides validation and a temporary outlet for stress. But it also shrinks the hippocampus, oils your neural pathways for negativity, and shapes what you pay attention to.

Chronic complaining feeds a victim identity where you feel powerless. It keeps you mired in problems instead of seeing possibilities. To counter the habitual negative impact of complaining, ask where your power lies.

What is in your control? Can you practice acceptance and see from another perspective? Can you become solutions-focused and action-oriented? Are you shying away from an uncomfortable conversation? What is one small change you can make to improve the situation?

  • Complaint Mindset: “I’m getting dumped on at work, and it’s not fair. Why me, again?”
  • Solution Mindset: “I am going to have a conversation with my boss about my workload and express my boundaries.” or “I am going to drop the office housework and focus on my priorities.”

2) Criticizing focuses on finding fault with yourself or others, often in a harsh or judgmental way.

Being oriented towards poking holes is an imbalance. Because when you are applying your creative energies, you usually have less space and time for criticizing. Unused creativity can give rise to resentment and criticism.

A healthy critical eye becomes a catalyst for more creativity and more possibilities. With constructive feedback, the intention is to identify how to improve, rather than tear down. Mistakes become learning, refining, and a launchpad for growth – not failures.

Whether self-critical dialogue or criticism of others, you must be willing to break through criticism and turn towards creativity again. This is what opens a space for novel thoughts and energy to come through.

Criticism Mindset: “I’m not qualified for this job. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

Compassion Mindset: “Nobody who dares to leap ever knows what they are doing.” or “What if not knowing how it’s supposed to be done is my creative license to carve the path?”

3) Concern steeps you in excessive worry or anxiety about potential problems, often without a clear sense of what to do about them. Amidst a foreboding issue, you feel small and helpless. While concern seems helpful, it can fuel anxiety and feeling stuck.

Like empathy, concern is often a reflection of what you value and care about, which can guide compassionate action and catalyze change. But the concern that Pritchett calls “garden variety worry” – concern about inflation or the state of world affairs or AI in the workplace – often leaves you overwhelmed or despondent, feeling powerless.

Worrying makes it feel like you are doing something, but it removes you from the present. Rather than be with uncertainty, you ruminate to escape it and grasp for a sense of control. When you worry, you try to micro-manage the future while envisioning what you don’t want into it.

Unless you can address your concern through positive thoughts, energy, or action, then it honestly helps nobody and nothing. It feeds the energy of fear and keeps you caught in a spiral. Instead, find where you power does reside.

Perhaps bring in a perceptual reframe, such as deeper trust in the bigger picture. Or take grounded responsibility and calm, present-moment action – no matter how small.

Concern Mindset: “All of these policy changes are worrying, and I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Grounded, Present Mindset: “I am going to embody the change I wish to see in the world.” or “Day by day, I am going to contribute to the calm and inclusive environment I wish to encourage by being a welcoming and friendly presence.”

4) Commiserating, or co-rumination, is connecting with others through focusing on shared problems and suffering, which can lead to becoming entrenched in negative emotions.

While it may feel liberating, therapeutic, and bonding at first, those long gripe sessions deplete health and mental strength. When social connection hinges upon rehashing complaints, you quickly fall into reinforcing each other’s victimhood. You bring a heavy focus to what you don’t want, without freeing the energy towards what you do.

Unless you move towards making a constructive change, you’ll be swimming in an energetic pool that gets dirtier as long as everyone only kicks up the mud. Instead, you can practice compassionate listening, empathizing, and empowering.

Commiseration Mindset: “Yes, everything is awful, and it’s not fair, and nobody cares.”

Empathetic, Empowering Mindset: “Yes, this is a big change, and challenging. How can we find opportunity within it?” or “This is hard. We may need to time to take it in. Maybe we can find alternative, creative ways to support our cause?”

5) Catastrophizing involves exaggerating potential problems until they are insurmountable and become worst-case scenarios, which obviously creates stress and anxiety.

With catastrophizing, fear inverts the creative power of imagination towards envisioning disaster scenarios and how they will play out. Often, these scenarios involve your worst fears coming true. You inflate the problem to such a degree you are caught in fight-or-flight and feel powerless.

Keep catastrophizing from running wild with a probability check. Does it usually go as badly as you imagine? Has life disproved you before? Even when something did not go how you wanted, did everything end up alright or even work out for you?

Catastrophe Mindset: “I made a mistake, and I’m going to be fired, and I’ll end up on the streets, broke and alone.”

Grounded, Logical Mindset: “What is the most likely outcome of my mistake? Even if it goes wrong, can I handle it?” or “I’ve made mistakes before, and I have not been fired for them.” or “Will this matter in five years?”

The Ripple Effect of Clearing the Mental Clutter

Cutting down negative thinking doesn’t mean ignoring problems or pretending everything is perfect. It means becoming aware of unhelpful thought patterns and replacing them with more constructive, balanced ones which support your growth.

Rewiring your brain away from self-sabotaging patterns requires practice and discipline. Awareness is the first step. If you can identify and shift these five loops of habitual negative thinking, you will not only feel better, but you will also liberate mental space, clear your energy, and be more effective and creative as a leader.

By Aimee Hansen

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How to Be Present and Gain Greater Power in Communication

Power in CommunicationWhat comes to mind when you think about being present in business? Is it having razor-sharp focus, paying attention to every detail, anticipating every possible flaw or problem, looking people in the eye when they talk to you?

We are taught that focusing on one aim or purpose in life or business to the exclusion of everything else is how to be present. What if that actually keeps you from being present and therefore being able to authentically engage and have greater power in communication with others? Being present doesn’t mean being single-minded. Being present doesn’t mean putting blinders on. In fact, focusing on one thing or person requires you to cut off everything else around you.

What if you could be aware of everything that is going on, being said and happening around you? That is being present.

So why would you do that?

Abraham Maslow said, “The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.” The quality of your life depends on your presence in the moment and that is the key to gain greater power in communication as well.

Being in the moment does not require effort if you allow yourself to expand and give up being single-minded. You lose focus is because you’ve learned to hone in on one thing and if something else is getting your attention, you don’t know how to be present with everything.

Rather than being caught up in conclusions or decisions of what is required right now – trust your knowing, your inner voice, your intuition, which often leads you in a direction throughout the day that you might not have thought of or been able to plan. Would you be willing to have that trust in yourself?
What prevents a lot of people from following their knowing or their inner voice is their reluctance to be open to the unknown, which is sometimes uncomfortable but can stretch your life to greater possibilities. Get comfortable being uncomfortable – that is where change happens, and you become greater. Your presence will increase, and you will become unstoppable.

Here are five tips to total presence and gaining influence:

1. Asking questions

A question always opens up new possibilities. Ask to be present as then it becomes something you be and not something you do.

Another question: what requires my attention right now? If I allow myself to be present with everything what do I know here? What action could I take next?

2. Be interested not interesting
To gain greater power in communication a vital element is to listen and be interested in the other person. This is a way to make the other person feel worthy and helps them open up to you.

3. Exercise

Be aware and get present with three points of your body. This is a great way to bring you back to yourself. Whenever you have the feeling you are everywhere and nowhere, and therefore you are not able to be present with what is going on in the moment, recall this exercise. You’ll experience for yourself how easy it is to get centered. Just try!

4. Lower your barriers

The next time you start getting defensive or feel like you need to forcefully put forward your side of the argument, stop, breathe and just imagine pushing your walls or defenses down.

How does it work? Ask for your barriers to lower in any moment of your life. Practice it in your daily life so that you get a sense for what occurs.

Barriers separate us from each other, and true presence is not possible with them. You always will be hiding behind walls, which does not allow you to fully engage with the moment.

What creates the ability for other people to judge you or oppose you is when you resist and react or when there is something to bounce off.

Whatever people throw at you it is not real, it’s just their point of view.
The other person will be stuck with their judgment, not you, when you have your barriers down. Lowering your barriers will free you.

Being totally present and pulling down all of your barriers and having no point of view of what they may or may not think of you disarms every person and changes the situation. This is the space of allowance that is possible when you are without barriers and walls.

5. The key to being neutral

Choosing to function from what some would call a neutral or open-minded perspective, so as not to hold on to any point of view, gives you more choices and flexibility. Holding on to a point of view keeps you from having power as it limits you within right and wrong/good and bad parameters. A key element of gaining power in communication is not holding on to any point of view, but to have the freedom of all choices in the moment and the willingness to receive any information.

How many thoughts about you and being present do you have that are filled with judgments? By living them over and over again, you continue to attract more of them. This way of thinking takes you away from the presence that is possible and fuels the fight against you.

These points of view can really lock up and limit your life, your business and your reality. So, the key to freedom is, “Everything is just an interesting point of view,” as this starts to unlock the limitations defined by the point of view.
Here’s how it works: every time you get into a mind spin where you are circling around a point of view you can say to yourself, “Interesting point of view, I have this point of view.” Repeat this ten times and sense the freedom that opens up. You will gain more clarity and create ease in your world.

You can feel fully alive or miserable in any moment. It is the choice you make that creates your influence and impact with every conversation you have. Stop resisting the present. Instead engage with every moment and make your choices towards being present and gaining greater power in communication by using these tools and never give up.

Guest Contributed by Doris Schachenhofer

About the Author

After completing her social work studies in Vienna, Doris Schachenhofer worked with children, homeless people, delinquent teenagers and prisoners transitioning back into the real world. Today she travels the world teaching and supporting people to be more of themselves. Follow Doris here and on Instagram.

The opinions and views expressed by guest contributors are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of theglasshammer.com

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