Tag Archive for: credibility

Radical Self-Trust: The Work Relationship No One Talks About (Pt. 1)

,

radical self-trustAs a leader who wishes to inspire and empower, you will be more impactful if you earn the trust of those whom you wish to lead. For that trust to be built upon a solid foundation, you must first cultivate a deep sense of inner self-trust.

It’s an axiom for a reason. The most important relationship is the one you build with yourself, and the relationship you wish to build with others begins with you.

Trust is Relational and Earned

Let’s talk relationship dynamics. Within the organism of any organization, trust is the precursor and basis of a functioning team. When trust is absent, the team cannot effectively resolve conflict, foster commitment, create accountability, or develop and deliver to its capacity.

Well, the same is true with yourself. Without a basis of self-trust, how can you confront decisions where you feel internally divided, authentically commit, be accountable, develop, or reach your goals?

Trust is also at the crux of any close, enduring relationship. Trust is not owed to another—it is earned. Trust is relational, and self-trust is a fundamental reflection of the quality of relationship you have with yourself.

  • What is the gap between your values and your life?
  • Between your words and your actions?
  • Between your knowing and your doing?
  • Between what truly matters to you and what you give time and energy to?

If there are real gaps, and you are a self-aware person, you will know and feel it—even if you avoid knowing that you know. These gaps create leaks in self-trust. They dilute your sense of self and integrity.

Self-trust comes from living in alignment with your truths and values, and being able to admit, and even amend, where you fall out of alignment.

The Self-Trust and Confidence Loop

According to Stephen M. R. Covey, self-trust is finding yourself credible. The four cores of credibility are comprised of:

Character (who you are):

  • Intent – being straightforward in motivation with genuine care in others
  • Integrity – being honest, keeping promises, aligning action and values, willingness to do the hard thing if the right thing

Competence (what you do):

  • Capabilities – gifts, skills, knowledge, styles of approaching
  • Results – your followthrough, consistency, and outcomes

As you build self-trust, it gives rise to a feeling of self-assurance and authentic confidence, based on a grounded experience of yourself that is greater than dips in motivation and emotional fluctuations. On a shaky day, you know you’re strong at the roots.

When your act with intent, leverage your capabilities, and follow through, you accumulate self-trust and generate confidence.

The loop then reinforces itself. The behaviors that build self-trust contribute to a feeling of confidence which gives you the courage to take more actions (such as trying new things, taking on challenges and making commitments) that lead to greater self-trust.

Six Types of Relational Trust—With Yourself?

In healthy relationships, there are six different kinds of trust that can be nurtured. One category is about self-trust. But what if you treated each as important to your relationship with self? Let’s adapt them and see.

1) Emotional trust – to allow vulnerability, show up to feelings with empathy rather than judgement, and to foster deeper connection.

  • How do you allow space for your emotions? What do you try to avoid or ignore feeling? What feeling could you be more open to?
  • How strong is your inner critic versus your inner sense of compassion? Whose voice is more prominent for you?
  • How are you kind to yourself? How do you trivialize or undermine your needs? How could you be more receptive and open to yourself?

2) Instrumental trust – to consistently show up, follow through on commitments, and keep promises.

  • How do you already show up consistently for what matters to you?
  • What is one way you could easily commit to regularly showing up to something important to you? Make it achievable.
  • How do you keep your word with yourself? How do you break your word with yourself?

3) Informational trust – to be able to be truthful, transparent, clear, and honest with yourself

  • How willing are you to admit the truths you know deep down within?
  • Where in your life may you be avoiding being honest with yourself or others?
  • Where in life would you like to become clearer and more transparent? What stops you?

4) Self-trust – to honor your worth, trust your judgement and intuition, and to show up to challenges

  • From where do your source your sense of self and worth? Is there anywhere where you are still trying to win approval?
  • What are examples of trusting your discernment or intuition? Where in life have you, or are you, dismissing your intuition?
  • What challenges have you taken on? What is a growth space you’d like to step into, but have yet to?

5) Situational trust – to be able to trust and rely on self in particular contexts, based on strengths and knowledge in that space

  • In what contexts, situations, and discussions do you really trust in yourself and your capacity?
  • In what contexts, situations, and discussions do you feel disconnected from your self-trust? Why?
  • Is there a context in which you wish to improve trust in self? How could you?

6) Physical trust – to feel safe in your own presence, knowing you will respect and protect your own health and safety

  • How are you looking after your wellbeing and health as the only human in charge of that job?
  • In what ways do you compromise your wellbeing and health? How could you be more protective and caring?
  • What would it mean to show yourself more love and respect? What would change?

It’s the one relationship you’ve been in since the moment you became aware of yourself, so it’s a good question to ask: do I have a relationship of trust with myself, and how can I improve that relationship?

And if you are willing, you may find the same is true as in any relationship. Growth requires a willingness to have the real, and sometimes challenging, conversations with yourself.

But if you do, integrity becomes its own reward.

 

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).

/by

Maintaining Credibility: How to Deal with People Who Try to Devalue You

,

By Nicki Gilmour Executive Coach and Organizational Psychologist

What happens when someone tries to discredit your work or disqualify you as a contender for a job?

Not just in politics, but in the workplace too. It is hard to believe that we still have to talk about this matter, but its still lurking. Whether it is overt sexism, a micro-aggression or even worse, the impact on the person on the receiving end is real. In the societal context, women ( and other minorities) are not believed and the benefit of the doubt usually goes to the perpetrator due to their status and biological sex/race/orientation (i.e. legacy dominant position that people do not like to challenge their implicit authority). In a work context, it means less pay, lost promotions and general unnecessary emotional stress. This is the stuff that causes a drag on individual/ team and firm performance and no amount of words about diversity from the CEO or drinks in the women’s network will fix the heart of what diversity work is; power and who gets it to have it , keep it and be believed.

Often people with issues (this is the kindest version I can print) will try to discredit you as a person and they start with your social identity, which means your grouping characteristics such as which gender you are, which ethnicity you are, and which orientation you are. Even if you personally don’t feel massive affiliation to these categories because it can be a shock to people with no intersectionality that you too could be just trying to live your life as a human and do your work without considering yourself (insert what you are here: a woman/black/gay etc).

Remember, it is often about you according to them and their stereotypical notions of who you are and absolutely nothing to do with who you actually are and what you are actually capable of. Equally, the people who i am referring to who feel like they are a threatened species, often benefit from their sex, skin color via positive stereotyping ( someone once said, its not a glass ceiling, but a thick layer of men). It is worth noting that anyone can do it even if they are a woman themselves because internalized misogyny and desire to protect traditional power structures have never been so obvious than this moment in history. But, whatever other people’s paradigms are, remedial attitudes or baggage, it should not have to be at your expense.

Why is this career advice? It is something that you need to be aware of because unfortunately one day you might stumble up against a less than evolved individual who will directly or indirectly try to lessen your credibility or devalue your work based on nothing more than your social identity.

How this plays out is that they take a shot at you based on their perception of their superiority and appropriateness regarding legacy positions for women, people of color and LGBT people. For example, at a recent social gathering, a fellow who had previously said offhand comments about women at work and LGBT people, decided to directly spit out a challenge starting the question with “who?” when the who was very obvious so it was not actually a question, it was a micro-aggression against a gay family structure.

Furthermore, bias is regularly disguised as ‘values’ because if you look at how values are formed, it is easy to see that constructs come from past norms, socio-conditioning and current cultural messaging. What did their granny tell them when they were nine? Chances are, they are operating heavily on familiar programming completely unaware that they have inherited things that they might not even truly believe if examined.

So, what do you do if you find yourself facing a person who is intentionally trying to devalue you.

There are strategies to pursue and which road to take depends on three things:

1. The overall systemic environment.

Where is the whole group at regarding their own ability to honestly digest how individual behaviors impact ongoing norms and actual humans in the group? The denial levels for untoward behavior in the workplace or socially are reducing as we have seen this year with sexual harassment. But, overall the ability to deny wrongdoing on micro-aggressions are still high. Look at how tolerant of bad behavior is the manager of your team? What flies? What are the group norms?

This is workplace culture and crucial to your next move when bringing up what happened. Will you be believed? The worst thing is not being believed or being told your experience couldn’t be true or is somehow invalid. Will you be shushed as excuses from you are wrong /you misunderstood them fly from people who are supposed to listen to such things? (HR , leaders, mentors, friends). Take the temperature as your truth is your truth, but group theory (Bion) suggests the group will protect the legacy structures, unless there are reasons not to.

2. The standing of the individual and their power based on them as an individual but also the power and authority assigned to them due to their social identity which adds benefit of the doubt privilege. Extreme cases are Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby- they thought they were untouchable due to the social currency. But, everyday bias and derogatory stuff is what we are talking about here, so relay the transgression to people who have mental complexity and can hold two conflicting realities in their head at the same time. That is to say, they can experience that this guy is great with them but bad to you as simultaneously true versions of reality and use their one subjective personal data point as an objective truth.

If no mental complexity is there ( as defined by Kegan, the Harvard development psychologist by the way, not just being rude here in saying they are not advanced), you will risk the high denial element again as these folks might have high IQ and make lots of money but are completely remedial on EQ, SQ and connecting the dots and you might as well be arguing with a small child.

This can be a depressing piece of work as there are many people who are capable but just have never had to do any real joining of cognitive, emotional and psychological processes because they can just stay in their ignorance as they have had no direct experience of what it means to be in the non dominant group and intersectionality doesn’t touch them. Also congruence is comfortable for everyone so its not their fault how they got there but it is their responsibility to figure out how to develop knowing that the world is full of many different types of people who historically didn’t have any power – see Kegan and Lahey again on the socialized mind in Immunity to Change. There are still so many men and women who cant help but protect the status quo for so many reasons. If you want to see this in action, participate in a contained social experiment- go to an AK Rice Group Relations conference on Power and Authority!

3. The third factor is your personality? Are you a confronter or a keep the peace person? You need to know your own comfort zones and abilities and what you are going to be able to take emotionally as revealing bad people can take strength, energy and there are stakes at play sometimes ( the bully/bigot knows that the stakes are low or them and high for you).

So, once you know the above, you can work out what the best course of action is. Sometimes it is about doing something and sometimes is it is not.

For extra reading, I recommend Leaders Guide to Leveraging Diversity Capabilities or leave this book on your boss’s desk to prime the pump for people who want to make things better so you build a cultural coalition of people who know how to deal with everyday problem children at work. I quote Maya Angelou in high regard, because “when you know better, you do better.”

If you are dealing with difficult people or a culture that has systemic diversity issues in it, I would be happy to work with you as your executive coach. Contact me on 646 6882318 or nicki@theglasshammer.com for an exploratory chat.

/by