Helping leaders motivate their people to a higher level of performance through strong human relations, team building, and goalajiving. This is the seven Minute Leadership Podcast with your host Paul Felloaledo. Hello everyone, and welcome to the seven Minute Leadership Podcast. It's episode seven point thirty three. Today we're talking about something that most leaders only think about when it's too late. Confidence, specifically the kind of confidence that holds you together when
everything around you is falling apart. So I'm calling it confidence built before the crisis. And here's the truth, right out of the gate. If you're waiting for a crisis to figure out who you are as a leader, you're already behind. So let me paint a picture for you. Two leaders, same company, same unexpected situation. A key client walks away, revenue drops significantly, and the team is rattled. The first leader freezes, They start second guessing every decision.
They hold three meetings in one day and make no actual decisions in any of them. Their team can feel the uncertainty rating off of them and it spreads like a cold and a kindergarten classroom. The second leader, they're calm, not fake, calm, not that weird, glassy eyed, calm that makes your team more nervous, genuinely calm. They gather the facts, they communicate clearly, and they make a call. The team doesn't love the situation, but they trust the person leading
them through it. What's the difference between those two leaders. It's not intelligence, it's not experience, it's not even skill. It's preparation. One of them built their confidence before the crisis ever showed up. So how do you actually do that? How do you build that kind of camp confidence before you need it. The first thing I want you to understand is that real leadership confidence doesn't come from never failing.
It comes from knowing yourself well enough to trust your own judgment even when you're not sure of the outcome. That takes work, quiet, intentional work that most people skip because it doesn't feel urgent. Here's a simple place to start. Get clear on your values. Not the values your company
posts on the wall in the break room. Your values the things that are non negotiable for you when you're making decisions under pressure, Because when a crisis hits, you won't have time to figure out what you stand for. You need to know already. Sit down this week, seriously, block thirty minutes and write down three to five things that guide how you lead, not how you want to be perceived, how you actually want to behave. When it gets hard, that list comes your anchor. The second thing
is this, you have to practice making decisions. Confident leaders aren't people who were born decisive. They're people who have made a lot of decisions. Learn from the ones that didn't work, and stop being afraid of being wrong. One of the biggest confidence killers I see in leaders is
the habit of waiting for perfect information. You tell yourself you just need a little more data, a little more time, one more conversation, and meanwhile the team is standing around you, waiting for direction and losing faith in you by the hour. So here's the mindset shift. A good decision made now is almost always better than a perfect decision made too late. Start practicing that in low stakes moments, so it becomes natural when the stakes go up. Make the call on
the small stuff. Where does the team eat lunch for the end of the quarter celebration, Make the call, what's the agenda for the new team meeting? Make the call. Stop deferring the small decisions, because that habit will show up in the big ones. The third piece of building confidence before the crisis is relationships. Confident leaders are not
lone wolves. They have people around them, a mentor, a peer, a coach, someone who they can call when things get hard, not to be told what to do, but to think out loud with someone who's not going to panic with them. If you don't have that right now, that's something to fix today, not tomorrow. Today, because in a crisis you will need a sounding board. And that's not a weakness,
that's wisdom. The most confident leaders I've ever seen are the ones who are completely comfortable saying, hey, I need to think through something with you. That's not insecurity. That's self awareness. Build those relationships before you need them, because nobody wants to make a new friend in the middle of a fire, So let's bring this together. Confidence built before the crisis comes down to three things. Know your value so your decisions, have a foundation. Practice deciding so
you stop being afraid of being wrong. And build real relationships so you're never facing hard moments completely alone. None of this is complicated, but it does require you to be intentional about it, which is kind of the whole point of what we talk about on this show the leaders who show up best in a crisis didn't get lucky. They did the quiet work ahead of time, and that work is available to all of us. So here's what I want to leave you with today. Confidence isn't something
you find in a crisis. It's something you carry into one. Start building it now in the ordinary moments, in the small decisions, in the honest conversations you have with yourself and with the people that you trust, because one day and I can't tell you when something is going to happen that tests you, and when it does, you'll be glad you started today. This has been the seven minute
Leadership Podcast, and I thank you for listening. For more Paul Fell of Alito Podcasts, visit paulfellowalito dot com.