Welcome to the masterful coach podcast with Molly Claire, where coaches learn Skill Mastery, Business Mastery, and Life Mastery at a whole new level. If you're ready to create a meaningful Coaching Business that makes a difference, you're in the right place. And now your host, Master Coach Instructor, Molly Claire. Hey, coaches, welcome to this awesome episode. I am so excited to dive in with you and talk about confidence and competence in your coaching skills. This truly is the magic sauce to being a powerful coach, to helping your clients transform their lives, helping your clients create the results that they want. It's really also the magic behind you being able to effectively build your business because confidence and competence as a foundation in your skills is going to allow you to build your business much easier. It's going to bring confidence in your marketing in your sales and really bring that focused momentum as you move your business forward. Today, I'm going to break down what I mean by confidence, what I mean by competence and how these two play a part together. Confidence; when I talk about that I'm really talking about a feeling of feeling of confidence or certainty, a sense of self assurance. Confidence is very important to have as you're building your Coaching Business. Now, if you're listening to this and thinking, oh! that's too bad, I don't have a lot of confidence. That is not what we're going for here, because the truth is that whatever level of confidence you have right now can always be built, increased and expanded. So you having what you perceive as not a lot of confidence is not a problem. The fact that you're here, listening, engaging as you're building your business or as you're scaling your business shows that you have a level of confidence in yourself and your ability to create something. So just be really careful about having judgments about how much confidence you currently have, how often you experience that feeling and what that means about your ability to build a business. Confidence is built inside of you, it is created in you and you can always create more of it. Competence; is really just talking about the level of skill that you have or expertise. So all of the coaching tools that you have in your tool belt, the things that you've studied, the things that you utilize with your clients, you want to make sure that you know and understand how to use those skills, have practice, develop a level of expertise in the tools and processes that you're using. This may seem to go without saying but the truth is that some people miss out on one of these two areas and sometimes we can confuse the two as well. What I mean by this is oftentimes, I see coaches all the time that I see as very competent coaches, they know the skills, they know how to use them but they're lacking confidence and then what they tell themselves is I'm not a good coach. I haven't figured it out yet, when the competence is actually there, it's just that they have to catch up with the confidence. Now the opposite can also be true, someone can be overly confident, and they can sell a lot of coaching but oftentimes it's not going to result in long term clients, it's not going to result in renewals, referrals, and their clients may struggle to get the results. One of these in and of itself, confidence or competence is not going to be nearly as effective as a standalone. Now, either one of these can be a great starting point, confidence will push you forward and will actually allow you to build your competence. When you have a level of confidence, you say I know I can do this, I can coach these clients and it’s going to allow you to be more daring, bold therefore practice and build your competence. Then the flip side can also be true. If you have a level of competence and you use that even with less confidence over time, most likely you're going to be building more thoughts of confidence. So these are both important. I hope you can see how they play a role together. I'm going to talk now more specifically more in depth about confidence, and how I define a few key concepts within confidence. Okay, so I'm going to give you three terms to think about and this is really a way that I find it useful to talk about confidence with my clients that allows them to sift through these different aspects of it, because just similar to the example I was just giving about confidence and competence and how we can get confused. If I don't have a lot of confidence, I may think that my competence is low. But actually, that's just my brain being confused. The same is true with confidence. There are these three areas that when they get mixed up, we don't know how to address the problem of some lack of confidence for you. The first aspect of confidence is self-worth. When I'm speaking about self -worth, the way I'm defining that is really what you believe your worth or value is your inherent value, perhaps what you believe, God believes your worth or whatever higher power you believe in or it's really that internal belief about what you believe you are worth that is self-worth. Now slightly different than that is self-esteem. When I talk about self-esteem, I'm defining that as what you believe others think of you. You may think they're one in the same but I want to challenge you on this for a minute because, what I find is that some people have a stronger self-worth, they do believe they have this inherent worth and yet they can still get caught up on what others are thinking about them and this is a challenge. I'll tell you that for me, this describes me, I have a very high level of self-worth, I believe that inherent value and yet I struggle at times with wondering what others think about me. I've challenged myself on this, looked at it and sometimes it can be true that if I think someone else is thinking something about me, I'm thinking that about me and sometimes that is very true. However, sometimes we can actually feel good and confident about something about ourselves and still worry about judgment outside of ourselves. Self-esteem is really what you believe others think about you and self-worth is what you believe your worth is. Just take a minute right now and separate these two. Ask yourself, how is my self-worth? What do I believe about my worth, about how valuable I am, how important I am and notice what comes up for you? Now take a minute and notice, how about your self-esteem? How challenging is it for you when someone else thinks something about you that's not that great? That you're not sure is really true? Maybe you're certain? It's not true? What is that like for you? As I described for me, I have high self-worth struggle with self-esteem and for you listening, it may be the opposite. Maybe your self-esteem is not so much of an issue for you, maybe you don't worry so much about what other people think but you do question yourself. It doesn't really matter where you land on either of these, if you were to rate yourself on a scale of one to 10, it doesn't really matter the point is to recognize the difference so that when you're coming up against questioning yourself, feeling that doubt, you can check in on these. I'm going to throw one more thing at you one more term here, which is self-confidence. This is really what you believe you are capable of. I may believe and have a high self-worth, I believe I'm extremely valuable, extremely worthy and extremely worthwhile but yet I may lack in self-confidence of what I believe I am capable of. What do I believe I'm capable of creating in my business? Do I have that sense of self-confidence that says, I know I can figure anything out? I know I can do anything. So just to recap, self-worth is really about what you believe your worth is. Self-esteem is what I'm describing as what you believe others think about you how much you're relying on that. Self-confidence is really that sense of I can do this, I'm confident in myself in my abilities in my capabilities. So as you distinguish these, I think it would be really powerful for you listening, to just write these down and just notice them and take stock in how you're doing in each of these areas. How would you rate yourself on each of these areas? How can you improve these areas? Also, how can you use the sense of self-worth, self-esteem or self-confidence that you do have to your advantage? Here's what I mean by that. Let's say you take stock here and you realize self-worth a challenge for me, self-esteem a challenge but I do have this self-confidence there, where I just believe I can figure anything out. Guess what? Rely on that self-confidence, you challenge yourself to show yourself what you're capable of and at the same time, you can really poke holes in these thoughts that are keeping you from having self-worth, keeping you from having the self-esteem, as you use that self-confidence to propel you forward, you work on those other areas and you're going to be able to help build the self-worth and build the self-esteem and this can be said, for any of these. If I have a certain level of self worth, I can rely on that and then I can tiptoe into building more self-confidence, self-esteem, just notice for you where your strengths are, as a coach, I know you've a lot of tools in your tool belt and I can certainly talk about this on future episodes as well to give you guys more insight into this. But really think about like if you had a client struggling with that area, how would you help them? What would you do? I think when you can focus on strengthening those where you're weak but also really focus on using your strength to your advantage. That is the key right there because whatever you focus on grows, when you use your strength to your advantage they can also build up areas of weakness. So speaking of which, we've talked about confidence, I've broken it down into these three areas. Confidence is often a key to propelling competence. In fact, if you are one of those people listening, that is thinking well, I have competence in certain areas, I have those things that I think I'm really actually pretty good at but I really don't have any confidence. I've heard this from my clients many times, I've heard this from my students as well, my coach students and what's interesting to think about is that, for any area where you have a level of competence where you have built a skill level, it had to begin with you having some level of confidence that you could get there that you could figure it out. Think about that thing that you have competence in. How did you get there? How did it start? How did you tiptoe into that? Did you have determination to figure it out? Did you think there's no way I'm not figuring this out? I have to do this, whatever it is just notice for you how confidence actually was the road to building that competence. What is competence? Let's talk about it a little more. Competence; level of skill, expertise that comes from learning, comes from practice and this path to greater competence, a greater level of skill can be driven by confidence, determination and commitment. That is what drives the competence. I want to talk a little bit more about some of the approaches that we can have when it comes to confidence and competence and I will be talking more about competence on this podcast. I'm even thinking I'll bring on Amy Gianni fellow Master Coach runs the coaching collective with me to talk a little bit more about competence, she has an awesome way of teaching it and I think you guys will absolutely love it. But for today, I want to talk with you about confidence and competence and how they play together. Some people can take the fake it till you make it approach. This is where you rely on confidence with a bit of a fraud complex underneath, you're like, I'm confident I'm going to just fake it till I make it, I don't really have the skills. Now this can work and it has some use as well. I'm not going to knock this method but just notice that if you're relying on this approach only, you can have unnecessary underlying anxiety if relied on too often and long term. Just notice that this is effective in some ways and if you're doing this, ask yourself like, how is this working for me? How is it not? What might I change? The next approach I want to talk about is perfection before I start, this is the opposite. This is relying on competence. This means you think you have to have all the skills perfectly there's that word or know everything, whatever that means, before you claim any level of competence. I've seen this so many times I need another certification. I need more letters behind my name to say that I am legitimate. This right here believing your skills have to be perfect or you have to know everything and have to have everything down perfectly will delay your work in the world as you are waiting on perfection before you believe you're worthy of having confidence. Competence is not required to have that feeling. This will help you build skills, certainly when you're focusing on this, while dragging along with you I'm not good enough, I lack confidence, fear and doubt. It's really going to bring with it an unwillingness to create the feeling of confidence because you don't deserve it. I'm going to say this again, approaching your competence and confidence with a perfectionist approach, believing you need to have it all figured out, will help you build skills while dragging along with you the I'm not good enough, and an unwillingness to create the feeling of confidence because you believe you don't yet deserve it. All right, let's talk about this magic source of confidence and competence. Using these two in tandem, as you grow your coaching practice, when you can build and work on your confidence, while also having in mind building your competence, this is what will move you faster. You will have more peace of mind, you'll have greater ease, and quality of life and experience as you build your business. What does this look like? Well, first of all, think about this, close your eyes for just a minute and think about what it will be like if you can build your confidence while approaching building your competence, expanding your competence and by the way, I believe everyone should be expanding their competence all of the time. This is one of the big things in the coaching collective that we believe in is collaboration. We have our mastermind, those that have already gone through our program are able to join our mastermind and we have experts come in with all kinds of expertise, it would be crazy of me to think that I have learned at all that I know at all absolutely not always be learning and expanding your knowledge and skills as a coach, I promise you, it will serve you and your clients so well. Okay, so back up, I just I got on a little tangent there, close your eyes and think about when you have confidence. You have that sense of I know I'm capable of this, I can do this, I believe in myself, my abilities and you have a plan for continuing to build your competence. Notice what feelings come up for you and notice what your experience is like as you think about that, of what is possible in your business. This is everything and no matter where you are on the confidence scale in the three areas, and no matter where you rate your competence, I want you to really think about how you can bring in both of these two aspects and incorporate them in to building your business. So let's talk some details here really quick. What is this look like exactly? How do I bring confidence and competence? Okay, the first thing I'm going to say is make a list of the things you believe would make you more confident in your coaching program. For example, it may be for you, well, if I had my workbook ready, if I had better coaching skills, if I had more experience if I knew how to effectively use this coaching tool or that coaching tool. These are all the things that we think, well if I had all these things, then I would be confident. Make that list. Here's why I want you to make that list. Now it's not really true that having the workbook is going to make you feel more confident, because confidence is a feeling that you create and the reason you would be feeling confident when you have the workbook is you may be thinking something like I'm prepared. The truth is that it's not the creation of the workbook that creates the feeling of confidence. It's also true that if you have the workbook done, then it may be very easy for you to have thoughts that create confidence. And so be very aware of this trick that our brain plays and says, when I have this, I will be more confident because most of the time, that's not really true. Our brain just finds a new way to lack confidence, but there's definitely some interplay there. Once you have this list of; these are all the things I think would make me feel more confident, now you have what I call your competence list. If you're thinking, if I had my workbook ready to go, if I had better coaching skills, if I had more experience, these are the things you put on your to do list. These are things I want to work on doing creating so then you have your list and as you continue to work on those, you're moving forward at building your competence. Okay, so we've got the competence plan checked off. Next, you create the feeling of certainty and confidence as you step into belief. As you're moving down your competence list, you're going to be stepping into belief. This may include work on beliefs around your self-worth, your self-esteem, your self-confidence, as we talked about and your primary focus will be using confidence to bravely stepping into putting yourself out there, even in those things you're not totally competent in. You're going to use that confidence, use that feeling to propel you forward, you'll use this confidence to really move yourself through your competence list. You don't want to finish the list before you feel confident. We know the confidence drives it instead you create confidence along the way, confidence drives you to do those things creates more competence. So can you see that you are incorporating these together? So here's an example; here's something on the competence list, I want to have my workbook complete the confidence move, I will use what I do have to start helping clients now. While you're working on completing the workbook, you also use that confidence move, where you're helping your clients right now with whatever you have or the worksheet that you need for the day. You're not waiting till the list is finished to move forward but you're planning on both. Here's another example, on your competence list. I want to master the use of this coaching tool. You put that on your list, you have a plan. Now, here's what we're talking about with the confidence move. I'm going to use this tool to the best of my ability, while I continue to work on mastering it. I hope you're seeing that these both play together so nicely and notice the difference between just having confidence and that emptiness and having that fraud complex and doubt or just relying on competence believing one day I'll be there versus this process of using them together. When you can work on competence, you'll be in integrity with what you have to offer. When you can bring confidence you'll be able to take consistent action without getting caught in perfectionism, or thinking you'll be able to do it when X, Y or Z. This is what I've got for you today. Take a look at those areas of confidence, assess your competence. Do this exercise I've given you I promise you that when you are working on both your competence and your confidence in tandem it is everything you're going to enjoy your business more. It's going to move you forward consistently taking action and the bottom line is, it's going to allow you to put yourself out into the world and make a difference. Thanks so much for being here and I'll talk with you next time.