Very glad to be here and I'm gonna jump right in so we can get to the good information I have today. My name is Kristen Webb. I'm with the great leadership series.We are a leadership training development and consulting agency and we pride ourselves in being able to develop the leaders uh develop, help, develop groups from the inside out. Um More importantly today today, though, you can call me your leadership enthusiast because I love all things leadership.

Um And I specifically have a bias obviously to helping to develop women leaders uh in any field that we're in. It's really important that we really hone in on the scale of leadership. Um We live in our homes, we lead in our businesses, we lead in our places of worship. Um We live in our community, social spaces and more. And the question is, did you catch that? Because if you, did you realize that I um mentioned a very wide and vast um diverse list, non exhaustive list of things that um or areas that we lead in. And practically we're leading in every space we lead everywhere that we can influence others to move in the same direction and move with the same goal and purpose in mind. So, more proudly, we lead um ourselves first. So we want to keep that in mind. So let me start sharing my screen. So I want this to be as interactive as possible, but I just have one question for you. Um But before I delve off into it, I want to wake us up this morning and possibly make you a bit uncomfortable. Um I may not be able to see. I'm not sitting next to you in a room, but I want to have you all to repeat after me. You cannot stumble upon greatness, you walk up to it and introduce yourself.

And this is the drum that I march to daily. Um We're all equipped with what we need to be successful. We came here equipped to do that. Uh We're able to reach our goals. We have what we need to reach those goals individually and organizationally. And we can be the greatest version of ourselves each and every day. We just have to be intentional and we have to be willing to put in the work and literally introduce yourself to your greatness every single day. Today, we're gonna go over four really basic concepts. Um But we're gonna talk about something really important, which is confidence. Um It's an uncommon journey that we talk about in leadership and I say uncommon because it's not often seen as the primary or underlying impact uh of our ability to lead. But you may already be asking yourself, how did I end up here? Great question. Um But it's not by chance that you're here getting, receiving this presentation today by the end of the presentation, it is my hope that you can internalize how important it is to lead with confidence um to first possess individual confidence that can be transferred and shared um and transfer to share confidence.

And so we'll talk about these things and when you leave and close out the session today, my goal is that you have a better understanding of the basis of confidence and the correlation between it and individual confidence, leadership and shared confidence. All right. So this is a model that I came up with. And I believe this model is a good reflection of showing the transfer of individual energy and effort, the effects of leadership and the ultimate impact on shared confidence within a team, organization and others. So if you're looking at it, what is the first thing that jumps out at? You feel free to put it in the chat? But the first thing that jumps out um to me is gonna be the individual confidence. Why? Um because it is a larger piece of the pyramid. So you may have said I see a pyramid, you may say you see two pyramids because the sheer confidence itself is one. Um You may say you see platforms, but the one thing that really, really sticks out is that the greatest piece of this pyramid, the, um what, what appears to be the foundation is individual confidence. And when we talk about leading with confidence, leading boldly, that's, it's gonna be the area that we're gonna focus most on because it is so critical for you to have individual confidence and be able to navigate it in a way that allows you to have effective leadership and then ultimately transfer your confidence and and create shared confidence amongst those that you lead and then the cycle just goes on and on and on, right.

So we're gonna start with individual confidence. Confidence is it is the clarity and acceptance of gifts, skills and values. It's self assurance, it's really understanding yourself and being able to reassure yourself when necessary to um know what you can and can't do. It's, it's understanding those gifts and skills and values and knowing how to execute and when to apply it, right? Um It's also the baseline or the foundation for our success. You'll hear me say this throughout the entire presentation, but confidence absolutely impacts the way that you're able to have a fruitful life to be able to have a successful um experience in leading others. Um If you think back to maybe some leaders that you had, you probably had some really, really good leaders, really effective leaders that you look up to and maybe even took some of their um their perspectives and their um their actions and integrated into your style of leadership.

But then you can also consider there are those leaders that mm I don't ever want to adopt some of those behaviors that they have. And so when you look at those two types of leaders, typically, you see uh more success than the one who appeared or exuded, more confidence um with more trusting of themselves and thus more trusting of others to do their jobs and to use their abilities for the entire organization to be successful.

And so it truly is the foundation of success. It's also hills and valleys, which means that we're not always on 100 I don't know about you today, but I woke up a little tired and so I needed to make sure that at whatever capacity I'm in, I need to be willing to put in all of what I have to offer that day. But there are gonna be days that you're not gonna always feel like that if you're gonna want to just, you know, maybe not put in as much effort. And so we have to understand and embrace the idea that they're gonna be ups and they're gonna be downs, they're gonna be situations that create triggers and barriers for us that sometimes make us not have our confidence in the highest life that it should be. It's multidimensional because we are layered. Um We sometimes um box people into one particular characteristics. This is how Kristen is, but no Christian is layered and the same is for you, you have different situations, different um uh people around you, different um things that you take pride in or, or want to work on.

But all of that is also relative to your confidence, you're gonna be confident in some ways different in some situations than others. And so it's important to be mindful of that. And then lastly, it comes from within, it starts with self. Um a lot of times we, we enjoy uh receiving praise from others. Uh even as a leader, you want to make sure that you're uplifting your team and creating um opportunities in a great environment. But for them to feel confident, it has to start within themselves. And the same for you as the leader, it comes from within so confidence, it comes from within confidence is not arrogance, you probably know an arrogant Andy or an arrogant Alice, but confidence is not arrogance. It is typically the overshadow the um the overcast of what really um it may be low self esteem or not just high or just in general, not high confidence. Uh Confidence is not low self esteem. Confidence is not unintentional. You have to be intentional every single day, every moment of your day, you've got to be mindful and in the moment and present to be able to make sure that you're navigating your emotions, navigating who you know yourself to be so that you can reflect that in your leadership in a positive way.

Um Make sure that, you know, that confidence is not self righteous, it is absolutely not self righteousness and then it's never externally validated. Again, we mentioned confidence starts from within. It's the icing on the cape when others tell you, you did a great job or you're good at this particular task or you'll excel in this way. That's always beautiful. When we hear it, it's reinforcement, it's motivation, but it can never validate the confidence. It can't be the core of it because the core has to start with you. So I asked this question all the time. What if confidence was all you had or what if all you had or all we had was confidence. What if it's what determined the way we catapult in life or don't catapult? What that was the only thing that determined um What goal you would be able to attain? What position you'll go after next? What new invention that you'll create? Um what way you'll impact and make the world more positive? What if your confidence was all you had? I would like for you to think about that and really consider how successful would you be if in this moment it was Armageddon and the world was coming to an end and your confidence is what was gonna allow you to be able to get through that maybe get to the other side would you make it, would your confidence help you make it or if you did make it out, how much would you have been?

Um um I impacted by it. Would you come out unscathed? Um So these are questions that we want to ask ourselves or start with when we really talk about um managing our confidence. So why does it matter? It matters because we want to make sure we have self love. It allows us to be open to new ideas, people and things. It helps us have more healthy relationships, uh overcome fear, uh make solid decisions as leaders. We want to make sure we're always doing that, having those healthy relationships, not allowing fear from keeping us to move forward, making sure that we're able to make very sound, comprehensive, logical um decisions. Uh It helps with upward mobility, increasing our drive, thus, our productivity, it allows us to have more clear convictions and understanding our values and being able to be firm and sit in them uh without shifting. Uh And it also allows us to be, to have effective communication and that goes more than just um in, in verbal, communicating, back and forth, right? Uh There's the written form as well. How do we write? How do we listen? Um How do we verbally engage, how do we behave with our uh physical response in communicating?

So all of that is why confidence matters because we want all of those things to be um either eradicated if it's, if it's holding us back or we want it to be enhanced if it's something that we um wanna make sure we flourishing in our lives. So understanding your confidence is really important and always say, ask yourself these three questions when trying to understand where your confidence is today and how you're gonna move forward through it. You wanna know who you have been in the past, you wanna understand genuinely your past and who you feel like you have reflected yourself as or been. Um You wanna understand who you are today. The goal is to continue becoming the greatest version of, of ourselves. And so you wanna make sure you understand who you are today and then who are you becoming? Who do you wanna be? What, what goals have you set that will establish the Christian that you look at in the mirror or um you know, insert your name at the beginning, you know, who is it that you're becoming um tomorrow and beyond? And the, the important thing is you start to walk through how to understand your confidence is knowing that those three things will give you the foundation on developing a plan to be able to counteract things or be more proactive and um and be able to respond correctly.

You also want to capitalize on yourself. So ask these three questions, what do you like about yourself? What have you achieved and what can you enhance those three questions will allow you to see your growth, to see your strengths, to see the ways uh in which you have learned. And so you can then apply those to maybe even what you need to enhance about yourself, you know, and those accomplishments that you've achieved or the characteristics about yourself that you can appreciate. How can you take those things and migrate it into what you need to enhance about yourself and to create a kind of an a plan of action to improve yourself, to capitalize on who you are. There's some barriers to confidence that sometimes keep us from really digging deep and being able to answer those questions and it's from self defeating assumptions, goals being too big or distant, declaring victory too soon doing it yourself. We always try to do that right.

So doing it yourself, not a healthy thing to do and it creates barriers to us being confident, it creates these building uh these blocks that we can't seem to get over these hurdles that keep us from attaining our goal and being effective leaders and being able to be successful.

Toxic people entering unknown territories, rejection, focusing on past failures and or conflict. All of these can be barriers and when you are able to identify who you are and what are the things you like and what are the lessons you've learned, then you're able to really understand what barriers have kept you in the past from having the appropriate confidence when needed or being able to have it consistently uh in a good healthy space, some tips to create or enhance confidence you want to depend on yourself first.

Uh secure a mentor, maybe think positive thoughts, meditate exercise, smile, talk to a stranger, resolve a conflict, focus on solutions rather than problems, maybe increasing your competence. So attending conferences such as this is global conference that we're in this week, you know, increasing your confidence, knowing your principles and living by them. These are all just suggestions as well as things that I have seen firsthand and practice and understand how they can shift you from uh a space of maybe not having the highest confidence or healthiest space to being able to move into a healthy space of confidence. And so once you have a good foundation of understanding yourself and being able to manage your individual confidence, then you can move into really focusing on how you're going to be an effective leader. And leadership is simply the ability to influence self and others to work towards a common goal and as women in tech or women in leadership roles or women in business, whatever that industry is that you're in leadership is the ability to influence yourself first. And I don't know if you heard me say that earlier, but making sure that you can influence yourself first and then others to work towards a common goal. And you can do that and you can execute it effectively.

And when you do so, it creates this strategic vision that allows for everyone involved to be a part of a win win outcome. Effective leadership allows for creating clear vision, increasing productivity, empowering future leaders, making better decisions and outcomes, solving conflicts, effectively increasing performance.

These are all things really critical to the success of, of an organization. And because you have stepped into a position of being able to manage your confidence and really understanding who you are. You are being able to carry out these tasks and more uh because this is not an exhaustive list, but you're able to carry these tasks out and more more effectively without confidence, there is no leadership. So in leadership confidence looks no different. It's, you know, when you're leading yourself or you're leading others, it doesn't change. And it's just as critical to have high confidence in leadership as it is when you're not even in a space requiring you to lead. But your success or lack of success in leadership still greatly depends on your level of confidence. Once you have um been able to, you know, obviously practice on your leadership skills and it's an ongoing everyday thing. So it never ends. And that's why it's important to manage that level of confidence. So you can work on being an effective leader at all times and eventually you roll into your share confidence, share confidence is an effective way to build self-confidence and then use that self-confidence to make your life and the lives of everyone better.

One of my favorite quotes is that we are on this earth and the thing that we have to make sure we do is to serve others is to be willing to help others. And you do that by understanding your team dynamics. Uh understanding that there's a conscious and unconscious behavioral relationship between members in the group and that your confidence and your ability to lead helps impact those team dynamics to create that share confidence. So how do we build confidence amongst teams? You can be confident yourself starting one at the top, be honest, encourage their mistakes, embrace failure, celebrate small improvements, give a chance to teach each other be an active listener. There's that listen, word again, schedule a team, time out, make checklists, treat everyone with respect, talk openly about performance, be supportive and delegate. And once you do all of those things, then you're able to say, you know how to lead with confidence that you understand that the core of it is individual confidence that supports your ability to be an effective leader and then transfer that same energy over to your team and those that you influence to create shared confidence amongst everyone.

So I ask you again, what if all we had was confidence? What if all you had was confidence? What of confidence was all you had? However, you asked that question if this is what you had to rest on to be successful as a leader, to help your team to help create other leaders to be able to positively impact the tech world and beyond and the vision that you have for yourself and for your organization, what a confidence was all you had to rest on and you wanted to make sure that it was absolutely in line.

So I encourage you today to make sure that you are practicing things that are positive and healthy for you to be able to move forward in an emotional way so that you can technically take care of everything that needs to be taken care of successfully. So you cannot stumble upon greatness, you walk up to it and introduce yourself. My name is Kristen Webb. Again, I am with the Greater Youth Leadership Series. You can connect with me on linkedin Facebook. Um But on linkedin, I am Kristin Webb, my website is the Greater You leadership.com and you can find me on all social media. Thank you for joining me this morning. This has been an amazing time. Um Let me stop and unsure for a moment and see if there is anyone here. So I see a couple of questions. How do I overcome self doubt? I think it's important that when we talk about overcoming self doubt, look at how you win, look at the things that you know, you're great at and every time you're questioning if you can do something, remember how you won with those same qualities before and apply it. So that's absolutely. Um, what I look at, I look at my past, I understand my wins and I get past that doubtful moment and also understand that sometimes life is just gonna throw hard balls at us and we've got to be willing to stand firm and move forward.

So that's all I have. Thank you all so much. I know we're getting close. Um.