Unleash your inner confidence with Mark Cox and Margo McClimans, founder of Coaching Without Borders and author of The Four Channels of Confidence, as Margo shares powerful ways to help us overcome self-doubt and embrace our true potential. Margo breaks down the four channels and offers practical tips and insights on mastering each. Don't let self-doubt hold you back any longer! Start living your most empowered life today.
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The Four Channels Of Confidence: Transforming Self-Doubt Into Self-Assurance With Margo McClimans
Team, have you ever had those days where sometimes you're super confident? You feel like you can take on the world and you're in a great zone, and then other days, you're in a certain situation or a circumstance and your confidence leaves you. We've all been there, by the way, and that's why I'm so excited to speak with my guest. My guest is Margo McClimans, and she's the Founder of a company called Coaching Without Borders. She's been a Certified Executive Coach for well over two decades, and she's also written an amazing book called The Four Channels of Confidence: How to Cultivate and Radiate Self-Assurance.
I had a chance to read this book a couple of weeks before we did the episode. Fantastic book. Simple, straightforward, powerful, and a great example of the Mark Twain quote where he said, “I wrote you a long letter. If I had taken more time, I could have written you a short letter.” Margo's written us a powerful short letter. She's taken the time to do that editing. In this episode, we talk about those four channels of confidence. After defining really what confidence is, we get into the four channels of confidence.
The channels are the breath channel, the attitude channel, the voice channel, and the body channel. These are things that we can all think about intentionally to ensure we're in our best self to be as confident as we can be. She then talks about multiplying your confidence through relationships and developing an action plan for moving forward.
It's really a great conversation and frankly, at the beginning of the book, Margo speaks to writing the book for women. The reality of it is I think this book is universal. We all have these challenges and her coaching programs are for everybody. I think everybody's going to get value from this conversation and book. If you do get value out of this, folks, please like and subscribe to the show because that really matters to us. That's in fact how we get really good guests like Margo. Thanks for doing so, by the way. Enjoy this episode. Here's Margo McClimans.
Margo, welcome to the show. It's great to see you here. We've met before, but it's great to see you on this show.
Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.
I'm excited to chat because certainly I really love The Four Channels of Confidence, How to Cultivate and Radiate Self-Assurance. Two things dawned on me when I was reading this book. I think, first of all, it's a great example of the Mark Twain quote that says, “I wrote you a long letter. If I had more time, I would've written you a short letter.” I love these books where people actually take that time to do the hard editing. It's not easy, but it's really tough. It's all absolute gold in here. As you mentioned in the book, it's a great weekend read.
That's the idea. I'm imagining people getting on an airplane ride, a domestic or European flight. You should be able to finish it.
From Stone Business To Coaching: A Journey Of Self-Discovery
The Four Channels of Confidence: How to Cultivate and Radiate Self-assurance
Although the book is directed towards women, one of the things that dawned on me is how much I would've benefited from this book with the exact content very early in my career because again, I think confidence is a challenge there, or Imposter Syndrome's a real challenge early in your career, depending upon what you've done. We've got lots of stuff to unpack in this amazing book here. Just to start, for the readers, maybe you share the short story of your professional journey that got you here.
Sure, absolutely. Let's see. I started actually in the marble and granite import and export business. As an entrepreneur, that was my first company. It was called International Stone Consultancy. I got into that industry because I was hired as a buyer for a stone company in California, because I speak Italian. My main qualification was to speak Italian so I could reach out to the suppliers in Italy and import their stone to suppliers all over the world, but mostly Italy.
I realized at a certain point, I remember sitting on my back porch in Palo Alto, California and thinking, “I really want to be my own boss.” When I was that buyer for that company, I want to be my own boss. I want to have my own business, and I love the stone business, but I also have lived in all these different countries.
When I’ve had intercultural training, it was so important to me and made my experience so much better. I thought, “How can I walk down the street to Hewlett Packard and knock on the door and say, ‘I’d like to help train your leaders to work internationally.’” Why would they hire me? I thought, “I have some work to do.” I went and got my MBA in Italy and while I was there, I realized, I actually have a good thing going with the stone business. I actually started with International Stone Consultancy there, always with the dream in the back of my mind that one day, I want to be an intercultural trainer.
A couple of years after I finished my MBA, I was working at a local software company, ironically, working in California Silicon Valley. I moved to Italy where it's famous for stone to work for a software company. A little backwards, but nevertheless, I was working there. The MBA director approached me. This is 2005. He said, “I want to start a leadership training for the MBA students, and I want to have certified coaches, and I think you would be a great coach.” I said, “What's a coach?”
It wasn't like nowadays when there's so many coaches. As he explained it to me, I connected to my dream about intercultural training, and I saw the connection, and that's really how I got my start. This person believed in me. I got very lucky. I was in the right place at the right time. He was right. I found coaching is really my thing. I really found my thing with that. That's a little clip of the story, and I’ve been coaching ever since.
How interesting, when you think back to 2005, in those days, I was still in the corporate world running large sales organizations, and I remember there was almost a stigma to coaching back then. It was almost like if you were an executive and you had an outside coach, it was because there was a problem. It wasn't the way it is now where everybody invests in their future and we understand the importance of coaching. It was a little different than when they said, “You need some professional development.”
Even thinking of it those ways, it was very much a fixed mindset saying, “You need to go get better. It means you're not good enough now.” In one sense, it was positive in the corporate world because they were investing in you. In the other sense, it's a bit of a problem because if you need some outside help, there's a bit of a problem here.
I wish I could say it's completely different now. In some industries, it's still the case where there's a bit of a stigma. I do have some clients who wear coaching like a badge of honor. “I have a coach.” Other clients who say, “I'd rather not be given a testimonial with my name,” or whatever it is. It's true that in some organizations more than others, they are investing in their top talent and giving them coaching. Some industries, I still get requests where they say, “We have this problematic person. We're about to fire them.” You either fix them or at least if you can't, we can say, “We tried everything and we even sent them to a coach. Now we can get rid of them.” I don't accept that work. I really say, “No, thank you.” I don't feel okay taking money in a situation like that. They need to invest in the people that they want to keep around.
Great approach and good for you. By the way, for the readers, we met in a coaching program. We met in Strategic Coach. That's why we're here. Tell the readers where you are now.
I'm based here in Zurich, Switzerland. I’ve been living here since 2010, but as you can tell from my accent, I'm American and I'm from Columbus, Ohio. I’m actually a Midwesterner. I have a lot of affinity also with Canadians, this whole great lake region, I think, where there's a lot of affinity between us, more so than even for some of my countrymen a little bit further away.
I’ve always felt that.
We know how to play euchre.
You know how to play euchre and you also know how to play hockey.
Floor hockey. Where I grew up, floor hockey is my favorite sport.
Floor hockey is actually one of my favorite sports in life. I'm a hockey fanatic because as a kid growing up in Canada, the only thing we had to do was play ball hockey outside. I had the 10,000 hours.
I loved it. It was my favorite sport in gym class. Nowadays, I'm a tennis player. I also started playing when I was a kid. I keep up the lessons once a week. Speaking of getting coaching, I still get tennis coaching every week.
The Importance Of Coaching In Personal Development
That's this interesting thing. I'd like to just touch on coaching for a second here. I look at what we do, what I do. I’ve got a fitness coach, so I think I'm in okay shape, but I still want to learn the best techniques and approaches. I perform better when somebody's watching me. You're doing your 8 reps, 9 reps, you tank out at 7. If you're on your own, somebody's watching, you squeeze it out.
I'm a drummer in a bar band just for fun. The number of times, Margo, and we have these videos and all this stuff, and people come to show when I’ll tell people I take drum lessons and they go, “Why?” It’s like, “If you good enough to play in a bar band, why would you take drum lessons?” For me, the question is so foreign because the answer to me is so obvious. I want to get better. I want to get better at everything.
Especially the things that you love. Why not?
You're a Certified Coach. Tell me how you would define coaching.
I'm glad you bring it up because when we do a coaching for managers program, because we also do trainings, we bring a group of managers in the room and we start to tell them, “Coaching might be a good tool in your toolkit as a manager.” We invest a fair amount of time in explaining what is coaching because what I do is very different than what my tennis coach does. There's a lot of overlap between like, coaching and mentoring. There's also some overlap into therapy. That's also a delicate topic, too. People say, “I don't want therapy,” or, “I do want therapy,” or, “What's the difference?”
I probably need a fair amount of that. What we're going to have to do another episode for that, and it's going to be thirteen hours long. Let's hold off on the therapy for now, but I get the point.
There's overlap in all of those. What's the difference? Coaching, consulting, mentoring. Let's just start with that. Basically, in every one of those cases, you have a person who cares about you, who wants to understand your challenges, who wants to help you find answers, who wants you to walk out in a better situation than you started in. That’s the case for all three. Coaching, mentoring, consulting.
The difference between, for example, coaching, mentoring and consulting is the coach does not need to have any overlap in background. Technical background is not needed because a certified coach through the International Coaching Federation or there's other certifying bodies, it's about helping people find their own answers through questions through great listening. Of course, if I understand more about your industry, that's great because you can connect with people, you can relate to people and you want to feel like you understand their challenges. That's the most important thing.
Coaching is about helping people find their answers through questions. Great listening is key.
It's great if you have that information, but I don't have to. Whereas a mentor or a consultant has to have an overlap in their background or expertise in that area in order to provide the advice that the person is looking for. I could coach an astronaut, but I could never mentor an astronaut. I don't know what that big red button does. That would be dangerous. That's one really important distinction that we make.
The one between coaching and therapy is also part of our certification process. One of the reasons why I think it's important to work with a certified coach is that we learn what is the line? When do we need to start suggesting maybe this is a topic for therapy, because coaching is about the whole person and their whole life. It's not just their professional life.
My clients are welcome to bring in personal topics. We can even talk about their past. If that's relevant for now, if it's affecting them now, then that's relevant and that’s perfectly fine. What I'm not going to do is make a diagnosis. I'm not going to give them a label of a syndrome of something of that kind. If I sense that there's any depression or dangerous tendencies toward themselves or somebody else, that's absolutely not the territory of a coach. That absolutely should be referred to a therapist.
Without going too far down this tangent, but just thinking about it, when we think of most managers out there, or we could use other examples, but most business managers who are leaders are doing some form of inspection, some form of motivation, and some form of coaching. That's really what it takes to lead a team. By the way, one of those key things you shared is they actually need to care about the team and understand the team to be helpful at coaching.
That's an issue at some point in time because some managers just think of members of the team as tools for them to achieve their goals instead of understanding it's all about the player, not the coach. When we start to think of those things, or even in the sports world where my fitness trainer's coach is doing a little bit of coaching and a little bit of training, but she does know more about the space.
There's some consulting in there.
Defining Confidence: Why The Four Channels Of Confidence Book Targets Women
It's a little bit of both. It’s an interesting set of definitions there for us to process. If we circle back now, so we've talked about coaching and the book you've written, by the way, congratulations. It was originally from 2014. We've got a second printing now, I guess. The Four Channels of Confidence, How to Cultivate and Radiate Self-Assurance. Before we talk about the stages of confidence, maybe let's do that. Let's define confidence and then secondly, let's explain why you targeted this book at women specifically.
For me, it's really important that we distinguish confidence from arrogance or feeling like you're better than somebody else. Confidence is purely about being comfortable in your own skin, about not needing to prove yourself. It's not about never being afraid, either. You've heard the expression, feel the fear and do it anyway. I think confidence is really a choice. I think I shared that a story the book. Maybe I had on a super elegant dress or something that I felt a little bit insecure about.
I said, “I'm going to decide to be confident and put my shoulders back and walk into that room as if I look good. I'm going to decide I look good. I'm going to feel confident.” Sometimes that's what it takes. It's a choice to be confident and it's scary. It's not about not being afraid. I really believe that we're born with confidence. I think that every single one of us was born confident. None of us doubted ourselves when it came time to learn how to walk.
We kept trying. You don't doubt yourself as a toddler. I think we learn to not be confident at some point. The book is all about helping people rediscover their own innate confidence. Another assumption people make is, “I don't want to get too confident because I’ll come across as arrogant.” Another assumption they make is, “I'm an introvert. I don't want to become an extrovert.” You don't have to be an extrovert. In fact, the most confident people are usually some of the quietest people. They don't feel the need to talk or to speak louder or talk over others. They're just totally chill. Nothing about introversion or extroversion. Nothing about arrogance. It's really just cool, calm, collected.
You sense those people. Sometimes we call them comfortable in their own skin. They don't have to fill the room and they don't have to fill the air. They're not filling the air. It's not all about them. It seems to me some of the most confident people I’ve ever come across are the ones where when you're interacting with them, they actually make you feel like the smartest person in the room. They're not trying to convince you that they're the smartest person in the room.
They don’t one up you or anything else.
In the beginning of the book, you share very alarming stat. I don't know if this stat got updated, Margo, with the later versions. The stat was that globally, it's only 29% of leadership positions are filled by women versus men.
That was updated.
That's a current stat. The reference to government positions and so forth, the stats are even worse. Actually, to me, this is an issue actually in B2B professional sales as well, particularly mature B2B professional sales people. The gender diversity is not there at all. This is an alarming stat. It's so early in the book but is that one of the driving factors that said, “I'm writing this. This book's a book by a woman for women?”
That was absolutely one of the driving factors, if that is even a factor, because who am I to say that the figures have to do with those women's confidence? Not necessarily. I actually find it a really fascinating topic about those statistics and how many different factors play into that. It's not at all about fixing the women. It's not their fault. It’s a systemic thing. I think, nevertheless, it makes it harder to be confident when you're the only woman in the room. That’s for sure. Not just the only woman. When you're the only fill in the blank in the room. It makes it harder to maintain your confidence. That's what I had in mind when I was writing it. I was thinking, “I want to help especially women, but definitely also men, really feel comfortable in their own skin, even when they're the only blank in the room.”
It makes it harder to be confident when you're the only woman in the room, and not just the only woman, when you're the only fill in the blank.
Also, quite frankly, I believe that women are much more likely to go out and buy a book about confidence than a man. I’ll be honest, that was also part of it. I am a woman. That's my perspective. That's also a good reason to talk to women as I'm writing it. Also, I think that although confidence issues hit men and women probably equally, I think that women are much more likely to say, “I'm going to go out and read something about this. I want to get some help from the outside here.”
Thanks for sharing that. Thanks for your honesty and transparency about the marketing component of this, part of it actually matters. It is funny. One of the things you bring up in the book, and again, these are a little dated, but I think I went through the first gender diversity training ever, for me anyway, the first portion, was around 2005 when you were starting to get into this. It was pretty basic stuff. There were a few exercises that were shocking about these preconceived notions and these biases that we have.
Daniel Kahneman and Oleg with Thinking Fast and Slow, there's 135 different mental shortcuts we all take, the biases. It's amazing. I have every one of them. When I read that book, it’s shocking that I’ve done this,. One of the things that jumped out was oftentimes, in a meeting, and I could see this in the corporate world, you'd walk into a meeting, and I think you referenced in the book, the men walk in going, “I'm going to show these people what I know. I really deserve to be here. I might be the smartest person in this room.” Whereas women are walking in going, “I don't know if I deserve to be here.”
I hope I wasn't quite that black and white in the book because, like I said, I do think that men and women equally have these doubts in their confidence. That being said, I have personally met many more men who would be like, “What's the big deal? Why are you doubting yourself like that?” I think that those unconscious biases do impact women more. As you said, we all suffer from these unconscious biases, whether we're a man or a woman. If you've taken the Implicit Association Test from the Harvard group, have you heard about this?
No.
It's really fascinating. Anybody can go, it's free of charge. Implicit Association Test, IAT. You can go in and test your own bias and you can test your gender bias, racial bias ability, disability bias, and all sorts of categories. I think there's like twelve different categories or more. The way that they measure it is they show you two things on the screen. When something is matching what they say, you hit a certain key. When it's not matching what they say, you hit another key.
For example, they have women and children and or men and children. You have to answer and they judge the time it takes your brain to say, “No, it can be a man and a child.” That takes your brain longer than if it's a woman and a child. It's microsecond difference. They have all the bias in there. I run this with a lot of the groups that I work with, especially on female leadership programs. Ninety percent of the people in the room said, “Yes, I got the bias.”
It’s all there. Actually, again, back to the Women in Sales Conference, which is why I was so interested, we've had Lori Richardson. There are a couple of folks there. There's an organization called Women's Sales Pros, and because of the lack of gender diversity and professional B2B sales, which is changing, a lot of the younger teams I'm working with have much better gender diversity.
There's a group called Women Sales Pros, and they're all amazing. I think I’ve had about 6 or 7 of these women on the show, super successful in B2B sales. Many of them are authors. I think it's led by Lori Richardson, who's been on the show. It really interesting to unpack some of these topics. If we go back to this confidence, because as you say, Margo, as I was reading this, many of these things absolutely apply to me. I think it's universal in terms of these elements of, how do we help protect our confidence. That's a big theme, by the way, of the coaching program you and I were in are in where we met each other.
That is one of the reasons why I love it.
Strategic Coach. That was the first place I ever heard this idea of protecting your confidence. Up to that, even with sports and all these other things and the business and everything, I always thought that I had to earn the right. If it was a bad client or something of that nature that was stealing confidence or a bad leader I had, it's my fault and I’ve got to earn it. Instead, they go, “No. You’ve got to protect your confidence. You got to be around people.”
It's an asset.
The First Channel Of Confidence: The Breath Channel
It's a mindset too, as you say. In the book, you do a really deep dive on four channels that help in this regard. The breath channel, the attitude channel, the voice channel, and the body channel. I think the advice is so crisp, clear and simple. Let's unpack each of those and talk a little bit starting with the breath channel, and I'm going to call out right off the top. I don't know if you've read this book.
I have. It's a great book.
It's just such a wild book.
I taped my mouth while I was sleeping. I did it.
Did you really? Were you able to sleep?
Yeah. I put the tape in the middle. One of the big things in the book, if you haven't read it, is the importance of nose breathing and not mouth breathing. If you put a little bit of medical tape that's not too sticky in the middle of your mouth, you can still breathe if you have to from the sides, but it trains you to sleep with your mouth closed. Now I wake up in the morning with a closed mouth and it was fun.
Team, we're talking about the book Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor, just an unbelievably interesting book about the importance of breathing. James is 1 of 5 people I can't get on my show. I'm going to do it. There's only been about five people I’ve ever gone after that didn't join the show, and I haven’t found a path to James, but I’ll get them. Let's talk about what you do is provide some very simple tips on the breath side of things and the important side of things. Let's talk a little bit about the importance of breath. Maybe the cooling breath and then the rapid clearing breath is just two examples and why we do it.
I'd be happy to. I'd like to add before we dive in there why I chose the word channels because I could have said the four elements or the four corners, or the four points. I chose channels because I really feel like these are four ways that both we can in increase our sense of confidence, but also that we've projected. It's a two-way street. It's a channel of confidence. It's true if you think about it, especially when you're listening to somebody speak on stage. Let's just pause on the breath one. You notice when people are nervous because they're out of breath. You're like, “They can't catch their breath.”
At the same time, if you just take a deep breath right now, especially if you make the exhale longer than the inhale, what you're doing is slowing down your heart rate. That calms you down. When you calm your brain down, you're able to access more of your creativity, more of your intelligence, which, of course, makes us feel more confident. When we feel like under pressure, shocked by a question, or we get a scary question or scary situation, we can't even access all of the wisdom, knowledge and creativity that we have because our brain is under threat. It's thinking fight or flight right now. That's where these breathing techniques come in.
That fight or flight's is such a good example, Margo, and we've all lived this. You might have been in an emotional argument with somebody and then it ends and you're driving home and you think of three other data points you forgot to bring up that would've totally won you the argument.
“I should have said that.”
There's a physiological reason why, because of the fight or flight. As humans, that evolution, as soon as we're in that panic or that emotional state, the blood is not in our brain. It's literally in our extremities because we think we might have to take off.
The brain is doing us a favor. It actually blocks the functioning of the prefrontal cortex. Things like the adrenaline do that on purpose because it says, “This is no time to make a strategic plan. Just get the hell out of there. Don't think, just do.” That was a survival thing when we had saber-toothed tigers coming after us. If you're standing in front of a boardroom, it’s not very convenient to not be able to think.
Personally, I'm always amazed at the impact of breathing on me because I do meditate. It's just Peloton meditation. I haven't gone through a transcendental meditation before. The impact of ten minutes of focused breathing, I’ll walk into meditation like that and then feel like, “I’ve got to hit list. I have so much work to do.” I come out of that meditation going, “I'm going to have a great day. I get to do this work.” What a jewel to actually be on a show like this. Total mindset shift. Even to the extent, my wife, Donna, has noticed. It can really just change your state. It's so powerful. I love the tips of trying to do that in the moment. That's really hard. You're in the boardroom.
That's when that's when it counts. You're in the boardroom. You mentioned the cooling breath. I think we've all experienced how emotions can be contagious. If somebody starts losing their temper and raising their voice, your own heart starts racing. You can be sure that that person who's yelling and screaming also has blood pressure through the roof. The cooling breath, and this is something that I learned from Sharon Melnick's book about success under pressure. I can also recommend that one. She talks about a cooling breath.
Emotions are contagious. If you stay calm, you can be a neutral or calming source, even amid others' anger.
What's the title?
Success Under Pressure by Sharon Melnick. She talks about if you breathe in through your mouth, especially if you have a small opening, like you're drinking out of a straw, just try that. Breathe in through your mouth. You can feel the air passing over your tongue is a little bit cool. Do you notice that?
I do notice that.
It actually has an effect. It’s a very different feeling than breathing through your nose or just relaxed mouth breathing. It's really something that cools you down and instantly calms down anger. It's specifically helpful in a situation where there's anger, whether it's somebody else's anger or your own anger. This cooling breath slows you down, calms you down, and cools you down. There's the expression when somebody's angry, they're hotheaded. There's this association between anger and heat. That's why this cooling breath is part of calming down.
Emotions are contagious, so if you're able to cool yourself down in these moments, you might not make them calm down fully, but at least you're not exacerbating. You're not throwing fuel on the fire because that's exactly what can happen. When somebody starts losing their temper, we get triggered and we lose our temper. It just escalates. At least you're a neutral source, if not a calming source for the person that's angry. That's the cooling breath.
Just this impact of taking some deep breaths. You talk about how even doing it for a couple of minutes actually makes a difference, which it does. Wherever you're nervous or something, walking into a meeting or a presentation, even a minute or two of box breathing from the book where just breathe in, one nostril, hold it, breathe out the other nostril, hold the pause. You pause when you're empty. It's like a box. I pause when I breathe in.
In, hold, out.
Big difference. An immediate difference before you're walking into one of those tense situations. You also mentioned that also, and you brought it up here, the power of silence and just helping you get emotionally stabilized is huge. This power of taking a pause. I feel this all the time. You bring up how if you take a pause on stage or when you're doing a workshop, seven seconds feels like a lifetime. I'm notorious for this. I’ll ask a question and I'm expecting an answer in a second.
Give them a chance.
Not everybody's there and so you've got to give them a chance to catch up.
You get their attention back, too, because if all of a sudden you stop speaking, if somebody has zoned out and you stop speaking, they'll look up and say, “Is it over?” You get their attention back.
I’ll be honest. I face that a lot when I'm having this conversation, and it sounds like everything that I'm saying is super interesting to me. I’ll ask a question and somebody will literally go, “Did you just ask a question?” You talk about 88 keys on the piano and with inflection, we're not using all of the different inflection, tones and pitches available to us that make conversation interesting. Suddenly, I’ll sneak a question and then they go, “Did you ask a question?” They couldn't even follow it.
It's what I say in the voice channel of the book. It's about taking responsibility for being heard. It's making yourself not only understandable enough, but dynamic enough that people are not used to focusing for a long time. We're in a society where things are always changing, flashing, moving and scrolling. That means we have to be ready to change things up to get people's attention back.
It’s so hard now. The attention spans are so short. There’s a fantastic book called Stolen Focus by Johann Hari about the lost attention and the attention spans on people right now. It's just shocking. It's just incredible. He tried to go on a social media fast and a technology fast for a few months, and it was unbelievable what happened to him and what he recognized.
Just the fact that given what goes on with all social media and the technology companies, their whole model is based on trying to keep our eyes to the device. It's not to try and be helpful. It's the longer we have eyes to the device, the more money they make with advertising. They've really built these models that trigger things in our brain to keep us there. By the way, it works beautifully.
You have to appreciate the science when you don't have to. I can appreciate the science behind it, but I also know that I need to take responsibility for my own health and wellbeing. There's any number of things out there that are not good for me. We can't go around and controlling the people to not offer tempting things that aren't good for us in life.
We have to have the confidence to say, “I noticed that I'm not feeling as good.” Speaking of confidence after I’ve been scrolling for a while, have you asked yourself how do you feel after that compared to how you felt before? Do you have more confidence or less? If the answer is less, why do you keep going back? Only you can decide. Our mutual friend, Dan Sullivan, wrote a book, Your Attention: Your Property.
The Second Channel Of Confidence: The Attitude Channel
He's got so many good books. Let's keep continuing on with the four channels. The second channel is the attitude channel. Lots of writing on this. The inner voice. Trying to sabotage ourselves with our inner voice. Let's unpack that a little bit.
I think that's the most important one. My colleagues and I, my fellow coaches, we talk about how you can do as many things on the outside or on the surface as you want to not sabotage yourself, but if you don't do the inner work, then you can't master that inner voice. The Four Channels book is really meant to be from the inside out and the outside in. It's like, let's throw everything we've got at this because it's such an important topic. Let's not only dig down on the inside and ask ourselves, “Why do I beat myself up? Why do I tell myself that I can't do things that I'm not good enough or torment myself with these ruminations?”
It's also sometimes doing what they call the process of the warrior. That's not process. One of my colleagues can help me remember. It's about not only doing the inner work, but also talking the walk in a way, like doing these things where you're taking deep breaths, you're putting your shoulders back. That's the body. You're speaking with a louder voice and faking it until you make it in a way. You're saying, “I'm going to tell my body,” because we're always talking to ourselves. Our brain is talking to our body. Our body's talking to our brain all the time. I'm going to do everything I can from the outside to instill confidence in myself, but that's not enough. We also have to deal with the attitude. That's the inner part, the inner critic. The biggest message that I hope people take away is befriending it.
Really saying, “I have this voice, and it can be a real asset sometimes. It's only there to protect me.” Our inner critic loves the status quo, and it starts talking as soon as we want to step out of our comfort zone or try something new, or do something different. That's usually when it gets the loudest. It wants to keep us safe. Whatever you've done up until now hasn't killed you. Let's just keep doing that. God forbid you make changes. If we recognize that and say, “Thanks a lot inner critic, and I don't need you this time. Bye-bye.” Recognizing it. Noticing it. That's the first step.
Our inner critic loves the status quo, and it starts talking as soon as we want to step out of our comfort zone or try something new.
The thing about jumping outside a comfort zone, and even something like Peloton has been good, at least for me, coaching me on this is if you want to improve, you absolutely have to jump outside a comfort zone. You're going to be uncomfortable. No matter what level of fitness you get to, if you want to improve while you're working out, there is a very uncomfortable part of that workout that you want to start, stop. What they try and help you with is there's this concept of getting a little more comfortable with being uncomfortable.
It's a good way of thinking of it. One trick I used to try and help myself with a long time ago was in the early days when all of our friends were getting married, I was actually asked to be the MC at a bunch of bunch of different weddings, like almost every wedding I went to for 2 or 3 years, and everybody gets married at the same time. I take it seriously because I don't want to ruin their wedding. You're good at stepping up and in some cases, 200 people, 250 people, you get a little nervous. You’ve got to prepare for it. After a couple, I started thinking to myself, “Why am I doing this to myself? Why do I want to go to this wedding?”
In those days, I drank a lot. I would've partied up with everybody else instead of having to be zoned in until I was done. The way I rationalized being comfortable being uncomfortable was it made me be in the wedding even more because I had to interview the bridesmaids. I had to interview the groomsmen. I had to learn stories about everybody, the family. I said, “This is uncomfortable,” but I'm getting comfortable with it because there's a benefit.
I'm going to know everybody more. I'm going to be more in the wedding and all that stuff. I learn from different people. I think this idea is helpful for people reading. There's going to be that presentation, there's going to be that keynote speech, maybe somebody's speaking at a wedding. You rationalize why you're doing it. Instead of feeling nervous, you feel like your butterflies are flying in formation.
Building on your strengths, too. I think I can imagine you're a fantastic. I know exactly why those people asked you toe their wedding. I'm sure you'd be amazing with that. Anyone who's been in a room with you, Mark, especially in a room with lots of people, will know that you have an ability to have a laser-like focus, to bring a calm to the room, to acknowledge what's going on, to ask the good questions. I’m not at all surprised. What I hear you saying is you took it not only as an opportunity to step outside your comfort zone and get better, but also you took it as an opportunity to connect with these people, which is clearly something that's important to you and something that you're good at.
Also, I don't think I mentioned that explicitly in the book, or if I did, probably not enough, find out what you love about any situation that makes you nervous or what you're already good at that makes you nervous. I just did that this morning. I was in a call with my team and we were doing a retro of a project that we led that was very stressful, a lot of work. There's so many last-minute changes. At a certain point, I was like, “Why am I doing this?” I had to take responsibility because why were there so many changes? It’s because I didn't say no. I just kept bending over backward. That's my strength. I have this Ranger strength in the Gallup Strength, which just like every strength when taken to an extreme, becomes a fault.
Rather than just focus on dialing back my strength, like just don't be so much of a Ranger, I thought maybe there's another strength that I have that I can put into play here that makes it easier to say no because I find that so hard. That's about quality. That's a big value of mine. Also, the relationship piece, like build on the strength that I have to build relationships to make it easier to say no. I think that could be a good rule of thumb for anybody who has to face a difficult situation and feels nervous.
The Third Channel Of Confidence: The Voice Channel
Focusing on the strengths, and acknowledging your strengths, I think that’s always very helpful for confidence. We're going to talk about one thing that isn't in the book at the end here, but let's finish a quick discussion on the four channels. Now we're on channel three. We started with breath. We went to attitude. Now we're on number three. Voice. We touched on it briefly. Voice being a very powerful aid in terms of confidence.
It's really one of those where it’s a lot about how you project yourself. As I said before, take responsibility for being heard. It’s a channel that can sabotage you. It needs to be there for people to get the whole picture of you as confident, which builds your confidence. When people listen to you, when people say, “That was a great idea. Let's do what Mark said, or let's do what Joanne said.” It's like it's building your confidence. When do they do that? They only do that when they can hear you. They only do that when they can understand you.
Learning how to make your voice not only the right volume, and I don't mean louder because sometimes people are too loud and people stop listening, the correct appropriate volume. A dynamic volume but also concise enough. If you talk to people, they are not capable of listening for that long. You need to be concise as well. That's what builds the confidence. It’s actually the feedback that you get when you start to master that channel.
By the way, I love that, Margo. We should take responsibility for being heard because that's an innate need in all of us. Outside of food and water, being heard is one of the most important needs out there. I think a lot of times when we're growing up and maybe early in our business careers, we don't have that confidence to take a room and to share our opinion and to step in or to disagree. Some of us are people pleasers. “I don't want to have the straight talk. I don't want to give the fundamental truth. I don't want to give feedback.”
Especially if that makes you the only person in the room with that opinion.
It does take some of that inner fortitude, but taking responsibility for being heard is a great life lesson.
Sometimes, it's as simple as waiting until people stop talking before you speak, waiting until they ask you a question or saying, “I have a question,” or, “I have an opinion here.” Before you just blurt out your golden question or your golden opinion, make sure that people are looking at you and they're not talking themselves. I know that sounds basic, but you'd be shocked at how rare that is. When you witness a meeting or when you watch debates, for example.
It's literally painful. I’ve certainly been in those corporate environments for many a year where it was painful to see how a discussion would take place. There was always this feeling that everybody had such a need to be heard that they couldn't hear anyone else because they're dying to figure out when they can jump in and share their thought.
Why would somebody listen to you if you don't listen to them? That's part of taking responsibility.
I always like this idea of whatever you want in life, give it away. If I want somebody to hear me, listen to somebody else. If I want somebody to treat me with respect, give someone else respect. If I want somebody to acknowledge that I'm good at what I do professionally, acknowledge and believe they're good at what they do professionally.
Start there. Make your own karma.
I used to be running very large corporate meetings with lots of people with heavy personalities. One of the things we do, as a matter of course, was say, “At the end of the meeting, no matter what, we're going to do a round table and everybody gets the floor for 60 seconds. You can pass, but there's no debate or rebuttal.” What people start to do is we're in a discussion, we're trying to keep things on track, and they didn't get their point in, but they veer away from going, “Let me go back to something we were talking about five minutes ago.”
The Fourth Channel Of Confidence: The Body Channel
They just jot it down. At the end of the meeting, we go around the room and somebody would say, “Mark, you really wear terrible-looking jackets. I don't want to see another one of those.” I can't debate and jump in and go, “The salesman said you've never seen this jacket look better on anybody.” I can't jump in. They get the floor with no rebuttal. I think that's just an easy tip, folks. When you run your next internal meeting this way, see what happens. Now we're moving on to, and I think it's the Wonder Woman, the Superman pose. Amy Cuddy. The fourth channel is the body channel. Let's talk and share a couple of tips there, Margo.
It was Amy Cuddy, and I understand a lot of her colleagues as well. I think she gets all the credit, which great. She certainly deserves it. I think that there's a whole group of people who are doing some fantastic work. Now that's a bit of a sidebar, but it's one of those things where in later years, people tried to redo the experiment and it didn't work quite right, so they wanted to throw the whole thing at the garbage.
It pains me, and this is the sidebar, how often it's the case when people start to get notoriety, status, power, money or anything else, we just lose all the empathy for them when we start just cutting holes and criticizing. I just want to say I think it’s a great work, and I understand there's a critique and some people say, “In the second edition, you're going to take that out now, right?”
No, absolutely not. I think it's fantastic. How do I know it works? It’s because I’ve tried it and it works on me. End of one. I'm sharing what works for me. I'm not saying this is the only way, but I'm sharing in the book what works for me. I think it's fantastic work. It's very logical, anyway, if you think about it, because, as we were saying before, the body and the brain are always in communication. The brain is always on the lookout for threats or rewards.
Much more focused on the threats, of course, because especially in caveman times, the threats are more important. You need to at least stay alive. The rewards, while they're nice, but we better stay alive first. That’s also why when you get feedback, you have 99 pieces of good feedback and a bad one, and you focus on the bad one. Our brain is shaped like that. Let's accept that and embrace it because it's gotten us to where it has.
The body and the brain are always in communication. Our brain is always on the lookout for threats or rewards but much more focused on threats.
A lot of it is really logical. She was saying taking up space. If you think about animals in the animal kingdom, what do they do when they have to go take over territory or fighters? They make themselves large. What you're telling your brain when you do that is you're strong. You're powerful. You don't need to hide. You're going to be okay if you're seen. The opposite is when you make yourself small and what do you do if, God forbid, you are in a place where there was gunfire happening, you would make yourself as small as humanly possible.
That tells your brain threats. Making myself small. One of the points she makes in the TED Talk that got so famous is unfortunately, we do this all the time without realizing it. We're huddled over our phones, sitting on the train. We're making ourselves small. Without even realizing it, we're sending a message to our brain that don't you're not strong and you're not confident. There's a threat. There's danger. We're not at our best.
It doesn't mean that you have to be big, even the Wonder Woman. It's about being neutral. Especially if you're in one of those difficult meetings where you feel nervous, where you don't have all your confident confidence, are your feet flat on the floor? Are you sitting up straight? You know? Especially if you're standing on stage, I can't tell you how often I see this, and this is definitely more women than men standing on stage. You can't see now, but I have my feet crossed.
Leaning on a podium or something.
Just freestanding. For some reason, they feel the need to put their feet opposite. You do this. What happens when you do that? Maybe not so much, but you see people stand like this. One foot across. The problem with that is if you get pushed, it’s a lot easier to fall over. If you push me the same way when I have both feet on the floor, I don't move. I know you're not going to actually probably get physically pushed when you're on stage.
Some of our meetings In The Funnel, that'll happen. We're trying to cut that out.
We're trying to make a law against that. Still, I believe, psychologically, there's something you just feel stronger if you plant both feet flat on the floor, planted on the ground. Just do everything you can to not feel off balance. You might as well. Just standing up straight, both feet flat on the floor. By the way, that makes it easier to breathe. The channels help each other. Speaking slowly, taking a deep breath between sentences. I don't need to talk in a continuous flow. I can really pause like I'm doing now and have a little breath here and there in between my sentences. It's not disturbing, but I'm able to keep the oxygen flowing. Unfortunately, in the Amy Cuddy video, I think she hadn't got The Four Channels book yet because. She's a little bit out of breath, but that's okay. I think it's still really great work.
Also, that was early days of TED Talks, so that's when you knew gazillions of people. It's different now because there's different levels.
It’s super polished, also.
First of all, The Four Channels of Confidence, How to Cultivate and Radiate Self-Assurance is a great book. As, as everybody knows, we put people on the show because I’ve read their book and I liked it. This is a really great book. Those four channels, breath, attitude, voice, body, they're all interdependent and connected. Of course, many of these things play over. These are things where we can intentionally help and protect our confidence, which is so critical in business and in life. I'm pretty sure after this episode, Margo, lots more people are going to going to look to learn more about you and your coaching business. How do they find out more about you?
I think the best way is LinkedIn. That's the social media channel. For my confidence, I decided I don't want to be on a million different social media channels. I'm going to choose one. I’ve chosen LinkedIn. Of course, our website as well, CoachingWithoutBorders.com. The book is available on Amazon. Hopefully you will find it right away when you type Four Channels, but if not, Four Channels of Confidence is definitely going to get you there.
That's again on LinkedIn, Margo McClimans. Margo, thank you so much for joining us on the show. It’s just great to meet you. It’s great to read the book. I'm so glad we have this conversation.
Thanks, Mark. I have to tell you, every time I talk to you, it's just such a joy. You are so generous. I can tell the world that we had a conversation also with one of my colleagues, and you were just immediately sharing all sorts of great tips and wisdom and insight. It was just a bit of a get to know. You're just a walking treasure trove of wisdom and generosity. Thank you for that.
Thank you so much. What a lovely thing to say. Thank you again, Margo. It’s great to connect with you. We're going to be speaking lots more, I'm sure. Team, thank you for joining our show. If you'd like this episode, please like and subscribe because that really matters to us. That's actually how we get great guests like Margo McClimans.
Also, if there are things we can be doing in this show to make it even more valuable to you, I really want to know what that is. You can send your ideas to MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com. That's actually my personal email for the company. I respond to every email we get where people suggest ideas for the show, and we love constructive criticism. Please keep those ideas coming. We've applied some of those things that you've been gracious enough to share, but please keep it coming. Thanks again for joining, everybody, and we'll see you next time.
Important Links
The Four Channels of Confidence: How to Cultivate and Radiate Self-Assurance
Margo McClimans - LinkedIn