The life blood of the business

As a contractors site agent I was exercised by getting the money in and holding on to it. My boss drilled it into me, he constantly reminded me that “cash is the life blood of the business”. Now, after nearly twenty years as a performance coach I have a different perspective. I think confidence is the life blood of the business.

When I am working with teams I sometimes ask “what can you do when your confidence is high?” Usually, and pretty quickly, someone will say “anything”. I then ask “what do you actually get done when your confidence is low?”. It doesn’t take long for someone to grumble “not much”.

That’s exactly how it is for me – When my confidence is high, I feel like I can do anything and I am truly at my best, most creative and productive self. However when my confidence is low I can sit there for hours, procrastinating about what I am doing and wondering if it will be of any use.

Lack of confidence is damaging at the micro level, you and I, and at the macro world level. For example when a few banks went bust in 2008 there was a sudden collapse in confidence in the western world. Organisations feared for the future and stopped spending money, tightened their belts and laid people off. Developers sat on their options and paused their projects until there was more certainty of a return. We consumers worried about our jobs and cut all discretionary spend. Our collective loss of confidence led to the longest recession that I can remember and some outside London say we are still in it.

How do you protect your confidence?

I’m not a naturally confident person and so have to work at it. For me working at it means noticing the things I do regularly that top up my confidence. I keep a list of the top ten things and make sure I do at least one of them every day. This is my confidence system:

• Exercise every day
• Spend time with family and friends
• Get clear on ‘Purpose’
• Prepare and deliver on purpose
• Turn up, start and finish on time
• Get feedback, reflect and act on it
• Appreciate my progress every day
• Be in communication with my clients and my team
• Get out and about
• Collect cash on time

My list has changed over the years though exercise, purpose, communication, showing up on time and cash are always in there, the latter probably due to my upbringing and my old boss.

So how do you protect your confidence and as a leader how do you protect the confidence of your people; if their confidence is down then, maybe, not much is getting done and that’s your business going down the drain.