Hi Leader,

How can you create the future if you haven't been there? How can you be confident in the face of what you don't know?

Naturally, since the focus of my work is helping leaders create new futures for their businesses and organizations, I am asked these questions.

This Key is about confidence, because your confidence matters. Here are 11 points I discovered about confidence.

11 Points About Your Confidence

  1. Your confidence is your password to open new doors. It is the ticket to your next adventurous ride. You gain permission to lead the ride because of your confidence.
  2. Confidence is the currency that allows you to shape tomorrow. It is the currency of growth and success.
  3. You don't need to have the answers to be confident. In our innovation and strategy workshops I ask executives questions they may never have thought about, and for which they don't have ready-made answers. We explore, diverge and converge. This is how creativity and breakthrough ideas get produced. I have confidence in our ability to create new solutions, develop new ideas and innovate. I have confidence in my process and in the people. They are the smartest people in the world in their subject, and I bring to the table a process to liberate their individual and collective gifts. I know how to free up the latent genius in the group and release the brilliance that will produce results. I have done it hundreds of times. I am doing it now. I have confidence I can do it tomorrow. This is the game changer. I don't need to have the answers to be confident. I am confident our collaboration will create the answers.
  4. This is a confident universe. It wakes up every morning to give life to all things and support new growth. You and I must do the same.
  5. Confidence is not the opposite of worry and concern but the capacity to channel those energies in a productive and pragmatic way. Confidence is refusing to accept the situation as a given and working to remold what is in the image of what can be. Confidence is creating forward movement.
  6. Confidence is pushing back against the "benchmark police" that terrorize your company with their zeal and forget that you are in business to help the customer live happier and better.
  7. Here is the secret everyone knows. You have not been to the future but neither has anyone else. This fact frees you up to embrace the innovator's mindset. This mindset says: no one has been to the future because it has not yet been created. It's our job to create the future. Confidence is converting impossibility into a prototype. That's the mindset that propelled Thomas Edison, Walt Disney, and Steve Jobs.
  8. Confidence is trusting your ability to develop options and create solutions on the move. It is being prepared to embrace new data and change your strategy accordingly. In most situations you don't need to have the complete picture before you make your move. My work involves ambiguity and unknowns, but I am confident that we will download new intelligence and create a collaborative dynamic that produces positive momentum and builds possibilities. Confidence is trusting that you have smart and capable people around you and that you are creating an environment that promotes possibilities and enables people to flourish.
  9. Confidence as a property of organizational culture accelerates learning by banishing the fear of imperfection to encourage people to bring forward the best ideas and options.
  10. Confidence is not self-aggrandized arrogance, it is the capacity to take initiative, and move forward with incomplete information. The dentist drilling three inches away from your brain, and the surgeon operating on you, offer no guarantees, but you put your life in their hands because they engender confidence in their experience and presence.
  11. More than anything else people respond to your energy, enthusiasm and confidence. Confidence is showing up with your voice and reclaiming your capacity for discernment and judgment. Confidence fuels your leadership presence and charisma.

Now it's your turn. Turn the confidence Key. Apply the currency of confidence to co-create a future that matters to you and to your people.

© Aviv Shahar