Victoria’s fate for the next five years hung on what happened in the next 90 seconds.
Victoria had convinced her boss she had a great idea. A trailblazing, first of its kind and unproven project she wanted her conservative company to get behind. It would create transformation in her area of the organization and potentially lead to an additional $500 million in annual revenue. Victoria believed in it. It required funding and commitment from senior leadership. They needed to believe in it.
Her boss managed to get her on the agenda for the next Executive Leadership Team meeting that included the CEO. They gave her 60 seconds to present her idea. Victoria negotiated 90.
Those 90 seconds would shape her future for the next five years, the future of her team, the future of the organization and very possibly the future of the industry.
Victoria wasn’t nervous. She was calmly enthusiastic. This is what mastery looks like.
Victoria’s coaching sessions had prepared her. Good coaching does that. It builds your confidence and makes you fearless. Real confidence is built on solid, consistent demonstrations of competence.
Many people come to me because they want to build their confidence. The problem is they don’t have the communication competence needed to make that happen for them.
Competence is the basis of confidence.
And the most important confidence you can develop is confidence in your ability to communicate. Then you are free of doubt because you have certainty that you have the communication skills to produce real results, even extraordinary outcomes, no matter what. When you have the high level of communication competence needed to consistently create extraordinary outcomes, believe me, you have confidence.
Confidence grows as competence grows.
It takes a particular kind of coaching to develop this kind of competence. Minimal discussion, maximal practice, repetition and correction. Repetitive practice of a tremendous variety of situations with constant correction and refinement. You practice until you have complete certainty you can do it and achieve results, and even extraordinary results, like gaining leadership support for a novel idea in 90 seconds. Not just with one idea, but with all of your ideas. Not just with one audience, but with any audience.
Then, when you step out on the world stage, you can fearlessly face any audience and achieve success. You have the communication muscle to face the world. Because believe me, it takes communication muscle to face this world and win.
You don’t build competence or confidence by thinking about it. You live in a world of action. You have to see yourself doing it, over and over again. You have to demonstrate success 1,000 times during your practice and coaching to have certainty you will demonstrate success on the playing field. You have to practice “right action” until you have complete muscle memory, and it flows without effort or thought. That’s what unshakable competence looks like. Developing right action develops right thought. Your mindset completely changes as you develop competence.
One senior vice president I was coaching hated repetitive practice. He was enthusiastic in expressing how much he hated it. During our coaching sessions when it was time to drill, which is what we call this kind of practice, he would say “I hate this.” He knew and expected I would say, “I totally understand, let’s start.”
Despite hating it, he kept extending his six-month Executive Coaching for four years of coaching, and is still aggressively working on his personal development. He’s constantly surprised how much more there is to learn. He’s gone from a boring corporate-type presenter to quite a rockstar, addressing admiring audiences of 50,000 and more.
He tells everyone how “painful” the coaching is. Interestingly enough, many of the people he tells this too sign up for coaching. They arrive and tell me that they expect it to be painful. I laugh and tell them that he has a very low threshold for pain, and that real coaching is not painful, but it takes character, and it builds character. That’s not painful, but in our soft society today, it’s not something people are used to doing. Only in sports do you see them doing what it takes to develop real mastery.
Many, many people want this level of mastery and Victoria is one of them.
The time came. Her key message was concise, perfectly crafted and penetrating, her presentation skills flawless. She delivered her 90-second message to the Executive Leadership Team and the CEO with extraordinary precision.
They kept her there with enthusiastic questions and then gave her the green light to go ahead with the project. I got the email telling me of victory shortly after. They not only supported her project, they supported her with enthusiasm. You can imagine how exhilarated Victoria was at the end of those 90 seconds. This was one happy woman.
If you want to achieve at the highest levels, you must learn to communicate at the highest levels. Do the work no one is willing to do and doors will open to you that few others will ever walk through.
Be the cause!