How to Believe in Yourself | The Speaker’s Edge Podcast

The last two episodes, we've been talking about executive presence, and we've been talking about two particular aspects of executive presence. So in the first one in the series, we talked about the importance of the first impression, and how you can make an impression when you first meet people. And that first impression can either be very positive or it can be negative. And if it's a positive impression, it's going to lift you up, and if it's a negative impression, it's going to sink you down. So we looked at the importance of the first impression, and how the biggest aspect, really of the first impression is visual. So there's things that we can do to really help ourselves make a strong first impression. Then in the second part of the series, we talked about the importance of body language, how there's different ways that you can stand, how you can carry yourself, how you can move, what you can do with your hands, how you turn your shoulders, whether you smile, all kinds of different aspects of body language. You can make a big, big impact on your audience. Have a big role in your impression on your audience. So we talked about how you can video yourself, and then you can watch yourself, and then you can see if you're coming across in the way that you would like to come across for your intended audience. In this episode, we're going to talk about something that takes a little longer—those first two you can create an instant impact, an instant impression with your audience. In this third part of the series, we're talking about developing rock solid self confidence, being very self assured, and that's something that you grow into. It's not something that you just immediately decide and then it's done. There's real growth, and you can't shortcut that. So we're going to talk about how you do that. But before we get into that, if you haven't downloaded the companion resources for the podcast, then go to maxwellleadership.com/thespeakersedge, and we'd love it if you enjoy the episode, you enjoy this show, then we'd love it if you rate and review.

All right, let's talk about the importance of being self assured then. Let's talk about the importance of developing your confidence—self confidence—and the key here is that it is developed. It's not just something you decide. It's not a perceptual switch. It's an actual growth thing. We need to actually change the way we think, feel, what we believe about ourselves. So really, we're talking about, I suppose you could say the title of this episode should be, how to believe in yourself, even when you don't, because you can grow into it. You can grow into it. Okay, now the bottom line is, for you and me and everyone else, you have infinite potential. You have infinite potential. You haven't even scratched the surface of what you're capable of, if you really put your mind to it, you have deep reservoirs of talent and potential that you dig into, and you can develop that talent, you can develop that potential. And as you develop more and more of that potential, you're going to feel more and more self assured, more and more capable in the world. And so that's what we're looking at. How do you develop that? Because it has to be developed. I'm going to keep stressing this. It has to be developed. John says that you'll reach your height automatically, but not your potential. You're automatically going to grow to whatever height you're going to grow to, and you don't need to do anything about that. It happens on its own. It happens on its own, but you don't reach your potential automatically. You don't—that doesn't happen on its own. You've got to work hard for that. And as you work towards developing your potential, and you gradually change who you are and become the next best version of yourself, the old you, the outgoing you, is going to fight to stay, wants to keep his place, to remain on the team. So change is doing something different. Transformation, which is what we're talking about, is being something different. So change is doing something different. Transformation is being something different, and evolution is continual transformation. And that's what we're talking about, really—your evolution. You becoming the next best version of yourself, the next best version of yourself, and the old you wants things to stay the same. So you've got to just be prepared for that fight, that battle, because the old you is going to put up a fierce resistance. It's like turkeys voting for an early Christmas. Turkeys don't want to vote for an early Christmas. Why? Because when Christmas rolls around, they end up on the chopping block, don't they? They end up in the oven. I said they're not going to vote for that. Turkeys will vote to skip Christmas altogether. In fact, let's ditch Christmas. Let's come up with a different tradition. That's what the turkeys will vote for. They're not going to vote to remove themselves. And in the same way, your cherished beliefs that are a big part of how you feel about life and how you perceive life, and what you notice and what you don't notice, and what you think is fair and what's not fair, what's outrageous, your heroes, the villains, all of those things—that's part of your enculturation, that's part of your programming. And those beliefs are not going to just stand up and say, “You know what? I can see you've outgrown me. I'll leave you to it. You're on your own, kid.” It's not gonna happen. They're gonna be like, “No, you need me. You need me.” They don't let go easily. So it takes effort, it takes effort.

A fun way to think about this is, I found a picture of the 1966 England soccer team—won the World Cup. Now, on the one hand, it was a joyous occasion. On the other hand, they haven't won anything since, and that was now 60 years ago. So next year the World Cup is in America. It's our turn. It's our turn. Surely, surely 60 years is long enough to wait. It must be our turn this time. Fingers crossed. Anyway, fingers crossed. May the best team win and all that, you know. But surely, it's our turn anyway. As I look at that picture of the England team—you look at them, and you think, “Oh, well, that's interesting. Look at that red strip. Look at the shorts, look at the, you know, the ball, everything. Look at the people in the background, the people in the stands watching it was at Wembley,” all of those things. And then you look at it, you think, “Well, hang on. The players—like all but one of them are now dead.” So the players, over my lifetime, have changed considerably. The strip, the shirts that they wear—they don't wear those shirts anymore. That's changed. The manager has changed—goodness knows how many times since then. Wembley Stadium has gone, has been replaced, and the supporters, most of them, are dead as well, aren't they? So everything about that England team has changed. In my lifetime, I've supported many different teams that are the same team. It's still England, but many different teams with many different players, cheering for many different heroes, booing many different villains. The managers have changed. “Oh my goodness, he's terrible.” “Oh my goodness, he's amazing.” The ground has changed. The supporters come and go. Everything changes, but it's still England. It's still England. Do you see where we're going with this? Do you see the importance of this? Because if you think about you—you have emotions, just like the team has players. You have emotions, you have thoughts, you do things, you have actions, you see things a certain way, you have perceptions, you have beliefs that underpin all of these things. And just like the England team can change the players—they can upgrade the players. And if you upgrade the players, you upgrade the team, don't you? Well, you can upgrade your emotions, and it's still you. Now, the beliefs and the emotions that are really like two sides of the same coin—they don't want to remove themselves, so we've got to work to remove them, and they're going to fight to stay just like the players. They don't say, “Yeah, you don't need me anymore.” They still think they're great; they still think they're England. They still think that they're needed as they get older, as other younger, fitter, more talented people come in. As things change, then they don't have a place on the team anymore. The team's upgraded. The team evolves. And that's okay, and it's the same for us. We can let go of our cherished beliefs. We can let go of our emotions. We can change the way we think, we can change some of the things we do, and we can change the way we see things. We really can—but it's still us. It's just an upgrade. It's just an upgrade. So you have feelings, but you are not your feelings. You have feelings—you're not your feelings—and your feelings can't even really be trusted. It's worth keeping in mind—your feelings can't be trusted—because sometimes we have feelings and we're sure they're right when actually they're wrong.

Susan and I, my wife, Susan—we did a hypnosis in childbirth course just before Emily was born, years ago. And I remember the lady who was running the course—she was talking about the importance of having a peace, stress-free environment for mom, Queen Bee. That's what she called Susan. Susan is Queen Bee. It's all about Queen Bee. It's all about her, and we need to keep stress away from her environment, because stress has an impact on the body. It changes things, and it interrupts the smooth labor process. And she said, “Think of it this way. Imagine that you're in the African savannah years ago, and you're looking for a place to give birth. You're pregnant, and labor is about to start, so you're looking for a place to go into labor. And you find somewhere, and everything is going well, and labor is progressing, and then you see a lion. What happens to your body?” It's like, whoa. “Stop, stop. Put this labor on hold. We've got to get out of here. We are not safe. The most important thing for us now is to escape the lion, not to stay here and to carry on with the birth of the baby.” So stress interrupts the labor process like that. And it makes perfect sense, doesn't it? But what she said that really caught my attention was—your body will behave like that whether you actually saw a lion, or you just thought you saw a lion. If you're there and you're like, “Is that a lion?”—exactly the same thing happens. There doesn't even need to be a lion. A fleeting thought for just a moment in time is enough for your body to go into exactly the same fight-or-flight response as if there was actually a lion there. Isn't that interesting. Our minds are so powerful—when you think of it like that—so powerful.

Now this is something that we can deal with when we understand what's happening. Because if there is a lion there, of course, it's very appropriate for our body to help us escape. We do need the energy. We do need the blood to move away from the viscera. We do need it to go away from the internal organs. We need it to go out to the extremities, to the limbs, so that we can run. And so the hormones—stress hormones—squeeze the blood vessels, squeeze the capillaries to preferentially divert the blood where it's needed, so we're away from growth towards protection, which happens to be our legs and our arms so that we can escape. Bruce Lipton explained it like this on his program Conscious Parenting. He said there's three key things happen in the stress response. One of them is the blood goes to the arms and legs so that you can escape. The next one is, if you think about digesting food, how much energy that uses—you know, you eat a big meal and you're like, “Oh, I need a nap now.” Or is that just me? I need a nap now. You want to sit down and digest your food. It uses a great deal of energy. Digesting food can use up to a third of the energy that's in the food to get the energy out of it. So it uses a lot of energy. So it makes sense that if we need to escape from the lion, then we don't want to be digesting this morning's meal. We could use that energy to escape. And so that's why the blood moves to the arms and legs—that's the first thing. The second thing is that the immune system also uses a great deal of energy. Anyone had COVID—you've experienced this, you've had flu, I'm sure you've had a bad cold—and you're exhausted, don't you? You can't do anything. You get out of bed just to go to the restroom, and by the time you come back—oh goodness—you lie down again. You're back to sleep, because your body is using all of your available energy to fight off the bacterial infection or the virus or whatever it is. That energy could be used to help you escape from the lion, because if the lion is going to pounce on you and is going to eat you, then you don't need to worry about the bacteria that's going to kill you in two weeks’ time. It's the next two seconds that's important. So the immune system is shut down. That's the second thing that happens. And then the third thing that happens is the same stress hormones that preferentially move the blood to the arms and legs move the blood from the forebrain to the hindbrain, because hindbrain is reflexive action which is more likely to save your life. Responding in a fraction of a second—thinking is too slow. You can't rely on thinking in that situation, and so you lose the ability to think. Your consciousness, your thinking, is impaired because the blood is moved to the hindbrain to prioritize reflexive actions to escape from that lion—that pesky lion. So that's all good and well, if there is actually a lion. But if it's credit card debt, or “I wonder if the kids are okay at school,” or “I wonder if my spouse is going to leave me,” or “I wonder if I can pay the mortgage.” If it's like those types of stresses, we don't need the same response. In fact, we don't need energy to turn and run. We need to focus to turn and face those things. That's how we deal with them, isn't it? So these kind of processes—these survival instincts that have helped us in the past—can get in the way when they're not the best approach for certain challenges that we're facing now. Speaking is one of those, if you think about it, isn't it? Because you do want to be able to think—you don't need reflexive action when you're in front of an audience. You need to be able to think, you need to be able to present the information as you practiced and prepared, and so understanding that process and how it's working helps us come up with a better way of dealing with the stress of the moment.

Now, there's a lot of research about how you can change the way you feel, how you can outgrow your fears—which is a lovely way to think about it. There was one experiment that I read about where they got a group of people together who were all terrified of spiders, and they put them through a systematic process of desensitization to different stages of the threat, of the stress response, of the fear. So at the beginning, they were in a room, and they knew that the next room, through the door, there was a spider tank—whatever you call the place where spiders live, a spider house—and it had glass and it had spiders in it, and they knew it was there, and they would have an amount of time to acclimatize to this thought, because initially they were—you know, they couldn't even think about spiders, let alone see pictures of them or think that they might be in the next room. It was very stressful for them, but if you stay in that environment, the stress kind of runs itself out. And so they got used to that idea, and then they went to the next level of threat, which was to go through the door into the room with the spiders in the tank in the corner of the room. Then they couldn't see them, but they knew they were there, and they were that much closer. Then when they got used to that idea, they got a little bit closer still, so they could see through the glass, and they could see the spiders now crawling over the logs. Then when they were comfortable with that, they moved up to the glass itself. And then they could see right in—those very little spiders crawling around. They could see them in detail. Then when they were ready, the instructor would put on a big, heavy leather glove and reach in and grab one of the spiders and bring it out. And they would watch the spider crawling over the leather glove. And then when they were comfortable with that, they would put the leather glove on, and the spider would crawl across their hand in the heavy leather glove. Then the instructor would pick the spider up and let it crawl across his hand and up his forearm with just the skin—no glove. And then when they were ready, they were able to do the same thing. Do you know how long that whole process takes to go from being terrified of even thinking about a spider to having a big furry tarantula crawling over your hand? Any idea? Just a few hours. Just a few hours. But you need to face the fear, and you need to step into the fear. That's the only way out. And when they check back 30 days later, the same gains held. This is extraordinary, isn't it? With a little bit of effort and consistency and persistence—because it's important to us—we can outgrow our fears. The problem is, fear leads to avoidance. Fear leads to avoidance. And if we avoid the things that we're scared of, then we never go through this process. In fact, we reinforce it because we run away. So you can see how beneficial it is for us to face our fears.

Now in the next episode, we're going to talk about where these fears come from so that we can understand that we're able to change, and then we're going to talk about further how we can change them. Now, in each episode, you hear me talk about the Maxwell Leadership Certified Team, and if you want to develop your speaking, it really is a no brainer. All you need to do to check it out is go to maxwellleadership.com/speak, jump on a call with a program advisor and find out if it's a fit for you. It could be the best call you've ever made. As I said at the beginning, don't forget to download our companion resources. Simply go to maxwellleadership.com/thespeakersedge. And don't forget, communication is one of the most important skills you can develop, and it is very definitely a learnable skill. So keep learning, keep growing. Learn to master your message and inspire your audience every single time you speak. Thanks for listening today. I'll see you in the next episode, Part Two of developing unshakable self confidence.

Ep. 036 — How to Believe in Yourself (Even When You Don’t)

Hosted by Roddy Galbraith

A Maxwell Leadership Podcast Network production

Weekly highlights from The Speaker’s Edge — a Maxwell Leadership Podcast Network production hosted by Roddy Galbraith. Learn how to communicate with clarity, confidence, and impact — in business, on stage, and in life.

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The Speakers Edge

Weekly highlights from The Speaker’s Edge, a Maxwell Leadership Podcast Network production hosted by Roddy Galbraith. Learn how to communiate with clarity, confidence, and impact — in business, on stage, and in life.

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Full Transcript (Ep. 036 — How to Believe in Yourself (Even When You Don’t))
Released: November 3, 2025