Do you ever get frustrated that your ideas are not considered? Do you not always rally the kind of support you need from your team to knock it out of the park? Do you run out of steam out of sheer exhaustion from trying to do it all on your own? I see you! And it doesn’t have to be that hard. You just need a little strategy.
If you want to become more effective and efficient while doing more with less, my five-step proven and actionable strategies of the Velvet Machete® Leadership journey will help you get there. Now, more than ever, all levels of leadership across many industries need to become influential, confident, compassionate leaders in this fast-paced, ever-changing, sometimes even volatile world we live in today.
Here are the 5 Steps to Becoming a Confident, Compassionate Leader
Step 1: Define Your Personal Brand
To be confident in your leadership, you must get clear on your distinct value. I mean, there are a LOT of valuable things about you, but when you zero in on a defined personal brand, you are clear on what type of people and opportunities you want to attract to help you reach your goals and provide value to others. In fact, as you move through the 5 pillars of Velvet Machete® Leadership Journey, you will take action that supports your brand and provides tangible proof that who you say you are, and certainly someone other people can count on. Without this foundational layer of self-awareness it is hard to build upon it with the next four steps.
Step 2: Build Supportive Environments
It is imperative to either leverage or refine the various environments you already have in place or create new environments that uniquely support your specific and natural habits, personality, behavioral tendencies, and preferences. Without the self-awareness built in step one, it is difficult to determine how you are going to support that brand’s integrity with the following custom-built environments:
- Your workplace culture
- Your physical & digital work environment
- Your systems & processes
- Your people environments, AKA your network
- Your private environments (spiritual, mental, health & physical)
Environments that align with who you are will set you up for success to play in your strengths and help you proactively “bubble wrap” the more fragile areas of your persona.
Step 3: Master Your Communication
Perhaps this third level is where you really shine if you’ve already defined your personal brand and built environments to support that. If this is you, then you speak with authority while listening with intent to drive results. You can confidently interact with others with compassion because you know they have unique strengths and you can help them identify environments they might need to succeed, as well. See how those first two steps begin the confidence journey?
Just like in external promotions, once you have brand recognition and brand loyalty, which you fortify with your strong environments, you can then market and sell your ideas…but you have to know who you are talking to in order to sell your ideas and create connection. So whether you are trying to influence internally in your organization or externally to customers you will need know your audience, embrace a two-way communication approach, understand your leadership communication style, get comfortable with difficult conversations, and master meeting mayhem.
You have to start with the “me” side of things, and then the Master Your Communication step is what transitions to the “we” side of things.
Mastering your communication is the most critical piece in becoming a confident, compassionate leader. Without communication, it is impossible to influence others.
Step 4: Master Your Engagement
When you are masterful at engagement, you can easily see & harvest the greatness in others while rallying support for your initiatives. You can see that confidently understanding your value through a strong personal brand, and then applying that to your contributions to others, while building supportive environments to fortify your efforts, all help you zero in on how to best communicate with unique audiences. Only then can you really start to be effective with your engagement efforts, as it affords you the ability to stand in your truth and leverage your gifts, all while being able to also meet others where they are. It’s really a magical talent to cultivate!
Howard Thurman said, “There are two questions that we have to ask ourselves. The first is ‘Where am I going?’ and the second is ‘Who will go with me?”
Remember, no woman or man is an island. We are a part of something bigger than ourselves always, but especially at work. We need to rely on the talents and influence of others to move towards our goals successfully.
Step 5: Build Your Influence
Truly, most everything you need to learn to become influential is honed in the first four steps, but I like to put a cherry on top! So to next-level your influence you have to take the spark of feeling self-assured and in turn command confidence from others. You will explore how to inspire results through compassionate understanding while learning how to be present. When you masterfully combine the steps in the Velvet Machete® Leadership Journey, you will be known as a professional problem solver–as a person who gets things done–who is confident in your contributions, compassionate in how you engage with others, and ultimately an extraordinarily influential leader.
Enroll in the Velvet Machete® Leadership Academy
If you want to go deeper into these proven concepts while being guided (live) by a coach who has been through it all and seen it all, then I invite you to check out my Velvet Machete Leadership Academy. We kick things off again on December 7th and you’ll have access to me twice a week via Zoom and every day in our private Facebook group as you navigate through each step in the journey.
Take My Leadership Personality Quiz
Take this brief personality quiz to quickly define your distinct value, then leverage your results to position yourself as an influential leader who makes things happen.
Find out what makes you great, and what you might need to “bubble wrap” to fortify your more fragile traits that may hold you back. (AKA the things that simply aren’t your jam.)
Don’t overthink any question…just go with your first instinct.
After just a few short questions you will receive powerful insight into how you show up at your best as a leader, and you will even receive a downloadable PDF of your results!
You can take it for FREE here: https://amberhurdle.com/leadershipquiz/