Friday, July 25, 2014

Critical: Self-Evaluation versus Self-Confidence

One of the biggest inhibitors to the development of leadership potential in First Nations peoples is that of a lack of self-confidence.

To be fair, this isn’t just an issue for the Aboriginal peoples of Australia.  All around the world, leadership development programmes have to work hard to try and empower people who, for one reason or another, suffer from low self-esteem and low self-confidence.

Of course, in the context of Australian history, this is a particular problem for the First Nations – as we see regularly at the Stars Institute.

Yet being self-confident as a leader needs to be balanced against the need to also be capable of realistically assessing how well you are performing.

This isn’t easy to balance for any indigenous leadership program because there will be a tendency on the part of many people to fall into one of the following traps:

·         That they are somehow lacking the pre-requisites for effective self-development and leadership meaning, by a faulty logic extension, that they must always be wrong when a difference of opinion or problem arises;

·         That their performance in a given activity or task by definition cannot have been good enough because for most of their life they have been told that they aren’t capable;

By complete contrast, that leadership means never being wrong or at least if you are, that you can’t admit to it.

In a brief blog of this nature, there is no way that we have the space to outline how effective leadership programmes deal with these sometimes conflicting tendencies.

What is important is to teach techniques to assess the realities of a situation and to be able to differentiate between an allocation of responsibility and blame. 

If something goes wrong, you can’t learn from it unless you understand how the problem arose and who was responsible including, if necessary identifying objectively that the fault was yours. Of course, that doesn’t mean beating yourself up either. 

Blame, whether personal or directed at others, is simply recrimination and that’s usually pointless and counter-productive. 

Developing the strength of your personal character is all about being able to objectively decide when you are right and when you are wrong.  It’s not an easy skill to learn but we’ll help you! 

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