Build Confidence at Work with Jessie Ollier

Transcript:

Sofie: Hello everyone and welcome back to Claim Your Potential, the empowerment podcast. I’m your host, Sophie, and for this episode, we are joined by Jesse Ollier to discuss how to build confidence at work.  

Jesse is a certified high-performance and sales leadership coach. She is the founder of Aligned Prosperity Coaching, a Speaker, and Corporate Trainer. Her heart’s mission is to serve female entrepreneurs and professionals in building the life and wealth they truly desire. Her work is designed to clarify true purpose and identity, cultivate unwavering confidence, and create aligned strategies that drive success far beyond that of traditional training. She believes that an individual’s unique personal gifts are the gift to their unleashed potential and is devoted to inspiring others to break out of fear, bet on themselves, and become a highly paid sought-after authority in their field. Please welcome Jesse. Thank you so much for being with us today. 

Jessie: Thank you for having me. I love the mission of your podcast and I’m really excited to be here. 

 Sofie: Thank you. We are so excited to have you on, especially since, you know, you’re so passionate about serving female entrepreneurs and I would love to start off our episode with really providing context for people. So I’d love to hear a little bit about, you know, what your journey has been. Did you always have that self-confidence in the workplace? 

 Jessie: Definitely not. I think that is quite literally why I’m here. I had kind of this odd passion as a full introvert and someone who was really quite shy my entire life to go into the world of sales, which kind of made no sense. I went into a world that was very male-dominated, also very extrovert dominated and so I would say I spent the first ten-plus years of my career kind of quietly thinking, “What am I doing here? When is everyone going to figure out that I definitely do not belong here? When is it all going to fall apart?” And just really kind of in this internal battle of, I know I’m good at this thing, but I also 100% do not feel like I belong here and confidence without question was my biggest issue. 

Sofie: And I’m curious as to where do you think that sense of, you know, low confidence, low self-esteem stems from?  

Jessie: Yeah. So I think, originally for me I mean – I think I could go back to childhood and look at a bunch of different situations. I think the one that stands out the most for me is I have ADD and it’s a type two ADD which is actually far less. It doesn’t have a lot of outward symptoms and so it’s more like you’re a very internal person, you’re in your head a lot. Um, you kind of get lost in thought often so it doesn’t have the hyperactive attached to it which makes it harder for, you know, teachers and parents and people around you to quickly identify it. And so it as a child it made it really hard for me to learn how to read and that you know being a kid who’s like okay, “It’s your turn to stand up and read in front of the class,” like it was absolutely mortifying for me.   

So I had little situations where it was sort of like ingraining in me, “Don’t be seen. Don’t be seen.” When you be like, when you put yourself in a situation to be seen, it’s very uncomfortable. So I spent a lot of my life like just fearing those types of situations and then I think the other piece of it is, being an introvert in a world really that is designed to appreciate and get excited about someone who is bold and will speak up and will share their thought and being an extrovert is far more rewarded than being an introvert and so you kind of have this internal dialogue of like, “But where’s my place in the world? Like should I sort of be in this place where I keep my head down and do great work? But I’m sort of never seen because me being in a place of being seen isn’t really appreciated.“ And so I think it’s just the culmination of micro moments that surrounds those types of things that ultimately create an inner dialogue of fear and where’s my place, that type of thing. 

Sofie: Yeah, I think so often, you know, when you’re a kid there’s so much that stays with you and we don’t realize that it – it does stay with us and so, you know, when you become an adult a lot of those habits or, you know, the lack of support or, you know, those types of situations growing up really does shape who you are as a person, how you interact with others, who you are in the workplace, that that sense of self-confidence. And so, you know, going through that what are some of those, you know, techniques or strategies that you use in order to really build your self-confidence? 

Jessie: Yeah, great question. So I think there’s a couple of things to be really conscious of. I think the first thing is, most people get confidence a little wrong. So for most people I think the definition of confidence is this idea of, “I can be confident when I’m perfectly prepared for something, I can be confident when I’ve done all the research, I’ve practiced, I’ve done everything that I can to be fully ready.” And the other thing that is important for most people’s version of confidence is control – control of environment and so as long as I can have control over being in an environment where I can, you know, sort of safeguard against triggers and I can safeguard against scenarios where I know if I’m in this situation I kind of shrink a little bit so as long as I can control my environment, I can show up and do my thing. And what ultimately happens is that, you can be very confident in certain situations and ultimately what it – what happens is people end up limiting their careers. They limit their lifestyle. They limit kind of the experience that they have in life because they’re so focused on creating this perfect bubble where they can show up and then eventually, they kind of have this moment of, “But I want more.” “Like I know there’s more for me, but the way that I’ve designed myself right now, I wouldn’t be able to go after those bigger things.” And so I kind of became obsessed with understanding confidence, understanding motivation, understanding how it affects the way you show up in relationships and work and really started studying confidence. 

And so the more powerful version of confidence that I’ve worked really hard to develop for myself and teach to clients is a core confidence and core confidence is not dependent on environment and it’s not really dependent on preparation for a situation. It’s far more aligned with the idea that when you have full faith around your ability to navigate the unpredictable, you can show up confident in any scenario. You remove the walls. You remove the blocks, sort of the limits and parameters of where you can show up successfully and you go from kind of thinking, you know, “I‘m in my thirties. I think I just want to work with clients in their thirties, like that’s who I’m really meant to work with.” And now all of a sudden you can say, “Okay, I’m in my thirties but I’m really – I have a high level of expertise, I’m incredibly smart. I, you know, do my practice very well. I can work with people who are in their twenties all the way up to their sixties if there’s ah, the right alignment.” And so it kind of – it expands and it shows up across the board. So it could be who you’re working with it, could be the type of stage that you get on, it could be, you know, how you show up with different peers and their behavioral styles. But separating the idea of like circumstantial or situational confidence from core confidence is – makes a massive impact on people’s worlds. 

Sofie: And I think a lot of this too has to do with, you know, identifying what your strengths are and really, you know, not just playing to those strengths but also, you know, recognizing what some of your weaknesses are and making sure that you’re putting yourself in rooms – in situations where you can really develop those, um, those weaknesses and grow from it and become a little bit stronger in that. But I think that, you know, when it comes to that initial – that initial fire of confidence, the initial light, I feel like a lot of the time us as women have to be in a space where we feel like our strengths are being valued and that we’re able to really use those. And so I’m curious as to, you know, are there any – is there any advice that you would have for women that aren’t really sure what their strengths are yet? 

Jessie: Yeah, absolutely. So I mean the first thing I would do is – I would, one, you have to – you have to quiet the chatter. So I think one of the most powerful things that I’ve seen affect, you know, my own life and also again a lot of the people that I’ve worked with is we have this idea that thinking is the answer to everything in life. It’s like, “If I think about it enough, if I think about it hard enough, if I invest enough energy and sort of anxiety around it, I’m going to find my answer.” And the truth is that your best answers, your truest answers, your most aligned understanding of yourself and yourself in the world is not going to come from thinking. It’s going to come from listening. And the problem that most of us have is we don’t have a process of sitting and being still enough, both still physically, but also still in our mind, to be able to listen and to be able to kind of make contact with this inner knowing that is your true self. And so the chatter that happens for most of us – like this constant internal dialogue that’s happening that is sometimes, you know, self or subconscious stream but also intentional conscious thinking that is usually bringing in all of the things that we learn from society and culture and our, you know, our family members and our friends and that type of thing and so when we arrive at answers through thinking we go into this pattern of sort of initially trusting it and then saying, “Okay but what if I made a mistake? Could it be wrong? Could I be you know, thinking that this is the path and really I’m going to find out in like a couple days that it’s actually this other thing?” 

And so we go into this process of doubt and we spend an amazing amount of energy just thinking. And the – the way that you can accelerate both your, you know, personal life, your career, kind of everything around you, is removing the energy from thinking your way to things and learning how to be still and be quiet and allow your inner voice to talk to you. And it truly is kind of a, “I’m being talked to but I’m also thinking combination”. And when you are – when you find the way you can kind of recognize that you’ve tapped into this inner voice it’s going to come with a knowing. So instead of that path to self-doubt and sort of starting to take this great idea and then thinking all of the self-doubt around it, it’s going to be more of this, “This is the answer and I from my core fully trust it and I can just go take action on it.” And it’s this amazing acceleration that happens in your life because you’ve taken the energy away from all of the doubt chatter and just gone into really great idea that is aligned with your true self and running forward with an idea so you can take action quickly and I think part of that, you know, I – I kind of explain some of that and they might be sitting there going like, “That sounds great. How in the world do I do that?” Um and you know obviously there’s – there’s a process of wiring in that type of thing but one of the most important things is you have to look at what is happening in your mind and what is a should for you. So this is part of the reason that people get stuck on motivation – they get stuck on, you know, creating a life that they’re going to be connected to long enough to make it – like create to actually achieve a big dream, why they give up quickly on things like New Year’s resolutions. Um. We choose a lot of things for ourselves that are shoulds like someone around me – something in my, ah, you know, subconscious, something that I’ve learned has told me that I should want this thing, I should do this thing and if it’s not truly aligned with your strengths and with who you who you are kind of meant to be on this earth, your body is going to consistently create resistance around it. So one of the first things you can do to really get to know yourself and better understand your own strengths is work backwards by looking at all what are all of the things that you think you should do, but when you take action on it, you have this sort of body or internal resistance. 

Sofie: And yeah, oh my goodness. As you were, you know, as you were explaining that I was thinking of a lot of the decisions that I’ve made and feeling instant regret sometimes and, you know, I’m thinking about, you know, something that I’ve done whether it’s in career or even if it’s with Claim Your Potential or in my personal life. I could not agree more. All of the times where a decision was not right for me, it just wasn’t in. It didn’t reflect who I was, what I truly wanted to do. My mind resisted every single time and so I think that that is so powerful and I hope that everyone is letting that sink in with them and taking that away of when your body is resisting, your body is saying, “Hey there’s something wrong. There’s something that’s just not right here. Wait, what about this. I don’t think this is going to work.” You know, going through all those different points of resistance, it’s for a reason. And we have to listen to our minds when our mind is telling us that there is something off here and it’s, you know, it’s listening also to that gut feeling is what we like to call it but really listening to when your mind is – is showing doubt because that doubt is so powerful and there is a reason that there is doubt there and thinking back to all of the – the good decisions I have made, decisions that worked out well, absolutely I had that reaction of, “Yep this is it. There’s no other choice out here. I know this is it right.” 

 That super confident feeling and I think a lot of the time when you know that lack of confidence shows up, it’s because we’re making consistent decisions that are filled with doubt because they’re not right for us. And I think that creates really a lot of imposter syndrome for us as well because we’re not, you know, we’re not fully engaged with who we are, who we want to be, what our skill sets are, what our strengths are. If we’re making those decisions that aren’t right for us and don’t boost our confidence. And so I would love to, you know, hear a little bit of your insights with, you know, confidence and the connection to imposter syndrome and, you know, what we can do to really overcome that imposter syndrome and turn it into confidence? 

Jessie: Sure. Um, that’s – yeah, that’s a great question. And you know part of what – part of what I think is important to recognize too is like, I think sometimes people resist growth because they think, “I’ve built this thing, like I’ve – I’ve created this identity. Everyone around me sees me this way. I’ve built this career.” Like whatever it is, “I’ve put a lot of energy and time into this thing and if I grow, I might be for it, like my body my mind you know everything in me might force me to say I have to abandon this and the last thing I won’t do is just abandon this thing that I’ve dedicated all this energy to.” And so one thing that’s really important I think for people to understand is that sometimes the thing that needs to change and the thing that you have resistance around, it’s not the thing, it’s the way of the thing. And so for instance, like I work with a lot of people in the world of sales or a lot of women in sales and leadership and, you know, sometimes they come to me saying, “I’m at a point where I feel that either has to change drastically or I just need to get out. This is clearly not right for me.” And the truth is that it’s not that sales is not right for them. It’s the way they’re practicing sales, that’s not right for them and often it’s because they’ve been taught by, you know, through a very masculine system versus women are designed like – they’re born for sales. But then they go into organizations and they’re taught how to sell like a man and that feels bad so sometimes it’s looking at the way versus the thing but when you talk about the idea of how do you kind of, develop that confidence, or I’m sorry – give me give me that specific question you had at the end there again I lost it. 

Sofie: Yeah, no, it’s all good. I was curious, you know, how we can overcome imposter syndrome and really turn it into confidence?  

Jessie: Yes. Okay, sorry. I distract – I have like I said I have ADD so I get distracted really easily. So the interesting thing with imposter syndrome – so this is this is part of what I got kind of obsessed with understanding and it’s really understanding like how does your brain work and how are you. In some scenarios able to just easily tap into confidence and in other scenarios just sort of lost to chaos and panic and desperately trying to figure out a situation versus being able to just show up and – and navigate it. And a lot of it has to do with what we call working memory. So working memory is a brain function that if you imagine it like a pie – like a pie chart. There are in any moment trying to you ask me a question and my job is to then take that question translate it into something that makes sense for me, tap into my past experience and say okay, “What is similar to this thing that I’m being asked right now? How did I solve it? Does that solution make sense for this?” Like each of these of these little pieces of work are part of the pie for working memory and you need every piece of the pie to be able to then come back and deliver something powerful and something that is truly in a like at the level of – of ability that you have like truly at your capacity. What happens often is that when we are in a scenario where we say, you know, “I’m good at this but I’m not good at this and I should be better. I should be like quicker, I should be more talented, I should be smarter, I should be able to speak without turning red or I should be able to look” – whatever it is. We have all of these shoulds going through our head and what happens is those things create this fear fog. And it starts eating up the pieces of the pie. So now instead of being able to go through this full function, you have like parts of it that you can do and then you just kind of stall out and this plays a role in the experience of impostor syndrome often.  

It’s like, I’m in this thing because I believe in myself and my ability to do it, but when I show up and step up to the plate something derails, something sort of short circuits and so I have these moments of being able to deliver and then the next time maybe not being able to deliver. And over time then we’re going to start creating the sense of like, “Do I belong here? When are they going to figure out that I don’t belong here?” And the more that that happens, the more your working memory is going to get interrupted and so the first thing that we need to do is, we need to identify like what is the inner dialogue. What are the things that ignite that, sort of ignite that fog that starts to take over in your mind because and – and one of the important things to understand is that one of the main pieces that ignites that is you are a person standing on a linear line. Right? And you belong exactly where you are like you belong exactly where you stand with your strengths, with your weaknesses, with everything that exists in your life like that’s where you’re supposed to be but then we create this pressure of, “But I should be better. I should be as good as the other person that I – that I watch all the time, that I listen to, that I follow on social media.” And the gap between where you actually belong and where you think you should be, that gap is full of all the stuff that interrupts your working memory. It’s full of anxiety and fear and doubt and stress and it causes fatigue and brain fog and all kinds of things and so the best thing that you can do is identify your shoulds and start slowly working them out. And part of the way that you do that is you need to give full permission to who you are right now. So for instance, the weaknesses. Instead of looking for an environment that doesn’t maybe bring out your weaknesses or – or protecting yourself from an environment like that give permission to your weaknesses, stop hiding them. Don’t create fear and shame around them, give permission to them and say, “These are my strengths and these are the things that I’m working on and today my goal is to take like one step forward from where I am instead of standing paralyzed with my brain full of the ideas of – of where I should be.” Does that make sense? 

Sofie: Absolutely and I think that as you were talking about, I was thinking about what it’s been like really starting a nonprofit and you know who I chose to – to be on the board of directors and that was really something that was very important to me was I realized that hey I’m never going to grow as a person, as an executive director, if people are not questioning me all the time, if people are not asking me, “Hey Sophie, why did you make this decision. Or hey Sophie, you know this is a great idea, but I think it might be a little bit better if we did this instead.” And I was realizing that I was surrounding myself with people that weren’t open or weren’t willing to give me that pushback and so when I was thinking about, all right, who do I want to be on my board of directors, that was the first thing that came to my mind was I need to be able to grow with my nonprofit, I need to be able to grow as a leader and I’m never going to be able to do that if I am picking people that you know are going with the flow that are saying, “Yeah – yeah, whatever you want, whatever you want, we’ll just make it happen.” And so I’m very happy to have, you know, a group of women that are like hey you know I think this is great but have we thought about doing it this way, or you know what I don’t think that’s going to work for us, maybe we should try this instead. 

And so I think that, um, you know, to your point there with being comfortable and being okay with putting ourselves in environments that really bring out those weaknesses and push us to develop those weaknesses, I think is really key to quieting some of that imposter syndrome because, you know, in imposter syndrome, we’re asking ourselves, “Well, who am I to do this? Who am I to be in this position? Who am I, you know, to have this role?” But if we’re in situations – if we’re putting ourselves in environments that help us thrive and help us really develop those weaknesses to where we can gain a little bit more confidence in those weaknesses than I feel like that really does help quiet that imposter syndrome. 

 Jessie: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s interesting that you even mentioned board. I talk to, you know, I often ask clients tell me who – who’s on your board and you don’t have to have a technical board. It just means, “Who are the people that you bring your ideas to? Who are the people that you bring your goals to? Who are the people that you are sort of surrounded in your, when you’re thinking when you’re training your brain to think I’m in this situation? What’s my process for navigating the situation? Like what’s the process of the people who are around you?” And it’s so common for people to have, you know, this sort of board of advisors in their life who are their friends and their family and maybe, you know, often people who are kind of like behind them if you were to sort of rate people on a scale of – of their success trajectory or where they’re wanting to go. It’s people who are not quite where they want to be and that’s a safe place to be. It’s safe to be around people who are going to you know, simply support but it will not help you get where you want to go and the worst thing you can do is bring your ambitious idea to people who their biggest goal is safety and security and so, you know, finding a job that feels comfortable but doesn’t challenge their inner world because they’re going to help you.  

They’re going to help try to align you with their thought process. Even if it’s 100 % unintentional, but that’s what it’s going to look like. And so, you know, mentioning the idea of you can have people around you who don’t necessarily for themselves seek that feedback like they just want to feel good about what they’re doing at work or you can have people who they personally constantly seek feedback because they’re thinking, “It’s okay if I’m not perfect for this role. My job isn’t to show up perfect. It’s to show up willing to learn and move forward today.” And when you get people around that who – who do that for themselves they will naturally do that for you right. And so part of what’s really important is look at your board of advisors look at the people you bring your stuff to and say, “Do they think in a way that is going to help us grow together or do they think in a way that is going to keep me where I am.” And that’s incredibly important because you will become a version of the people that you’re around and so go look for people who are practicing what you want to experience. 

Sofie: Yeah, I think that is such a key takeaway from this episode is that, you know, environment is everything whether it’s, you know, what life was like for you growing up and the type of, you know, environments you were in all the way up to adulthood where it’s all right, “Who am I talking with every day? Who am I bringing my ideas to? Who am I trying to show up as my best self for and with?” And I think there’s so much power in that and so thank you so much for sharing that and I would love to, you know, wrap up our episode with, you know, if there’s anything else that our listeners should be taking away from this episode, what is that key big idea? 

Jessie: Yeah. So I’m not going to add something new I think – I think I want to stick to the idea that because this is it’s the most powerful accelerator in your life. When you focus on developing core confidence and core confidence requires a release of control. I think a lot of people have a misconception around control and they think that if I control things around me or if I control myself and people and all that, that I have power and the truth is that control is literally the giving up of power. You’re giving the power up to the thing that you’re trying to control is so important so powerful that it could derail everything and you’re focusing power on that thing so to really develop core confidence, one, you have to practice releasing control and that will naturally give you power back but then you need to focus on developing the ability to navigate the unpredictable and when you really dedicate yourself to learning that you will start showing up to bigger, you know, higher worth, higher value situations, bigger stages. Whatever it is that you’re trying to achieve. In a completely different way versus kind of being like a big fish in a small pond staying in that small pond where you can have control where, you know, you can show up fully confident because you’ve been there enough. It’s familiar enough to you developing that core confidence is the keys and that’s, I think, the biggest thing that if I were going to pick one thing to work on, that would be it. 

Sofie: This is amazing. Thank you so much for sharing that Jessie and I, you know, to wrap everything up I would love to know where can our listeners connect with you. 

Jessie: Yeah, absolutely. So I’m on all social media. Um, so the best places to find me is going to be on LinkedIn, on Instagram, and then you can also go to my website which is just Jessie Ollier and Ollier is confusing, its O-l-l-i-e-r – but Jessie Ollier dot com. 

Sofie: Thank you so much for coming on to the podcast Jessie. I really enjoyed our conversation and I think there’s a lot of amazing things that, you know, the women listening to this can really take away when it comes to building that confidence in the workplace and just in life in general. And so thank you again so much for coming onto the podcast. 

Jessie: Absolutely. Thank you for having me.