Mastering Your Insecurities as a CEO

From my 30+ years behind microphones and cameras, I know that powerful people are often insecure and can be uncomfortable in their own skin, especially in certain high-stress situations. I can’t tell you how many CEOs, executives, and celebrities sat down with me for an interview and stumbled through it, unable to put a coherent sentence together or even sit still for a three-minute segment, their leg bouncing nervously, while talking about what makes their company or product so great.

Their confidence in the boardroom or on screen didn’t always translate well to an outside audience, leaving them scared and frustrated. But what really surprised me when I started consulting and doing corporate media training was the amount of reassurance some CEOs need about their talent and skills. Many have things they’re incredibly insecure about and have few, if anyone, to talk with about their fears, so they, instead, keep their game face on and hope for the best.

It’s completely normal for leaders to feel insecure at times—you’re the ones taking risks and dealing with challenges, all while trying to keep your company flourishing and employees engaged. These insecurities can be a product of your position and the expectations of being strong, decisive, and results driven. You feel that if you show weakness or uncertainty, you’ll be quickly maligned, and your business acumen questioned. But showing your human side can also strengthen and expand your influence.

Mastery vs Conquering 

The first step, when I’m working with leadership, is to have you acknowledge what is really causing the problem. It could be a lack of confidence, a lack of self-esteem, actual fear, or what I find, even for myself in some instances, the inability to acknowledge challenging emotions. Our instinct is to try to conquer them or push them aside instead of understanding them for what they’re trying to show us, learning from them, living with them … and using them to create success in our professional and personal lives. I call that mastery—you’re not getting rid of the challenging emotion, you’re just learning how to integrate it in a way that’s useful to you because that’s why it’s there in the first place.

Just like joy is here to show us how we want to live and the people and things that need to be in our lives, painful ones like envy or frustration pop up to show us the things we don’t need or that we have to work through to gain experience and wisdom. We, as a culture, deny their very existence because otherwise it looks like we’re “giving in”— such a negative connotation. But if you don’t deal with your challenging emotions, they’ll just come roaring back with the lessons taking a larger toll on your psyche the next time.

An example I like to use for this idea of mastery is the actual fear of public speaking. Instead of succumbing to it, how do you use this emotion to make it better? It depends on what’s causing the fear; maybe you think you’re better one-on-one with a client and speaking to a larger group freaks you out because there will be more questions you may not be able to answer. Then, preparation is your friend.

But just to be clear, mastery of anything challenging is not about beating it into submission. It’s about knowing what you have to offer and being very clear about that— and then acknowledging your fears about what you don’t know and building on that information to be confident in your performance, whatever that means. To get there you need to:

1. Acknowledge the fear or what’s lacking
2. Determine what you can use from it to make your product better: What can I learn from it? How do I make improvements? How do I live with it?

Insecurities also come from feeling stuck or not wanting to change your approach to new situations because you like how you do it now—it’s comfortable. For instance, you use the same slide deck for presentations, regardless of your audience, and you bomb, leaving you mortified. Or if it doesn’t go as well as you expected, you’re more nervous that you thought you’d be, or you’re confused, failing to realize that every speaking situation is different and you can’t prepare for all of them in the same exact way. Controlling the environment to standardize how you do stuff is nearly impossible, though it can be done to a small degree. But if the content changes, if the audience changes, if the size of the audience changes, all of those things are going to affect your presentation.

A CEO client of mine had this issue. He believed he was great one-on-one at events, being able to press the flesh and make connections. He said speaking to big groups or the media made him nervous because he couldn’t have that same effect.

“Yes, you can,” I said. “What is it you like about those more intimate interactions?” He said they were natural, more off the cuff.

“But aren’t you telling the same story over and over?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said, “but it’s my story,” adding that he told it in a way that made him feel proud of his work and company.

To overcome this lack of confidence, I explained that it’s about building a bridge from what you do really well in one place, and seeing the similarities from that to the new thing, and adapting what you already do well to this new situation.

“Going from talking to one or two people to a larger group is exactly the same. You’re still trying to connect with your message to one or two audience members. If a camera’s involved, then you’re using the camera as a pathway to the people on the other side.”

Vulnerability in the Office  

For some leaders, their insecurities affect how they make connections in the office and ultimately how they’re perceived by their staff. Emily Chang, CEO of Wunderman Thompson, West Coast Region was able to adapt what she does well at home into her work life by shedding her insecurities about being vulnerable in front of her staff. For years, her family has cared for chronically ill children in their home but she didn’t share that part of her life with her colleagues—she didn’t think it had anything to do with her work. But when a friend challenged her about why she kept it separate, it changed the way she approached work with fearless authenticity, bringing everything they did as a family into the workplace— and she said she’s “such a better person and hopefully a better leader because of it.”

So often, we bifurcate our lives into work and personal.  But the truth is that vulnerability in one area serves the other and how they’re both part of one living, breathing organism that, when integrated, can lead to great success. When you share authentically and with vulnerability, it’s returned in kind. It feeds itself and others feed off it as well. It’s just like saying, “What you put out, you get back.”

Chang said by integrating work and family, “We live differently, we engage differently, and we lead differently.” By embracing the “messy middle,” as she called it, she felt less like a boss and more like a leader. “When people can see you as human, you take a lot of that friction away … it brings out the very best with your teams, because they see you as human, not just the boss. The boss as a label is so hard to overcome. It’s a wall. It’s not that I’m not the boss, but I want to be more than that.” She said she’s willing to be vulnerable, to show people she’s hurting or insecure. “It’s a choice I made a while ago to say I’m going to be okay with my emotions,” she told me. “We have to be the ones who are fearless and equally willing to be vulnerable—setting the stage, showing the example—before others might feel free to do the same.”

By mastering your insecurities, fears, and emotions, you own your power, which leads to sharing a more authentic expression of yourself, and in turn, amplifying your team, showing them true leadership as you set the tone for your company’s culture and work environment.

Written by Jeanne Sparrow.
Have you read?
Countries with the highest human freedom.
World’s Safest & Most Dangerous Countries For Travelers.
Longest and Shortest Life Expectancies in the World.
World’s Most And Least Stressed Countries.
Best cities in the world.