The Confident Leader Retreat

When a collapser speaks, they tend to allow their words to trail off without finishing sentences. Their voices loses volume and pitch and this undermines their ability to make their point. Their audience loses connection and confidence in them as they often have to pick up the rest of the conversation. Collapser’s find their confidence is deteriorating, but they don’t understand why. At this level we need to make them aware that it’s happening and help them decide to change.

The struggler will often keep their volume and pitch low in their voice. They’re often afraid of saying the wrong thing and hope that if they speak quietly enough, no one will notice. The irony is that it stands out even more but for the wrong reasons. The struggler needs to be given the right advice and steps to improve their communication.

The amateur often has some confidence and ability but isn’t using their body and voice intentionally or in a way that aligns with their message and audience. The next focus for them is to have pressure applied to them so they have the opportunity to use the skills in different contexts. This will allow them to see the impact of their mind, body and voice on the audience and ability to get their message through. The key insight for the amateur is that they don’t know what they don’t know.

The intern often has the ability to use a broad range of skills to get their message across. But they haven’t had enough experience to use it all to improve. They recognize they have the things to learn and are very keen to do so. At this level, it is about observing the master, operating from high to low pressure to see them in action and applying these learnings in practice themselves. Interns are about 80% of the way on their journey to communication mastery. 

Professionals appear confident and skilled but may doubt themselves in some situations which can cause them to lose their self-belief. Often they’re listening to the wrong people or beating themselves up a little too much when they are in fact quite effective communicators.  Things like going red, shaking legs and pitch variations and other irrelevant things may be putting them off, but in fact, the audience isn’t noticing them at all. At this level, leaders have about  90% confidence. They just need reassurance that they’re on the right track.

The master is focused on being exceptional. They know that you never achieve perfection, but they can keep learning to help them stay sharp and focus on continuous improvement to be the best communicator they can be. They surround themselves with masters of their craft, thrive on the challenge of communicating well and will even begin teaching other leaders to be more effective in their communication. This is the level the Confident Leader Retreat wants to help you achieve.