‘Confidence can fuel good performance, doubt can sap performance.’
Julie Smith’s first book, Coach Yourself Confident, focused on the individual experience of confidence: closing the gap between how capable we are and how capable we believe ourselves to be. It won quite a few awards.
Her new book, Contagious Confidence, explores confidence as a performance variable: a powerful way for leaders to help teams do their best work.
But the funny thing about writing about confidence – even second time around, and even with awards in the bag – is that much of the time you don’t feel very, well, confident. Julie talks about perfectionism, inner critics (hers is called Nigel) and the ‘difficult second album’, but also the surprising joy of giving yourself permission to write a shitty first draft and that sensation of freewheeling when it’s all working perfectly.
It’s a conversation about confidence, leadership, writing, community – and sprouts.
Julie’s site: https://talentsprout.co.uk/
Julie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julie-smith-talent-sprout/
Alison (Jones) on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-alison-jones/
The 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge: www.proposalchallenge.com
Link for submitting your clip for Episode 500: https://bit.ly/45RfpdY
Alison Jones: I’m here today, again, with Julie Smith, which is brilliant. So Julie is a leadership coach and a keynote speaker, she is the founder of leadership consultancy Talent Sprout, and she’s the author of the multi-award winning, let’s just take a moment to appreciate that, Coach Yourself Confident: Ditch the self-doubt tax, unlock humble confidence.
And her new book is called Contagious Confidence: A leader’s guide to building belief and powering performance.
So first of all, welcome back, Julie.
Julie Smith: Thank you very much.
Alison Jones: Lovely to have you again. What is it about confidence that just sucks you in and keeps you writing about it?
Julie Smith: Does seem to, doesn’t it? I think there’s probably a couple of things. So, first of all, I think it’s like a universal human theme. So I don’t meet many people who don’t recognize the sort of ups and downs in their confidence. And then secondly, I think it’s a real performance variable. So it kind of– There’s a connection between confidence and performance in multiple directions.
If I go into something with a sense of belief and confidence, then that helps me to perform well. Equally, if I start listening to the voice of self-doubt and start questioning myself, then I get in the way of my performance.
Confidence can fuel good performance, doubt can sap performance.
So yes, I think there’s that connection as well that I’ve been increasingly interested in.
Alison Jones: And it actually, it works on the receiving end as well almost, doesn’t it? That if you’re conveying confidence, people tend to accept what you’re doing more readily than if you are sending out signals of lack of confidence.
Julie Smith: Yes, absolutely.
Apparently, research tells us that we mix up confidence and competence. So we assume therefore that if somebody is portraying a point of view, whatever it is, confidently, that it must be right and they must know what they’re talking about.
And of course, that’s not, it’s not a given. It’s not always the case, but that’s a sort of mental shortcut that we make.
Alison Jones: That’s why we’re in the mess we’re in, you could say, in fact. Let’s not talk about politics. Let’s talk about the relationship between book one and book two, because I do think it’s a fascinating evolution of your thinking and a sort of expansion of your thinking.
So for those who don’t know the first book and the second book, just explain a little bit, and then just talk us through what the sort of thought process behind that was.
Julie Smith: Yes.
So the first book is really a sort of individual take on confidence, so a response to seeing far too many amazing leaders in my coaching room who don’t see their own amazingness.
And the work to do is often to help them to close the gap between how they see themselves and the kind of reality of what they’re able to do, the reality of their skills and their capabilities. So it’s supporting them to close that confidence gap and unlock the potential and performance that they’ve really got within them.
The second book leans more into confidence as a performance variable from a leader’s standpoint. So again, a kind of theme that I see a lot with leaders is, and I don’t think this is going to change anytime soon, agendas demand getting bigger and bigger whilst the resources that they have at their fingertips stay the same or perhaps even diminish.
So the sort of question that they end up grappling with is, how do I make that ambitious agenda a reality without burning out either myself or my team? So it’s looking for another way to strengthen performance that isn’t just let’s be more and more efficient and let’s do more and more stuff or cracking the whip.
And my suggestion is it’s about unleashing confidence. So really leaning into that idea of confidence as a performance variable. How do you help individuals to find their confidence, and how do you help that collective to really unlock the powerful sense of we’ve got this?
Alison Jones: And there’s a couple of things occur to me now. One, is that idea about the contagion. It’s like you can’t do this unless you’ve done it for yourself. There’s a sort of natural progression there, isn’t it? Yes. And the other thing is about psychological safety, because this almost feels, we talk about psychological safety and I don’t mean it’s negative, but I mean it’s a sort of hygiene factor, whereas this is the next stage on from that.
Julie Smith: Yes. I think there’s, I talk about psychological safety in the book as being the sort of fertile soil in which you grow confidence for the team, because I think that if we feel safe, if we feel that we can try something new, that we aren’t at risk of being judged, which is maybe the real summary of what psychological safety is, then that enables us to stretch ourselves to do something new, to do something that’s different.
And it’s in the doing the new thing that we might realize, ah, we’re capable of that, and we grow our confidence alongside expanding our capability and expanding our repertoire of things that we can do.
So I think there’s a really strong connection between psychological safety and confidence.
Alison Jones: Yes. Love that.
One of the big issues about writing a book about confidence is that you must turn the spotlight on yourself, because writing a book demands a certain level- so yes, you see where I’m going with this.
Tell us, what is it like in terms of your confidence writing a book about confidence?
Julie Smith: I think the first thing to say is that often it was vaguely comical that I was writing about, literally writing about the ebb and flow of confidence whilst experiencing the particular ebb and flow of confidence in the book writing process.
Alison Jones: Help or do you not see it for yourself?
Julie Smith: I think sometimes you don’t see it… So sometimes I did see it for myself eventually. So I remember posting– When I was writing the first book, I remember posting something, there was a picture, you know, a selfie on LinkedIn, and I had my, literally had my sort of head in my hands, and it was a real, “Why am I so stuck on this section on perfectionism?”
I appear to be in an absolute perfectionism trap whilst trying to write about perfectionism.
Alison Jones: You couldn’t make it up, could you?
Julie Smith: You couldn’t make it up. Sometimes I literally did just have to laugh at myself. And I think on another level, it was in some ways it was interesting live research.
And I do think there’s something about knowing the topic from the inside out. I don’t have to write about me, but there’s something about my relationship to the topic that it’s not only academic that I think has to be useful.
Alison Jones: And you’ve got that multiple aspects of you. So you are a practitioner, you’re a leader, you’re a writer. Is it different at all in those different applications? Are there different challenges?
Julie Smith: Definitely. I think there’s a big thing that was different. If I go back to the start of whenever it was, 2023, when I started writing Coach Yourself Confident, the huge difference was I had no evidence to support confidence as a writer. So I was a beginner. And I do think if I reflect on the ups and downs of my confidence through the process, one of the things that I was able to do pretty well at the outset was make the distinction in my own mind between I’m a beginner and therefore I don’t know how to do this. I’ve never done this before. It’s unreasonable to expect myself to know what I’m doing.
And the feeling of being an imposter, which would’ve sounded more if I was any good as an author, I’d just be able to do this. This would be easy. And I think actually I’m really pleased that I was able to avoid inflicting the sort of pain associated with that second position, the imposter view, and instead lean into I’m learning at this. I’m learning every day, and it’s unreasonable to expect myself to just be brilliant and write brilliant stuff first off.
That’s not, it’s not going to happen
Alison Jones: Even just articulating that difference is really helpful, isn’t it? Because you become fused with the I’m rubbish at this story.
Julie Smith: Yes, and that’s not really massively motivational, is it?
Alison Jones: It’s not terribly helpful, no.
Julie Smith: As you’re sitting in front of your laptop, then it doesn’t really bode for a good, yes, a good writing session.
Alison Jones: But of course, as you’re writing your first book in the first draft, you’re comparing that with the finished, polished edition of Simon Sinek or whoever you have on your bookshelf who’s written I don’t know how many books before, and you’re like it’s it’s not like that. It should be like that.
So that gap between what other people are writing, because don’t see their first draft, and what you see yourself writing is huge, isn’t it?
Julie Smith: It is huge, and I think that talks to, I talk about saboteurs in that first book, and one of them is comparisonitis. And of course that would be an utterly unfair comparison to reach for any of the many books that I’ve got on my shelf and compare my first thoughts to what has been printed, because it’s an entirely– it’s apples and oranges.
It’s just, it’s completely– it’s like a apples and koalas.
Like it’s just completely- it’s so different. It’s an unfair comparison. And I think there’s other, there were other saboteurs that were… So comparisonitis is a watch-out, and I don’t think that one hooked me, so I think I was able to look at finished books and use them as kind of inspiration rather than…
Alison Jones: …to beat yourself around the head with.
Julie Smith: Exactly, yes. But there were other saboteurs that I had much more of a battle with. A card-carrying perfectionist I would say, that is tricky. So being a beginner book writer and being a perfectionist they don’t necessarily sit together comfortably. And I’ve said to so many people that the single most useful piece of advice was something that you said back in the bootcamp, and you shared what Anne Lamott wrote about shitty first drafts. All good writers write shitty first drafts, et cetera, et cetera.
And I then had on a Post-it, a literal Post-it, “The aim is a shitty first draft,” and I attached it to my monitor and it stayed there, in fact, throughout the whole process. And I just found that really liberating, that reminder of it doesn’t have to be perfect, it doesn’t even have to be good. The aim is just to write just some words, just some thoughts, just some messages, because once you’ve got that, it’s so much easier to edit.
So that permission, literal permission-giving Post-it was probably the most useful counter to my perfectionism.
Alison Jones: I love that. Tell us about the other saboteurs
Julie Smith: Gosh, there’s some of them– Oh, so I had quite a dialogue with my inner critic. So the inner critic is another saboteur that if we listen to it, it’s that unhelpful voice of doubt that runs a kind of commentary in our heads. And I don’t think I had much of a… my inner critic didn’t keep up a commentary on, who are you to write a book? Because I was okay with that.
I was still with the, “I’m a beginner. I can try this. That’s fine.” But it did have quite a point of view on sections that I’d written, and often would be quite vocal middle of the night with helpful evaluations like, “That’s a bit sloppy,” or ” What point are you actually trying to make there?” That wasn’t very conducive to either confidence or sleep.
So, I did– I guess that was a good example of deploying some of the things that I then was writing about. So this whole kind of idea of distancing myself from my inner critic, “Thank you. I understand you’re trying to keep me safe. You don’t want me to make an absolute fool of myself, but I’m choosing to give this a go.”
And slightly laughing at… I call him Nigel. So one of the things I suggested is calling your inner critic Nigel, or not call it Nigel, calling your inner critic something.
And so it just, I’m able to distance myself a bit from the words that Nigel has to offer.
Alison Jones: especially at 3 in the morning. Yes. Bless him.
Julie Smith: Yes. Yes.
Alison Jones: Was it, second time round, so tell me about the trajectory of your own confidence. Winning multiple awards, it has got to help with that, right?
Julie Smith: You’d think, right? You would think. There’s,
Alison Jones: I would, but then I’m second-guessing you and I’m thinking maybe it just sets you up for the difficult second album thing. I don’t know.
Julie Smith: Exactly that, I would say. Exactly that. So I think some aspects were easier in just that I knew what I was doing in a way that I didn’t know what I was doing first time around. I was learning all the time, at every stage. Some aspects were the same. I still heard quite a lot from Nigel. I still battled my perfectionism. I still battled FOPO, which maybe we can come back to in a moment.
But the thing that was different second time around was that second album thing, was the fear of failure, that somehow it reared its head much more because I knew that I could write a book, but there was a lot, there was a doubt about, can I write another good book?
The, have I expended all of my good book writing energy? It’s like it’s done. I’ve come to the end of it. What if this one is disappointing? What if I’ve set up a promise with the first one that is not fulfilled with the second one?
So there was actually a sort of new reason to second-guess myself, which is ironic.
You’d think, success should help, but it didn’t in a way.
Alison Jones: I think the lesson here is like anything is fodder for the fear, isn’t it? You can tell yourself any kind of story about any kind of evidence and as long as you recognize it’s a story, then you’re on your way to actually being able to perform.
Julie Smith: Yes. Yes.
And it was interesting, and most of the time I did know it was a story. I did recognize that. There was a moment, and you’ll remember this because one of the things I did was reach out to you and go, “Alison, help.”
But there was a particular moment where I think I was very fearful that maybe actually it’s rubbish, was when I got feedback from the beta readers. So this is the second book. My second draft went out to a group of beta readers, and I got loads and loads of useful feedback back. Some of that useful feedback was quite challenging, and first time round with book one, I actually found that a really positive and uplifting process, like from start to finish, because I knew that what I wanted was feedback. I knew it wasn’t finished, and so everything was received as really valuable.
The second time round, actually I had a massive confidence dip. There was some of that challenging feedback that now I can see as incredibly useful, at the time really triggered an enormous wobble and I questioned the whole thing.
Maybe it’s just the wrong book and I’m writing for the wrong people, and it’s the wrong this and it’s the wrong that. So it was a stronger reaction. In fact, a new reaction to beta reader feedback that second time round.
Alison Jones: It’s interesting as well because I happen to have been in on a fairly early stage of this book, because you were doing the first draft of the second book at Write It Wild, and what I noticed was how much you enjoyed it. And I don’t think you enjoyed it quite that much first time around, and I’m really interested whether that was the just, “Oh I’m no longer such a beginner and I’m enjoying my growing proficiency at this,” or was it just because you were sitting outside in a beautiful place?
I don’t know.
Julie Smith: I think there was a lot to do with sitting outside at a beautiful place. It was just an incredible setting. I think also because this book is about leadership, in some ways it’s in my kind of happy place. That is the territory that I spend my days in. I am alongside leaders and leadership teams, so I think there’s something about the territory that I was venturing into that felt really, I’m not sure if familiar is the right word, but I enjoy it. It’s a place that I like to go.
And I think also I had learnt some ways of writing. I think maybe some of the things that I’d learnt from the first time and then honed the second time, I was certainly quicker to get into just writing a load of words. So probably 90% of what I wrote at Write It Wild does not appear in the final book, but I knew that when I was writing it, and that’s all part of it, and I was entirely up for that.
So I think maybe it, you can lean into the joy a bit more when you know…
Alison Jones: And that’s what I really noticed, and I’m just remembering you used the analogy of freewheeling downhill and feeling almost guilty that you were enjoying it so much and you were finding it so easy. And I’m like, “Look, there’s going to be loads of uphill in this journey. Just enjoy the downhill.”
And you almost gave yourself permission just to put the worry, the perfectionism, everything to one side and just enjoy that kind of blurting it all out just to get the first shitty draft out.
Julie Smith: Definitely. And as you’re saying that, I’m thinking why wouldn’t you? Why would you put yourself through writing a book if you’re not going to find enjoyment in it? And there’s, yes there is something quite ironic there, isn’t there, it was almost like I was scrabbling around for something to be concerned about.
Should I be enjoying it this much? Is there something wrong here?
Alison Jones: It’s so funny, isn’t it? First I was concerned because it was hard work. Now it’s easy and I’m really worried.
Julie Smith: Some people are never pleased
Alison Jones: Some people are just never happy. Flipping perfectionists.
You know I always ask people for their best tip for somebody who’s writing a book, Julie. I’ve already asked you this, I wonder, do you want to just revisit that question again, or is there something specific to a second book or even just confidence that you’d like to come back to?
Julie Smith: If I think about the tips that I’ve given anyone, lots of people ask once you’ve got a book out there, lots of people ask. And the two things that I find myself saying a lot, one is the Post-it with the shitty first draft on it. We’ve talked about that.
The other is not to try and do it on your own, is to do it in community. And I think there is something really important theme about confidence in community. And that’s lots of different ways. So there’s the brilliant community that you have built, there’s your team, there’s other people who are writing a book and are at a similar time. There’s the leaders who are interviewed, because not only do I get…
I think what was interesting to me was I got stories from them and I got really useful content, but I also just got a whole load of motivation and encouragement and energy
Alison Jones: Energy and excitement, just the interest. All of that kind of keeps you going, doesn’t it, when your own energy fails you.
Julie Smith: It really does. It really does. So there’s lots of ways that ,probably the big thing I learned was in my head, writing a book was quite a solo task, and it’s just not, or it certainly doesn’t need to be. And I think any book is a better book from being written around and with other people in lots of different ways.
Alison Jones: Yes. Brilliant tip. Thank you.
And I always ask people, as again, to recommend a book. What have you read recently that you’d recommend to us?
Julie Smith: Oh, gosh. What have I read recently that I recommend? I’ve got one that I’ve reread recently, and then I’ll see if something else pops into mind. One that I’ve reread recently is called Not Knowing, and it’s by Steven D Souza and Diana Renner. And it’s brilliant. I love it for lots of reasons.
I love– I think it’s so current. I can’t believe it’s, I think it’s about 10 years old, but it feels so current because it really is about leaning into curiosity rather than certainty and questions rather than answers and perhaps loosening our grip on the need to find stuff out and to find stability and certainty that is probably false.
Lean into doubt, lean into questions. And also the format’s great, so I think it’s lots and lots of chapters. They’re all less than five pages long, and there’s lots of lovely graphics in it, so it’s just a kind of an enjoyable read.
And then the other one that I’ve not finished it yet, but I’m partway through Flourish by Daniel Coyle.
I think he’s brilliant. I find it’s…
Alison Jones: Yes.
Julie Smith: He’s so easy to read. I think that’s the thing. It’s both fascinating content, really good, interesting research conveyed in a way that I feel like I’m reading fiction.
Alison Jones: Yes. He writes so well, yes.
If you haven’t read his book on culture, do. It’s so well done.
Julie Smith: Brilliant. that is absolutely fantastic, yes The Culture Code, is that one? Yes. Talent Code’s good as well. Basically anything by Daniel Coyle is a high recommend.
Alison Jones: Formerly of this podcast as well, so you might want to go back and listen to him, yes so talked to Daniel Coyle. He’s very interesting to talk to. Brilliant.
Great recommendations. Thank you very much.
Julie, if people want to find out more about you, more about Coach Yourself Confident, more about Contagious Confidence, more about Talent Sprout, where should they go?
Julie Smith: Yes. So two places. First of all, my website, so that’s talentsprout.co.uk.
Sprout as in growth, I always feel the need to say, rather than, as in vegetable, Brussels sprout and all that. But talentsprout.co.uk.
And then from a social media perspective, I hang out on LinkedIn. There are unsurprisingly quite a lot of people called Julie Smith, but if you put Julie Smith, Talent Sprout you’ll find me.
Alison Jones: I share your pain as a Jones. Yes. yes absolutely.
I’m not sure about naming any business after a vegetable, but if you were going to choose a vegetable, sprout would probably not be it, would it?
Julie Smith: No. No, but Talent Carrot doesn’t really work, does it?
Alison Jones: No, really not. No.
Julie Smith: It’s talent and growth and works.
Alison Jones: I love it. Thank you so much, Julie. It was great to talk to you again. Great to dig into not just the writing, but the sort of the meta level of writing about a topic and experiencing the topic at the same time and how you develop alongside your book. I think that’s a beautiful picture, so thank you.
Julie Smith: Thank you.
