Strategy #34: Create Impact Through Confidence And Boldness

When you make any kind of presentation, and this includes an important job pitch of course, you have a variety of core delivery tools at your disposal. These comprise many of the things I spoke about in the previous work-search strategy, including the tempo of your voice, word emphasis, use of pauses, volume and so on. If you can master them, you’ll soon become a competent pitcher.

These are some of the essential ingredients of a great pitch but deploying them well isn’t an end in itself. They’re all subservient to a higher-level objective and that’s to influence your audience as comprehensively as possible. To elevate the quality of your pitch, these micro elements must feed a triumvirate of delivery skills which are impact, confidence and boldness. In today’s strategy, I’ll introduce you to these ideas.    

I want to start by thinking about the overarching purpose of any pitch, including the one that takes place in a hiring meeting of course. Unless you’re exceedingly unusual, you don’t put in the sort the effort that’s required to get to this stage of a job search for fun. You invest time and resources for one reason alone and that’s to get in front of someone who’s got the authority to hire you for a specific job role that you really want.

Now that you’re in front of a recruiter, you must exert maximum influence over this person so that they take a hiring decision in your favour. The way you give yourself the best chance of landing a lucrative employment contract is by making a potent impression upon them. So, I’ll start by thinking about the concept of impact, what it looks like and how it functions as part of a pitch. I’ll then move on to confidence and boldness and offer you a couple of resources that will help you boost these skills if you feel they’re lacking at the moment.

Many working people have witnessed plenty of fantastic pitches. It’s a stock in trade of many professionals' job roles and, even if you don’t make them yourself, you’ll probably recognise a really good one quite easily. But in case you’re new to the art of pitching, here are some of their common features. Great pitches are memorable, dynamic and entertaining. They’re single-minded, focus on a single specific outcome and strip out extraneous material that doesn’t serve their purpose. They seize an audience’s immediate attention and hold it from start to finish.

The best pitches are designed around a core theme. They revolve around a fulcrum that occupies a central position in the presentation, and one that every part leads up to, supports and summarises. Above all, the best pitches are a call to action. If you succeed in persuading your audience to do as you wish as a direct result of them absorbing the salient points of your pitch, you can assume you’ve made an impact.        

So, what is this business of impact in a work environment? Quite simply, it’s the ethos of doing things differently, standing out from the crowd, being a kernel of not only your employer’s triumphs but your own professional victories. I might talk about impact as it relates to a pitch in a hiring meeting, but it goes far beyond that.

Making an impact means that you must be bold. It requires the ambition to seize control, to make your work the best it can possibly be, before you make an employment pitch and once you’ve been hired to do your new job. Impact creates business opportunities and, if you can nail them in whichever way is most appropriate, it gives you the best chance of fulfilling your personal potential.

Impact has a vaguely indefinable quality but you instantly recognise it when someone who’s got it puts in an appearance. People with impact have got charisma. They own the room. They have a message that’s heard above the surrounding noise going on around them.

Creating impact means engaging an audience immediately, and you do this by tapping into their most visceral emotional receptors. Impact means holding someone’s attention by engaging their highest level of interest. Impact makes the difference between drab and sparkling. It’s a secret weapon, the super skill of the best influencers and persuaders.

That’s what I mean by impact, and it’s a skill I teach my course participants to deploy in their job pitches by way of making great content and practising excellent delivery. Tangible confidence and visible boldness complete the skillsets. 

So, let’s now consider confidence and boldness. As with impact, there’s an abstract quality to these features of a superb pitch, but you definitely know they’re going on when you see someone behave in a bold and confident manner. Compared to impact, the most visible of the trio, boldness and confidence are much more subdued, or at least they ought to be.

You can really let loose with impact. The more your audience perceives a major impact in your pitch, the better. It’s a different story with the others because you need to dial the volume down a little. Your confidence should bubble just beneath the surface of your pitch, and you need to reign in your visible boldness in the same way. Rather than being on overt display, boldness and confidence should be the virtually invisible drivers that propel the engine of your pitch.

Developing inner confidence through boldness, which is the outer manifestation of confidence in my thinking, isn’t always easy, especially if you feel unsure of yourself. Nonetheless, my long experience in recruiting, interviewing and interview-skills training tells me that these are virtually obligatory qualities if you want to fulfil your potential at work in general, and succeed in any ambitious job search in particular.

To help you do this, assuming you want some guidance on building confidence and boldness, I’m about to make an exception to one of my stated aims which is to deliver my own unique training content. Just this once I want to point you in the direction of two books which are, quite simply, the best resources I’ve come across for developing these skills at a psychological and practical level, and infinitely better than anything I could say to you about these topics. 

The first book is by Dr Nate Zinsser who’s in charge of the Performance Psychology Program at West Point, the US military academy, and he helps service personnel to perform at their best. He’s also worked with a wide range of top sports people and shown them how to achieve exceptional levels of success. His techniques equally apply to the business world and I’m totally sold on his ideas and strategies.

Zinsser is a highly-qualified authority, unlike many cod-scientific writers who churn out thousands of books on acquiring confidence but don’t have much of a proven track record to back them up. This is why I only make this single recommendation about building and retaining confidence. In his book, The Confident Mind, Zinsser presents a persuasive case for why confidence is so vital. He outlines a range of techniques which are simple to understand and straightforward to implement. If there’s only one job-hunting related resource that you look at beyond this course, make it this one.

But what if a lack of confidence isn’t the main issue for you? Perhaps there’s something else that concerns you regarding your mind management, including a lack of boldness in your approach to pitching. It could also be a general feeling of unease when you consider your mental strength and psychological resources in advance of a demanding project like job hunting. There’s no shame in this. You’ll more than likely be moving outside your comfort zone and, when this happens, it’s often accompanied by nerves, worries or other negative feelings.  

If you think this might describe you, my next book recommendation should help. It’s from another doctor, but a psychiatrist this time, called Dr Steve Peters. As with Zinsser, Peters is a well-qualified academic who also works with sports people. He’s notably helped a range of British Olympic competitors achieve gold-standard performances by showing them how to build reserves of mental resilience that have given them a winning edge during competition.

Peter’s focus is more general than Zinsser’s. He has devised a model for achieving psychological robustness which is startlingly simple to understand, yet profound in its importance. His approach targets a wide range of areas including stress management, changing habits and controlling the mind. He explains why these things contribute so strongly to achieving success and everything he talks about feeds into what’s really important to work searchers.

He's best known for his book The Chimp Paradox but I particularly recommend A Path Through The Jungle. It’s extremely comprehensive and delivers a self-guided course which is unbeatable in terms of quality and breadth. I can’t praise it highly enough and I’ve benefitted from it myself. If you want to make boldness a feature of every stage of your work search, and during your pitch above all, Steve Peters is the person to learn from.                

Neil Grant, Vocation Master

If you have any comments, suggestions or questions about the issues I raise here, I invite you to contact me personally. Please get in touch via LinkedIn;

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