332 – Confidence and Preparation

John Over the last two decades, I’ve been on an insatiable quest to learn everything I can about leadership. What makes the best leaders so good? After running companies small and large over the last 20 years, today I speak on stages all across the world to audiences who are interested in that same question. My name is John Laurito. I’m your host, and I invite you to join me on this journey as we explore this very topic and what makes the best leader so good. Welcome to tomorrow’s leader. All right, all right. 

John All right. Welcome to today’s episode of Tomorrow’s Leader. I am John Laurito, your host. And welcome to those of you who are tuning in for the first time, hopefully the first of many, many, many, many, many, many, many times. Okay. Let me start with a riddle. Yes, I know it’s been a little while since I’ve done a riddle. I did get feedback from many of you saying, where are the who? The riddles. We like the riddles. Bring back the river. What’s the deal with the Reynolds? Yeah. I’m betting you didn’t have them running amok. Okay, Jerry Seinfeld. So here’s my riddle for the day now. I will say this. First of all, I’m not going to commit to doing a riddle every single time because I think I can get over done. But I will do a riddle every once in a while. Here’s a riddle. I’m not a big fan of word riddles, but I’m going to give you a word riddle. And again, the first one to email me or text me or call me or snail mail me or carrier pigeon me, whatever you want to do with the right answer. I will send you a copy of my signed book. 

John Copy my book signed personalized to you. And I will announce you on this international podcast that you’re listening to now. Okay, here is the riddle. What word in the English language does the following? The first two letters signify a male. The first three letters signify a female. The first four letters signify a great person, while the entire world word signifies a great woman. What is the word? Okay, give it some thought. First, two letters signify male. First three letters signify female. The first four letters signify a great person, while the entire word signifies a great woman. Let me know your answer is your guess. Look in the show notes you will see my information or my website. John Laurito dot com and you will be able to get in touch with me and let me know what your thought is. Okay. Secondly, let me say this. First of all, I greatly appreciate those of you who review this podcast. I very much. I get very excited when this podcast reaches new audiences. And the way that that happens is through your help. When you review it, the more reviews, positive reviews, the more it gets pushed out into new people’s hands, whatever ears. So I got a new pod, a new review. This came from a six, seven, nine exclamation point dollar closed parentheses. It’s a strange name, but that is their name. Thank you. Six, seven, nine. Exclamation point. Dollar sign. Closed Parentheses. The title is Great Coaching, Great Voice Singing a five star review. John gave a great speech on Toastmaster International Convention 2022. He shares useful information on his podcast that helps to improve leadership skills. Definitely a podcast we can benefit from on a personal and professional level. His voice is so soothing and the riddles are so fun. 

John Soothing voice here today on tomorrow’s leader, John Laurito brings you leadership lessons in a very soothing voice. That’s right. A voice that will calm you and put you to sleep. I do know many of you have told me you listen to these going to bed at night. So I’m guessing I don’t know if that’s a compliment or not, but somehow I put you to sleep and your day on a good note. Whatever. So. Okay, so today’s leadership lesson. I was talking to a client of mine who was going for a promotion, a well-deserved promotion. He had been, up to this point, a top performing leader across the country in his organization, in his role was ranked among the best, if not the best in his in his category, in his role, well-deserved for this promotion that he was going for, because his boss was promoted and now created an opportunity for him to get this promotion. And he’d asked me for some help in preparing and getting ready for this and putting together the right game plan and interviewing and being ready for everything he needed to do and anything he needed to do to get this opportunity. And I remember thinking as we were preparing that I’m thinking to myself, okay, he is absolutely the best choice and he is certainly going to get this position. I’m thinking to myself, okay, there’s no almost no chance he’s not. I mean, he’s got everything that they would be looking for. If I were the hiring leader, I wouldn’t go anywhere further than him. He was the perfect choice for this opportunity. So I remember in my mind thinking, okay, you know, you you don’t necessarily need to be doing everything you’re doing to prepare for this because you have this thing, it’s in the back. 

John But what’s interesting is he reminded me of something that’s really important. And I said, leaders do this all the time is getting caught up in the mentality that I just shared is that sometimes we get so overconfident about something that it leads us to unprepared or lack of preparation. And then ultimately we don’t get the thing that we thought was a slam dunk. Now, I don’t know if in his mind he felt like okay himself. He was a great choice or perfect choice. I think he did. He had the confidence. But what I realized about this leader and what made him so successful throughout his whole career is that he was constantly preparing for a bigger battle than he reality probably thought he would have. In other words, that level of preparation and attention to detail is what made him so great. And I see people all the time that that ultimately fall short because they do just enough or what they think is just enough to get the opportunity or succeed in that situation. And you see this in sports all the time. You see the underdog. That that that is the surprise, Victor, in whatever sport, whatever event, whatever game, whatever match that they have. Because the supposed winner, the clear choice, the one who was seeded higher, comes in and they’ve dropped their guard and their expectations and they’re caught off balance and ultimately lose a game that they should have won. It’s a clear upset because the person that was expected or team expected to win just was not prepared or did not prepare and play with the intensity that they would have against a competitor that they would look at as a formidable opponent. So my message to you is the balance that I that I encourage you to think about is have the confidence of the returning champ so that that self-assuredness, that confidence, that ability to see the victory but have the preparation of the underdog so prepared the level that the underdog would prepare, prepare at that level for the interview that you think you are against the toughest competition, even though you may not be, and envision the positive outcome, envision the desired outcome. 

John Envision coming out of that interview feeling like you just absolutely nailed it and envision the conversation after the fact of a hiring leader with someone else saying This is the perfect person, like why would you even interview anybody else? So the confidence of being the returning champion and you know, if you’ve done something before and you’ve had such great success and you come back to do it kind of the same situation, you know, you’ve got a higher degree of confidence because you’ve already done it. You know, you have the ability to do it again. That’s what I’m talking about, putting yourself in that position. If you’re going to do a a keynote or you’ve got a new challenge and leading a whole new team at work in your organization have that confidence. You’ve done this a zillion times, but prepare as though this is going to be one of the toughest challenges you’ve ever faced. If you have that combination, the outcome, the probability of that outcome being successful is incredibly, incredibly high. You know, I see. And I remember just I remember as a kid. Viser I distinctly remember a time where I had a huge potential client that came in to see me. This was a referral from my best client now because it was a referral from my best client. I thought this was a slam dunk. I thought this person coming in was already sold on hiring me as their financial advisor, and because of that I had so much confidence. But then my preparation was almost non-existent. I didn’t do the things I would normally do before this appointment to prepare. I didn’t do the things in the appointment that I would have normally done. I actually cut corners. I didn’t do the full appointment that I would have because I thought, I don’t need to. 

John This is like an easy sale. And guess what happen? I didn’t get the client, they left and they said, okay, let me think about it, which is the dreaded word that nobody wants to phrase it. Nobody was here and they never came back. That was it. They didn’t hire me. I thought it was a slam dunk. And because of that, I probably I did probably 50, 60% of the effort or put forth 50 or 60% of the effort that I probably would have. I just thought it was going to be an easy kind of walk in the park. The bottom line is that’s when people get into trouble. I see this with leaders sometimes when they’re communicating things and they kind of cut corners because they think it’s going to be an easy message or they think people are going to naturally understand the reason for a tough decision. You know, they’re going to they’re assuming that people get it when they don’t. And when you assume you tend to cut corners and when you cut corners, you get less of the result or none of the result that you were anticipating to get. And ultimately, as a leader, we have to assume that that influencing that change might be harder than what we expect. Okay. Well, we assume that everybody is going to be on board. They’re going to understand the reason for this and they’re going to follow in line and do everything that we’re thinking about doing. But ultimately, that’s not going to be the case. So as a leader, if I can approach it with the confidence of the returning champ, that, hey, I’ve done this, I know what I’m doing, I see the desired outcome, I’m going to do it again like I’ve done in the past. 

John I have all the confidence in the world, but I’m preparing as though I’ve got a really tough battle and I’m the underdog. That’s that’s that combination there leads to phenomenal, phenomenal success. So I encourage you and again, if this nothing else is brings the level and awareness level that, hey, you know what, yeah, I’ve been caught in that situation before of just kind of assuming things or something or a situation or a conversation was going to be a slam dunk. And I really wasn’t prepared for what I ended up facing. And the outcome was nothing like what I wanted. So if I can help you catch that ahead of time and maybe you’re listening to this right before you’re about to have a conversation with somebody and you realize, you know what, I need to prepare for this a little bit more. You know, I have a big meeting with my team coming up. You know what? I’m assuming they’re going to be like right on the same page with me. I got to prepare a little bit more. Let me go into it. Assuming that not everybody’s going to agree or not everybody is going to understand or not anybody’s going to want to fully support what I’m talking about. I need to prepare my thoughts a little bit more. There’s nothing better than preparation. The top people in every industry and every role and every type of walk of life preparation is absolutely critical to their success. So my message prepare, prepare, prepare you. I used to think you can overprepare and yes, you know, I did a little brief stint doing voiceover work. Speaking of voice years, I did voiceover work, briefly tried do. And I did find that, yeah, you can overprepare in something like that because then you’re reading something and you just sound stale. 

John You go through it so many, so many times, it just you kind of lose the whole essence of the the energy and the naturalness of it. So, yes, there is something called over preparedness when you’re trying to perform and sound natural in certain industries. I’m not going to say there’s not such a thing, but in most cases I found myself convincing. I don’t know if you’ve heard yourself say this before that you know what? Yeah, I do better when I. I don’t prepare as much. I’m kind of more natural in this and that. Well, that’s a dangerous thought pattern, right? Because it slips into everything you do. You convince yourself, which is really just advanced rationalization that you’re better having prepared less. And ultimately that may not be the case and probably is not the case. That’s as you rationalizing, doing less preparation and trying to get away with it and convincing yourself that that produces a better outcome when it really doesn’t. So again, I’m hoping that a lot of these episodes just raise your level of awareness, because self-awareness is absolutely critical to you reaching the best version of yourself. So interested in your thoughts, your comments, your ideas. Shoot them over to me. Let me know I’m interested in your thoughts on this topic. But also other topics that you may be facing challenges, issues, situations that you’re dealing with that are challenging to you as a leader. I’d love to bring it to the the stage here, so to speak, and share with the audience or talk about it with you. Reach out to me. I’m here for you. So in the meantime, you know, the deal likes subscribe, share, all that kind of good stuff. Go down below, give a five star review blaze. 

John Go down below. Like I said early, that review means a lot. So good down below. When I say below to the bottom of where you are pulling up your podcast, you’ll see reviews. Give a review, let me know your thoughts and I’ll see you next time. Thanks. Oh, and by the way, before I forget, yes, my client did get the promotion. Not surprised. Well-deserved. All right. Bye bye. 

John Thanks for joining us on today’s episode of Tomorrow’s Leader. For suggestions or inquiries about having me at your next event or personal coaching, reach me at John@johnlaurito.com.Thanks, lead on!