Insight

Ever had a moment when you say to yourself, “I know how to do this. Why didn’t I do it?”

You are here and you already know and had some great wins communicating well. Evidence of it includes jobs you landed, sales you achieved, relationships you gained and maintained. Yet there are times, and I used to experience this too, when you don’t execute what you know how you expected. Maybe it’s because you are speaking in a new role, or in front of a new group. Maybe it's because there is a change in the system of operating culture that is new and unfamiliar to you and others and you are unsure how to apply what you already know.

When I reflected and researched this, I came to a realisation that in the uncertainty gap, there is a pressure inside that may create confusion as to how to apply the communication skill you know, or you may have forgotten some of your communication skills. This is absolutely normal yet it does not have to be a reality you stick with.

Communication is not a skill you learn once and carry forever, fully intact, regardless of what life throws at you. It is more like a muscle. Tended regularly, it stays available to you, even under pressure, in the middle of change, and even when fear is the loudest.

Most communication training treats confidence as a destination. You do the course, get the skills, you arrive. What it rarely acknowledges is that change, the ongoing, relentless, identity-shifting kind that most of us are navigating right now, creates a real, measurable erosion in the very skills you worked hard to build. You haven’t forgotten about it, though the memory may seem very distant, it is only because change takes a lot of energy. The same kind of energy that is required to adapt and use your communication skills at their best.

The people who communicate with genuine confidence through change are not the ones who trained the hardest at the beginning. They are the ones who kept training them along the way.

So what?

When my clarity of this came I felt so much relief, and I hope you do too. It is natural for our confidence to erode during the weight of change, but ongoing training and tending to your communication skills and all it touches, is what allows you to have a lasting confidence that grows with you through the change. And the good news is that it does not need to take a lot of time to achieve this. Also there is a way to do this that compounds the results of this over the time you continue to invest this way.

The research on skill retention tells us something important that most training programmes do not: a short, regular, return to a skill does more to maintain it under pressure than a single intensive learning event ever can. Not because the intensive event was wrong, but because the muscle needs regular use to stay strong, especially when everything around you is shifting.

What it looks like in practice is not another full programme every time change arrives. It is something smaller and more sustainable. A prompt that brings your attention back to how you are actually showing up in conversations. A reflection that reconnects you to the skill you already have. A practice that takes ten minutes and reminds your nervous system and you mind that you know how to do this. That you’ve got this.

Tending to communication confidence is not remedial work. It is the work for someone who understands that who they are becoming through change deserves to be heard clearly, and who refuses to let the weight of change that that away from them.

Next steps

Think about the last time you left a conversation feeling like you had not shown up the way you wanted to. Ask yourself, was that a skill gap, or a gap in energy brought on by the change you are in?

Now imagine, what if you had invested the time to have short bursts of practical reminders and training that mean that no matter how much the world was shifting around you, you may remain secure in your ability to tap into your skills and abilities, using them to speak up and show up through the change with confidence.

If this is sitting with you, I am super excited to announce, next week we release two new services that help in this area. Set up for convenience and practicality, I introduce (yes I have a drum roll going):

The Blossoming Speaker Podcast: Goes deeper into the insights and perspectives shifts that helps you move through fear, adapt through change, and discover who you are becoming.

The Blossoming Speaker Training Academy: A membership built exactly around this, short, regular, practical courses that helps you train and tend to your communication and confidence skills through change. Not a learn it once approach, a place designed to keep it fresh, accessible and ready to use when you need it. Available as audio training so you may listen to it via your podcast apps.

All the best, Susan.