Jamie Dandar McKinney On Building Confidence Through Curiosity And Openness

Success in every line of work or situation can only be achieved by facing every challenge head-on without doubts or fear. Therefore, building confidence is key in establishing a strong character and mindset in whatever you do. Stephen Jaye sits down with Jamie Dandar McKinney to discuss how confidence starts with embracing a burning desire to learn and grow. She explains the power of eliminating negative self-talk and knowing when to shift confidence gears depending on the situation. Jamie also shares her work as the Founder of JMD Consulting, helping women leaders discover their confidence to reach the top of the corporate ladder. --- Listen to the podcast here: Jamie Dandar McKinney On Building Confidence Through Curiosity And Openness One thing that keeps a lot of people settling for less is a lack of confidence. The inability to speak up, say what you want or even within yourself, believe that you are capable of and deserving what you want. This is a topic that inflicts a lot of people and is affected by this. It's something that people are even sometimes ashamed to admit and how often this is something that impedes us from getting the life that we truly want. My guest, Jamie McKinney, specializes in helping people find that confidence. She is the Founder and President of JMD Consulting. Jamie, welcome to the program. Thank you, Stephen. I'm so excited to be here with you. A lot of people are thinking about self-confidence and do have issues with self-confidence. What made you feel like it was going to be the thing that you brought into the world with the business you started? What service do you want to provide for humanity? This started very early in my career. The confidence I figured out was my survival skill initially. Once I started to figure out some of the nuances of it, it graduated to my thriving skill and that was important. I started my career in the automotive industry so it was very heavily male-dominated. That was my first job out of college. I was the third female to join a team of 400. I was the youngest, on average, by about twenty years. I hadn't grown up in the automotive industry so I didn't have stories to regale with them. The one thing I did have that some of my comrades did not was a college degree. You remember the game, which one of these things is not like the others. That was me in a variety of categories. There were shenanigans and resistance. I was also learning and new. I figured out though, early on that I didn't have to be the smartest person in the room, the most experienced and certainly the most male as long as I carried myself and with confidence and lead with that confidence. It started out being my secret sauce and my way of having an advantage in an industry and a company in a place where my advantages were limited as I was gaining experience. A lot of people would struggle with the idea of finding that confidence, whether it be survival or a thriving skill. One of the things that happen with a lot of people who lack self-confidence is doing whatever the boss says, not setting boundaries. “The boss told me I need to work over the weekend. I'm not going to say, ‘I'm sorry. My other parts of my life matter too.’” What gave you the courage to develop and show that self-confidence in this automotive industry where you were the one that's not like the other for several different reasons? One, I wanted to be there, be successful in business and learn. I was in an environment and a place that I saw as a challenge. I like challenges. Part of it, I was innately ready to learn and do something that I hadn't done yet. To break it down to a smaller piece and this is something in my book I talk about is figuring out your “hit it to me” skill. The “hit it to me” skill is a reference to a baseball interview that Derek Jeter was on in early 2000. I was listening to this interview while sitting on the couch in my apartment when I was fresh out of college. The journalist was interviewing Jeter and was teeing up this very dramatic question. He said, “Jeter, it's the bottom of the ninth. The go-ahead runs on third. You're standing there at a shortstop. The batter steps up to the plate. What's going through your head?” Building Confidence: Once you grow confidence in one area, it really has this compounding effect that allows you to become competent in other areas as well. Jeter said, “Hit it to me.” He said it so fast and suddenly. I remembered that the journalist and I both leaned in and said, “What did you say?” Jeter sat back and not in a cocky or an arrogant way but in an unequivocally confident way. He said, “Hit it to me. That's my job. When I'm in that situation, I know how to catch and feel that ball. I know how to get them out. Hit it to me.” When he said that, it blew me away and got my wheels turning about, “I'm not a shortstop for the New York Yankees or anyone. In my job, what could be my skillset where I have that same unequivocal confidence.” One of the things that came naturally to me and that I enjoyed doing was speaking. Throughout college, I had to do many presentations. I went to Ohio State so sometimes it's standing up in a classroom with 300 people. I leaned into that and practice those skills to get even better. What started as one of my strengths became one of my superpowers. Everybody knew like, “Jamie is good at doing this.” It led to special opportunities that led to special invitations that I always said yes to. While I wasn't the most technically savvy person or maybe wasn't the strongest in the chemistry part of what I was doing, I could communicate and speak in that manner and that worked in my favor. Everybody has a “hit it to me” skill, one, if not several. I specialize in drawing this out of people and showing them, “You do have this confidence and ability.” The cool thing about confidence is that once you grow it in one area, it has this compounding effect that allows you to become competent in other areas as well. It sounds like it starts with confidence through competence. This “hit it to me” skill is what brings us from the point where I feel like a lot of people, when the equivalent of the bottom of the ninth situation comes around, whatever your equivalent is in your industry, this is when it's on the line, oftentimes will dread to say, “I hope it goes to someone else. I hope someone else is the one that ends up being responsible and in charge out of this fear of messing up.” It doesn't take any other skillset besides competence. Is there another aspect of your mindset that needs to be developed to avoid saying stressing over, even that 1 in 1,000 or 1 in 10,000 chance that you might somehow screw it up? I love that you said confidence is built on competence because sometimes I hear like, “Is this a fake it until you make it situation?” I say, “No.” Confidence is not a substitute. For competence, that's not a sustainable strategy. You're spot on with that, Stephen. I wanted to make sure to highlight that. Along the lines of competence, failure, imposter syndrome, there's a lot of different things that we call it. Any time you do something for the first time, you're going to have a little trepidation because you haven't done it and practiced before. The mindset trick that you can do is instead of being afraid, you say, “I'm going to be curious and learn.” The goal that you set in your mind is what your thoughts and body is going to collect evidence to support. If you say, “I'm afraid that I'm fearful,” you're going to collect all kinds of little bits of evidence to support that. You're going to see other people judging you and all the things that you missed, as opposed to shifting your mindset to saying, “I'm going to be in discovery mode. This isn't about being perfect. This is about making progress.” When you think about your progress and then point to the things, for example, when you're taking those first few steps, “I learned this and that. I know this now, which I didn't know before,” you can use all of those to add to your confidence rather than deplete it, thinking about what you don't have versus what you do. Focusing on being curious and learning something from experience is this something someone can do in their mind leading right up to that challenge? Let's say you're about to give a key presentation or have a difficult conversation where you're asking your boss for a raise. There's going to be stuff going through your head like, “I can't screw this up. There are consequences.” People oftentimes think of the consequences of what happens if they fail or do something wrong. Is that shifts something that can be done at that moment in your head? Is it something that you need to train yourself on a day-to-day basis? When that moment comes, you're less likely to ruminate on the consequences and more likely to think of it as, “I'm having an experience and learning something new. If I do this wrong, don't get the raise and get bad reviews on my speech, I'm learning what I can do better next time.” The answer is both. You can do that at the moment but if you do the latter part of what you said, Stephen, you're going to be more effective. Confidence is like a muscle. Like any muscle, when we use it, it grows. When we don't, it atrophies. You don't go spend eight hours at the gym one day and then you work for life. It's a couple of times a week, 30 minutes a day or whatever that is because how we do anything is how we do everything. You've probably heard that phrase before. Your competence is the same way. In setting your mindset at the beginning of the day or the end of the day or whenever you've got time to concentrate, for some people they get up and it's chaos. That's not the time that they get good thinking time. One thing is recognizing and honoring where that space is. If you can't think of a space, that's a red flag. You could think of one because there's a whole lot of other things that co