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Bill Lampton Ph.D.
Hi there, welcome to the biz communication Show. I’m your host, Bill Lampton the biz communication guy once again, bringing tips and strategies that will boost your business because my guest and I will discuss winning words and ways. It’s a treat to have you with us today and it’s a treat to have our guest. coming to us from my own professional location. Gainesville, Georgia is Dawn Echols. Dawn Echols is a licensed professional counselor and the owner of donning Phoenix, a counseling coaching and conflict resolution private practice. With over 25 years in sales, Don bring skills from business and to the counseling space where individuals and couples can resolve conflict, experienced personal growth and improve relationships. Don has been a guest on our show several times and always brings great value to us. So please join me in welcoming Dawn Echols. Hello, Dawn.
Dawn Echols
Hi, Dr. Bill. It’s so good to see you again today.
Bill Lampton Ph.D.
Wonderful to host you. Don, the place I want to start is one that is so important to so many of our viewers and our podcast listeners. And that is the place of lack of confidence that many people have. And it happens so many times, even to the most seasoned professionals. Let’s say that we move to a new town where and a new locale, we’re in a new job we’ve been promoted. All of a sudden, we have what many of us have heard the phrase describing, we have the imposter syndrome. We’re thinking, How did I get here, all of a sudden, I’m in sales, I know anything about sales, all of a sudden, I’m in management, I’ve never done that before. I’m an imposter and people are going to find it out soon. You and I know all of us know that unless you feel confident. And unless you can convey that confidence. It is impossible for you to win a team to gain clients to have a successful business, our career. So please tell us when we have feelings of low self esteem and think we are imposters in a situation. What’s the counseling? You’re a veteran professional counselor, I know you’ve heard this from many clients before. So please share with us the remedies that you recommend?
Dawn Echols
Oh, that’s a great topic. And there’s, I have definitely, I’ll address the imposter syndrome concept first, and then we’ll talk about the low self esteem. So the imposter syndrome, I first want to talk about that it can come from a place of humility, in that we want to do a good job we want to do we’re striving for excellence. And we want to be effective and impactful. And so if a person is humble, they do not want to have a whole lot of accolades, especially any that they feel they haven’t earned. All of us like to be recognized to that’s the flip side of that coin. Every person’s need for recognition is a little bit different. salesperson may often respond every salesperson is even different. They respond to recognition and and a good team leader of any change sales or not, will recognize their people for the things that they do well and and reinforce that that’s a we call that positive reinforcement in psychology. That’s very effective. So first impostor syndrome can come from a place of humility, where there’s an awareness of what you don’t know how to do or haven’t done before. So a brand new job. Second thing about impostor syndrome is that’s going to occur if you’re feeling as though you can’t be authentic, and kind of be honest and transparent about that. And that you might not feel that way in some job settings, but hopefully in a good job with a good team and good management. You can be more authentic and more transparent and kind of say, I don’t know, but I’ll get the answer. I don’t know. But I know that this is something you need from me. So especially in positions of leadership, but this is true for any sort of skilled job that we’re looking into and that skilled job can be in the trades, it can be in what they call white collar, it can be working on internet as an as an I guess, technician, all of these things require a certain level of skill. And we have to strike that balance between, okay, what do I know how to do and what do I not know how to do and not tip too far in being authentic or transparent, but always leaving, that’s not a good thing, either. And we talked when you mentioned competence, which is so important, Dr. Bill, because you don’t want to always be saying, Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t know, oh, I’m sorry, I don’t know. Because that’s going to degrade confidence instead of transmit the authenticity we’re talking about. So that’s the first thing. The second thing about starting a new job, starting a new skill, or going to a new location and taking on a new challenge in whatever we’re doing in life or in war, you know, work is one of the, it’s a third of our lives, if not more, and it’s a critical skill to survival is being able to work and take care of ourselves and contribute to society as well as to our own care. So one of the things that we need to do is develop competence. And so depending on what you’re trying to do, the best thing you can do is get very skilled targeted training, not necessarily general education, because a lot of times our General Education broadens our perspective of the world, a university education, for instance, broadens our understanding of the world, but it may not teach specific business skills that actually help us earn a living and grow in our careers. And so to do that, you’ve got to go find those targeted trainings that are specific to your job. The second thing, in addition to specific training and targeted is to seek out mentors, and guides, leaders, coaches, that can help you specific to the area you’re trying to grow. So you may be doing some of those things where you find a mentor on the job. And then you can ask questions, and and then you don’t even have to be asking a lot of questions, kind of identifying role models in your business endeavors. That give you an example. On the personal side, you’ll often have clients say to me that they’ll find role models in their life, for the values that they want to model for being the kind of person of character that they want to be, or for having the kind of relationship that they desire, most especially a significant romantic one. But that actually modeling in our relationships occurs, we learn that with our siblings, we learn that with our parents, we learn that with friends, we learn that with teachers. So if you think of a good teacher you had in school, and someone that was a role model for you, or that encouraged you, then that can contribute as well. So I would say that all of those things addressed the imposter syndrome piece.
Bill Lampton Ph.D.
I like all those points, I’d like to respond by saying, in a sense, the imposter syndrome are they, they lack of confidence or the low self esteem to is taking a good quality humility, as you mentioned it the first and exaggerating it too much. We we want to be around people who have humility, no doubt about that. We want colleagues we want our supervisors, we want our CEOs to have humility, but that humility cannot be such that they are they seem lowly are bowing and scraping before so in a sense, low self esteem, low self confidence is is an exaggeration of a very good quality. I liked that point. And then something that I think we could we could maybe put into one sentence from what you’ve said, Don, is that competence builds confidence. Absolutely. That’s a great way to put it. You said that you said that in explaining that if we want to feel more confident than okay, then we need to add to our skill set. And then I very much underscore your third point there, which is rely on coaches and mentors. This is as you and I know, this is not a sign of weakness are an adequacy. The greatest performers in any arena, have coaches. I’ve been a lifelong golfer, and I’ve followed some of the greatest golfers of all and every one of them has, has a coach. And I’m often reminded and I mentioned on this program quite frequently that Malcolm Gladwell and one of his books says that no One he says not rock stars, not billionaires, not technology experts. He says no one makes it alone. No.
Dawn Echols
No, we are, we are social creatures. And we do much we there you can go so far as to say, we are so highly social, that we, the human species would not have survived. in isolation, a single human being, will die from isolation alone, even with other things there. It’s it’s not just about reproducing and having offspring, but but they they’re in my couples work, we often talk about that in an evolutionary concept. pair bonding, which we think of in modern day society is to people in a romantic partnership, often a marriage, who then combined together their efforts, their energy, their assets, their love, all of those things. And they have children, either through their own birth or through adoption, and foster, because that’s an important one as well. And then they pour all of that into that next generation or that offspring. So from an evolutionary standpoint, we talked about the biology of that. But there’s actually this idea that that cooperative effort between two parents is what’s contributed to the survival of that offspring, that human offspring. And so that takes at least two but then we in history is so neat to think about anthropologist and archaeologist as they contribute to our understanding of social psychology, because this coming together in community is is just extremely important. So your abs, I love that analogy. You gave Dr. Bill about the coaches, to the most successful because I was thinking before you even said that about golf, I was thinking about the confidence based question you and I asked, and the fact that confidence if we think about you know, the first person that comes to mind for me, of course, he’s retired now is Michael Jordan, on the on the basketball court. Yes. And, and that beauty and grace and, you know, height, and, you know, just to leap into just the graceful dance of, of his his plays. And but yet he practiced and practiced and practice. And here is this one example, I know there’s many of the superstar in one sport, okay, not counting all the other sports we might use as examples, that confidence that showed up his grace on the basketball court, that graciousness and that fluidity came through repeated developing competency, but also through coaching, that then translates to confidence, confidence builds confidence in those that are around us, it is creates a positive energy. And so I like how you amplify that idea that you the the opposite side of that that imposter syndrome, when taken too far is that humility, that’s maybe too extreme, because that balance of humility and confidence, we all respond better to a leader on our jobs, who actually has some strength, assertiveness makes a has and will make the decisions. And we’ll take it and I and I had a boss one time. And I’ve probably mentioned her before. And I’ve had other bosses that would do this, but she always comes to mind. And it was like the buck stops with me. And I’ve got your back. And she would back us in doing our job. And then if someone came after our department in some sort of political infighting in a corporate setting, she absolutely would not allow that to get to us. It was her job to gatekeeper. And she was a very quiet person that you wouldn’t immediately describe as confident in the way that we think of that as a stereotype. Absolutely a competent person who was very confident in her leadership balanced with humility. And in her personality, which she was leading people in technology in a very engineering kind of world, not at all a sales kind of thing. And we often laughed, because I came to her from sales. And I grew professionally with her as well as personally in my own life, because I was in my early 20s, when I got promoted into her department. And she and I were such different kinds of people me coming from sales, and she had this huge, it’s not just humility, but her competency in what she knew, she knew she could teach me something that I would not learn anywhere else. That would then make me better when I re entered the sales department, you know, moved it back into a sales position. We even I even had to make a deal to stay with her. Because the training like we were talking about was so intensively she’s like, I’m not going to put this much energy into training you if you’re going to leave me because this gets hard. You have to commit to a certain amount of time that you’re going to work in my department. And so she was a very sort of quiet, technical kind of person and here I came from This sort of sales where you had to practice assertiveness, and you had to get out there and get it done.
Bill Lampton Ph.D.
And you had you had a very successful sales career. I’m aware of that.
Dawn Echols
Yeah. So it just, you know, it’s all a sudden, very different things. And so we think about confidence. But if we think about what people can do, and what a good leader does, what are those things, competency, confidence, strength, with a nice dose of humility, but that confidence comes when we think about Michael Jordan kind of character, or later in that sense of constant repetition, dedication, and discipline, as well as taking guidance from someone else. And then emoting that, and in whatever word, I’m looking for putting that out there, when we do our job, it sort of comes out naturally. And then we don’t have to come from this place of when you said that about Don’t be so humble. There’s there’s roles that we have that we’ve celebrated, somebody like Mother Teresa, for instance, is a really good example of a person who chose a lowly service, and became a site, right. And she has these wonderful modeled things that we’ve all learned. But that was because that’s what she felt called to do. And it was unique. But here’s the thing, she absolutely had competency in knowing what she needed to do to serve, even as this quiet sainted lowly servant to others, and she probably was very competent about the skills and resources that were necessary to reach impoverished people.
Bill Lampton Ph.D.
You’ve given us some great guidelines. And when we come back in just a few seconds, Don, I want us to talk about the emotional adjustments. And I imagine some of your clients have talked with you about this, the emotional adjustments that we have had to make, because we’re working many of us virtually, which is, is a relatively new way of operating. And we’ll talk about that in just a few seconds.
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Bill Lampton Ph.D.
We’re back now with Don Echols of doning, Phoenix, and Don that was, that was quite a, an exploration of that topic. And I liked the way we tied together together, competence and coaching can and learning new things can certainly boost our confidence. Now, I would imagine that as a counselor, and the past two to three years, you have faced people who all of a sudden had to leave one situation that they had been accustomed to maybe for 15 or 20 or more years, and that was being in a brick and mortar setting, with a set team that they saw every day. And then suddenly, and many of them this is still the case. Suddenly they’re working virtualized, some of them probably were we’re welcoming that others were saying what’s all this technologist, I’ve got to learn. Tell us some of the adjustments that you’ve had to help people face and how you walk them through it.
Dawn Echols
Well, as you know, Bill, we are facing mental health crisis. In the last, you know, we had mental health awareness just last month, people had been kind of pushed to their limits. And that’s because kind of what we were talking about. We’ve been faced with a lot of change more rapidly than perhaps we’re typically accustomed to, and may have been not accustomed to that level of rapid change, even in technology for the last 100 years or so. But this idea that you had to rapidly do something completely different under changing circumstances, with even this concept called decision fatigue, which talks about having to make rapid constant decisions over and over and over for changing circumstances, multiple times per day, not just per week or per month or per year. So yes, we’ll go back to this idea that we are social creatures. And so we’ve got to figure out When you’re working, a lot of people talk about that they do like working virtually because of the lowered stress of certain things that occur. What they have to do when they do that, though, they will often balance that, especially those who are successful with it will balance that with person to person, physical interaction, face to face with other individuals somewhere in their life where they have a sense of community, not just online or digital. But like right outside the door. I remember you and I talking during 2020. And document when you talked about going for walks with Georgia, your dog and speaking to neighbors, even if you were crossing on opposite sides of the street that need Yes,
Bill Lampton Ph.D.
that is. That’s that’s a great mental break it it refreshes you are there certain times. You and I live in Gainesville, Georgia, there are certain times of the year with thunderstorms. Our people may not be familiar with the fact that we get very cold weather here in the winter. There’s certain times of the year. That’s difficult. But to me that is that is it energizes me it takes me Oh, wait, you got to get up and move around and get your circulation going. Yes. So that’s that’s one wonderful advantage. I can. I can recall right now, Don, an office situation I worked in many years ago, where a friend of mine in the office, one of my colleagues, we said it’s a beautiful day, why don’t we go out for a walk. And we had not been gone three minutes until the boss came chasing us. Get back in here, nobody gave you a break. And of course, that’s, that’s a very bad damper on your, your mood and your enthusiasm. So I think that’s one wonderful solution is to look at some of the pluses of the isolation we have.
Dawn Echols
Yes. And kind of looking at it, like I had a, my niece said to me that she works her job is now remote and her job, it being remote has actually allowed her to make a couple of geographic moves related to her spouse. And so she said, I really like it. And we talked about why because she’s a very social person, and is not someone who’s going to want to work in isolation, she’s going to need to interact with people. And she knows this about herself. And so she was talking about the pluses of doing that and what she’s found it to be helpful as, but then she also balances that with these other things. Sometimes now that people are out and about, again, going to a gym and speaking to people. I was thinking when we were talking when you were talking about walking in Gainesville and thunderstorms. The one of my favorite places to walk is over there off of pearl next Parkway. But I think it’s Longwood Park. And you know, you’ll often see lots of other people and they’ll walk their dogs, and I’ll walk mine, and I’m getting to speak or the children wanting to walk up and pet my dog Skipper. And just having even sometimes, because we do have a very diverse population in Gainesville. So sometimes the people I’m interacting with may speak a different language primarily. But facial expressions together, compensate and reach across that, that bridge of where maybe we’re not, you know, we wouldn’t understand each other’s words as well. But the the universal concept of a smile, and the warmth that happens in our faces, and often with a child that wants to walk up and approach my dog and out, you know, he’s little and it’s okay. But I’ll always teach children when they want to do that I say as long as it’s okay with your parent or the adult with you, you know, and so they and then they’ll, you know, I’m trying to teach them you’ll always ask, so that that way I have the parents permission that it’s okay, or the adults permission, that it’s okay for their child to pet my dog. Yes.
Bill Lampton Ph.D.
I think what we’re saying, Don is that, in some ways, our interaction that we had on a regular basis was taken away from us, but we can create an action ourselves. And it’s, I like the fact that you say, you mentioned Yes, I know many of my neighbors and some will even stop and roll down the window when they’re driving by and talk. And this This takes you away from that isolation. Van. This has been a fascinating exploration of some of the problems that we are facing and to have a professional counselor of high caliber talk with us about Solutions has been terrific. I know that there are listeners and viewers who will want to get in touch with you. So please give us your contact information.
Dawn Echols
Okay, they can visit my website at daunting phoenix.com And something with work WordPress in mobile means you have to do the HTTP s, colon slash slash instead of www like I used to have it. So It’s dawning phoenix.com. And the telephone number to reach the practice is 678-802-9591. That number is also on the website. And lastly, I wanted to address you know, we didn’t get a chance, and we can talk about this another time. But the low self esteem piece, that’s a different issue that actually is very well suited for counseling, because it does show up at work. And it translates to developing competence and confidence when you can address that in a good space. And coaching is also available our practice, so they feel free to look at other interviews of Dr. Phil on the web, on the blog, they’re daunting. phoenix.com.
Bill Lampton Ph.D.
Thank you, Don. And, and knowing your competences. And to bring that word up again, knowing your competence over quite a few years, I highly recommend people to get in touch with you and to learn more about your services and to avail themselves of that terrific opportunity. And since dawn has given her contact information, I am happy to share mine invite you to go to my YouTube channel, you will find this video there. In fact, there are over 400 instructional videos that I’ve posted there that of course is all free. And to go to my website, excuse me my YouTube, just go to the search bar there and type in my YouTube moniker which is Bill Lampton PhD. Among those 400 plus videos, instructional videos, there are about 75 to 80 issues of the biz communication show where I interview experts, as I’ve been doing with Don, certainly, I invite you to go to my website. And since I’m the biz communication guy, quite logically, the website is biz, biz, biz communication guy.com, you can be sure that I would welcome an exploratory phone call from you at no obligation or cost. Let’s talk about the communication challenges that you face and how I can help you find solutions to them. And one more thing about when you’re on my website, you’ll find opportunities there to to subscribe to this podcast if you haven’t already done that. So do keep that in mind. Don, I would want to say to you, you’re you’re always a highly resourceful, energetic and helpful guest. Please tell us are Are there any thoughts you have that would sort of pull together what we’ve talked about today?
Dawn Echols
Yes, that’s a great way to recap our discussion today. I would encourage people who are facing new things or feeling a sense of low confidence, low self esteem, worries, concerns and even anxiety or stress about your job performance, or even other areas of your life. First, develop competency through training, mentorship, and coaching. Increase your skills and find ways to practice and learn more about the area your you know, I’m thinking of business where you can read a lot of self help type books in business about you can call a coach such as Dr. Bill who will help you with communicating better or you can contact either a life coach, a wellness coach or a counselor such as those of us at knowing phoenix.com
Bill Lampton Ph.D.
Thank you. Thank you again Don echoes for being our guest on the best communication show thanks very much to those who were with us on the video portion and also those on the podcast. Be with us far all the future editions of biz communication show and I guarantee that every guest that I invite to the show is someone that will give us those communication tips and strategies that will become winning words and ways for us. Be with us again, thanks again to Don Eccles thanks to you. I’m Bill Lampton the biz communication guy
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
