Each month, the visionary founders of AllBright will share insights from their extraordinary careers, to help you get on your A Game. Whether you’re a startup founder or a small business, an entrepreneur or an exec, you’ll find inspiration here...
I feel self-doubt every single day.
I know it may not seem like it – in fact I hope it doesn’t, but I feel a level of self-doubt every day. I think self-doubt is a very real and normal feeling. It doesn't go away, no matter how senior you are, no matter how old you are, and no matter how much experience you've got.
When I feel that uncertainty creeping in, I try to take a moment to stop and reflect on why I’m feeling that way. My instinct is kicking in…something is making me question if I’m about to tackle a problem in the best way; am I taking a business decision too lightly?; am I about to hire the wrong person?…..
When I’m feeling doubtful, I ask myself ‘how can I use that as a ‘spur’? One answer, for me, is that I feel more confident when I do more research. So often that uncertainty is just a reminder that I need to get more insight to be more prepared.
Generally speaking, I notice that the women I’ve worked with are naturally more prepared. If you're going into a meeting or an important event and you're worried about how it's going to go, or whether you're going to be able to perform, it might be more than nerves. It might be telling you to do more prep. If you've done your homework - and I'm amazed how many people still don't do this - then you feel armed, and that doubt dissipates as you perform. When you’re prepared, as you begin your presentation or as you start to have those conversations, you’ll quickly find the nerves settle and you find your groove.
I also think it’s healthy to admit that we all feel self-doubt, because I have found that there's an expectation that successful women never ever feel it. But the reality is that of course that we all do, at times. That's being human.
As you become more experienced however, you to learn to develop your ‘game face’. When I became CEO of Hearst, there was an expectation of what that role was and what it meant. And I felt it. Part of your job as a leader is to inspire confidence, and to set the tone and the direction for the company. It’s ok to have moments of doubt, but you don’t want that to be the energy that you bring to a room. It is important to show that you're confident, show that you have a plan, because people are looking to you for direction. If you’ve done the work, done the thinking, you will feel more confident, and in turn you will act more confidently and, because you act in control, you naturally start to feel more in control.
"A big part of leadership revolves around decisiveness, which takes a certain level of confidence."
Anna Jones
A big part of leadership revolves around decisiveness, which takes a certain level of confidence. As much as you need to listen to your team and take on their input, ultimately you have to back yourself and your decisions and communicate them clearly to everyone. That to me is leadership, that's running a business: being decisive, making decisions, and seeing them through. I really believe that done is better than perfect. So make the decision, do the work and move on, and as long as you're learning as you go, then if it was the wrong decision, be open about it, learn from it, and move on to the next challenge. There's nothing worse than a procrastinating leader.
This approach served me well when I made the difficult decision to resign from Hearst and co-found AllBright. I thought about it for quite a long time. I think I'd been a frustrated entrepreneur for most of my career, and there have been various crossroads where perhaps I could have gone down an entrepreneurial path, but for various reasons I've been offered different roles and new, interesting things to do within the companies I’ve worked in. Starting my own company had been in the back of my mind for a number of years, it's not something that I just did overnight. I think it's really important to be honest about that, because people often make it sound like it's easy, but it's a huge decision to leave a big job. To leave a big company, to leave a corner office, when you’d finally smashed the glass ceiling - it was one of the biggest decisions of career and of my life.
The catalyst for me was meeting Debbie, my co-founder, and the fact that I knew that we could build a business which combined profit with purpose. I'd been at Hearst for many years, since before I was CEO, and I had been doing a lot of work to realise a new strategic vision for the company whilst I was there.
I was 40, and it was one of those watershed moments in your life, where you really think about what you want to do next. I knew I could stay in that corner office for the next 10 years, or I could take this moment to do something with somebody that I really respect. It took a lot of preparation and planning, both in terms of the shape of the business and also the practicalities of how I could do it. Financially, I wanted to make sure that I'd given myself enough runway - that’s something that people don't talk about enough. I wanted to know that I had a year where I didn't really need to earn much, if anything at all, and that we could still continue with our lives in a similar way.
But despite all the preparation, ultimately it came down to a leap of faith. I had to notice the self-doubt, recognise it for what it was, make the decision, and jump.
And I don’t regret it for a moment.
