The CEO looking to increase his self-confidence • A Coaching Story

This story is about Denim Cobra, a CEO looking to increase his self-confidence to unlock his full potential as a CEO. Each of Wave’s clients is known as an alias to preserve confidentiality. Each alias is granted randomly and is a colored animal.

After a first ride focused on improving his leadership, Denim Cobra got more comfortable with delegating and empowering his team. But he also realized he needed to increase his self-confidence to be at his full potential as a CEO. Wave supported him on that specific topic in a second ride.

Gaining more self-confidence was even more essential for Denim Cobra as he was going to enter a fundraising period. He had to show strong assurance in front of investors. Going through this challenge with an impostor syndrome feeling and no killer figures for his pitch was making the exercise hard. After he went through the first investigation phase with Wave, he realized how much his self-esteem and mood were dependent on external validation and events. He needed to find faith in himself again and build more resilience.

During the first month, Wave helped him explore ways to build more resilience through some mindfulness and drawing exercises. They enabled him to realize he had more strength than he thought to face the ups and downs of life. Especially, that introducing more patience to solve issues was key for him to feel more resistant.

Denim Cobra shared with Wave that he was still procrastinating a lot on his pitch for his investors though. It was necessary for Wave to dig into that behavior. Why was it so difficult to move forward on that presentation? Wave led him through a worst-case scenario exercise to identify this. It appeared that the anxiety of failing his fundraising and having to sell the company was what was holding him back. Understanding and getting more aware of his fears was half of the work. It helped him change his mindset and started to focus more on the journey than the outcome.

The other half consisted in confronting his fears. Having pictured and assessed the impact of the big bad outcome helped him go beyond his procrastination. He finished his deck and started meeting investors all over the world. He didn’t always receive positive answers but getting to action provided him new energy and made him proud of himself. Reducing the fear, each time he was confronting it. He built up self-confidence and started to truly believe his company could raise real interest among investors.

After 3 months of coaching, he told Wave that he understood himself better. Getting to the bottom of his fears, and understanding the rationale behind it, made him grow personally and as a CEO.

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