 Should you fake it till you make it? Come on in and we'll talk about it. Welcome back and congratulations on taking one more step towards becoming one of the great leaders of tomorrow. This month's theme here at Evil Genius Leadership is courageous leadership and part of being courageous is being confident. Sometimes we talk about building confidence through the idea of fake it till you make it and we'll talk about how that technique fits into the larger idea of confidence and what the pros and cons might be when we use it. The idea behind fake it till you make it is to act confidently even if we aren't feeling confident about the situation and there are definitely some advantages to this technique. Projecting a confident air with our body language and speaking with a confident tone will help put other people at ease which will help put ourselves at ease and that will help us feel truly confident in addition to just projecting confidence. Fake it till you make it can be great in situations where we're meeting people for the first time like networking or maybe that first meeting we're having with a new group or team. Even if we aren't feeling confident about our skills or the value we might contribute to the group we can project an attitude of confidence until we start to feel a little more comfortable about the situation and then feel more at ease and naturally confident. This is also a great technique in problem solving situations. When somebody asks what are we going to do you can confidently say I don't know but let's figure it out together. This will help put people at ease that they don't have to have a solution to the problem right away and everyone in the group will start to feel more naturally confident just like you. There are definitely times I don't recommend using the fake it till you make a technique and one of those times is giving presentations. I know a lot of people get really nervous about public speaking and that's very natural but in my opinion there's no substitute for careful preparation and rehearsal if you want to give a great presentation and here's why. One of the key pieces of any presentation is the question and answer period. The worst thing we can do in a presentation is to answer someone's question with false or inaccurate information especially if that person is a senior decision maker. Faking your way through someone's question can lead to a bad decision getting made based on that information plus it's kind of disrespectful to the person asking the question. It's much better to say I don't know when I'll get that information to you than it is to try to fake your way through it. So there are times when faking it a little can help us boost our confidence and the confidence of those around us and there are times when maybe faking it isn't such a good idea. Ultimately it's up to you to decide when you fake it till you make it and when you don't but if you find yourself faking it over and over again and not really feeling more confident or comfortable in the situation you might try a different approach. If you found this helpful make sure you check us out on Facebook and Twitter and join us every Friday at 10 a.m. Pacific time for a live interactive leadership discussion on Blab. Don't forget to click off on that globe to the right that'll get you subscribed to our email list and bring all of our content direct to your inbox. I want to thank you for watching I really appreciate it and remember the future is out there. Lead the way.