Some people swear by Weetbix, but in the Huxley-Carr household it’s all about optimism for breakfast. There are few people as relentlessly positive as Jane Huxley.
While retaining her trademark sense of humour, Pandora Radio’s Managing Director believes there’s nothing more important than owning your own attitude.
After 16 years at Microsoft, Huxley moved into senior roles in media and telecommunications, including CEO and Publisher at Fairfax Digital.
In this edited extract from the new book Women of Influence, Huxley tells Gillian Fox about where she finds her self-confidence as well as strategies other women can use for finding their own.
A common feature among female ‘change agents’ is inner certainty and poise. What’s the foundation of your self-confidence?
I have a bizarre confidence. It’s the type of confidence that I try to pass on to my children, my girls, now. It does start very early on in the home, where you are validated. It starts with the people that you surround yourself with. It really starts with having a great appetite and a thirst for learning and reading and seeing other people being successful.
The ability to articulate things really quickly, distil a lot of information and share it more broadly; these were things that came to me very early on in school.
I built confidence on the back of those building blocks. I have a strong belief that it doesn’t matter what happens, I can talk my way out of it. Or I can talk about where we’re going, how that looks, how that will feel when we get there.
Many women lack your self-assurance, Jane – even very accomplished women. Are there practical strategies you employed early in your career?
A lot of that assurance comes from functional skills that I had to learn along the way: presentation skills, negotiation skills, change management, selling skills. It’s a combination of what you learn in a classroom, what you learn in a training environment, what your mentors and coaches teach you, and what you bring from your childhood. All of those things have come together for me and created opportunities.
As I say to my kids in the morning, we eat optimism for breakfast. You get to choose, every day as a human, how you’re going to live that day.
You get to be wrong. You get to get out of bed really cranky, running late or whatever it is, and you get to choose again in the day how you’re going to respond to the things that are happening around you.
Insecurity is a painful, in some cases debilitating phenomenon. How can less experienced women extinguish their own negative energy?
Women in particular, but a lot of people who lack confidence, are living life inside their own head. I really think that a lot of what we believe is going on in the environment is not happening at all.
It’s a mental game that you’re playing with yourself that sets you up for failure. When I talk to people about the issues that they’re having, they’ll articulate the problem and I’ll say, “Okay, how much of that did you just make up? How much of that is there actual evidence to support? Let’s look at the data.”
Confidence is about recognising where the issues really are. We love a little bit of negative self-talk. It’s partly lack of confidence, but a lot of the issue is in our heads. Separate the two and stay with the facts where possible.
What do you wish someone had told you at the beginning of your career?
What I know now that I wish I’d known then is that it’s all about mindset. If only I’d had that little gem earlier: about what mindset is, how powerful it is, how to change from one mindset to another, how to respect other people’s mindset.
I’ve learnt that now, but when I look back on 25 years, the power of your mindset is what I’ve been learning all along.
Women’s Agenda readers can download an exclusive preview of Woman of Influence ahead of the official launch of the book on May 17, 2016. To download your exclusive preview, simply visit here.