You Don’t Need More Confidence. You Need This

Episode Transcript

There's a gap between the way you see yourself and the way you show up in the world. Maybe you see yourself as someone who is calm and confident and clear, and you like that person. But that person doesn't always show up, do they?

Maybe when you're alone you feel calm and relaxed, but when you go out, or when you're around that specific person, or with friends, or maybe your boss, it just feels like that person doesn't quite show up. And maybe you can't quite put your finger on it.

Maybe it's that when you're around that person or in that situation, you can't seem to get your point across properly. You can't seem to speak as clearly or as eloquently as you'd like to. Maybe you're rehearsing what you say before you say it, or you're trying to find the perfect time to say what you want to say, so you make everyone laugh or so you sound smart. Maybe you stutter, or maybe there's just a tension in your body, a feeling that something doesn't feel quite right.

There are a million ways it can manifest, but at the end of the day you come back and you just feel off. You feel like you didn't show up the way you wanted to, the way your best self would have, or your authentic self would have. It creates this quiet tension, and maybe you can't really explain it, because everyone else has only seen that side of you, the side that shows up in public, whereas you feel more like, why can't they just see the real me?

A lot of the conclusions we make from that are: I just need to fix this. I need to become more confident. I need to get rid of my anxiety. Maybe I have social anxiety, and I need to get rid of it.

So that's what I want to talk about. Not so much the gap, but confidence. Because if you're like me and you've felt that gap before, maybe you've read books, taken courses, been to motivational talks where this person is on stage sounding so eloquent and so confident, and you feel like, yeah, I want to be able to show up that way. I want to be able to show up as me. Maybe those tips and courses and books helped, or maybe they didn't.

I don't want this to be another motivational talk, because I feel like most of the advice online about confidence targets the wrong problem and just doesn't have the correct view. The way we've been taught to look at it is just not quite there. So I don't want this to be tools you can use to become more confident. I want this to be a different perspective on confidence. I want you to, after this half hour, feel like you now see what confidence truly is.

Why Is This Still Happening?

What happens is we have those experiences of feeling shy or anxious, or just not showing up the way we want to show up, and we innocently conclude that I'm shy, or I'm this person, or I'm that person. We attach ourselves to these definitions and we turn them into personal failures. I've completely been there.

I remember being at uni, walking home at two or three a.m. from hanging out with my friends, and really feeling like I just didn't show up the way I wanted to. I was stuttering. I wasn't really eloquent with how I was saying things. I was talking too fast. It didn't feel like people were laughing at my jokes. A whole bunch of reasons that I honestly can't remember right now.

I was walking home and I just felt, why is this still happening? I have moments where I feel so confident and so sharp and so eloquent, basically every way you would like to show up in the world, and then other times where I'm the complete opposite. In my mind I was a confident person, so it wasn't that I lacked anything. It just felt like I couldn't show up.

So I know what that feels like, and all the confidence talks and all the books and courses didn't really help me, at least. And over time you turn that into an identity, this subtle shame of, why am I not showing up the way I want to show up?

By the end of this half hour I want to give a perspective that will hopefully stop you turning those moments into personal failures, stop you from judging yourself when you don't show up the way you want, and more importantly, help you understand why you didn't show up the way you wanted to. Not to see it as something to fix, but to have actual clarity on what to do next. I'm also going to go into why confidence is so misinterpreted, and how most advice out there about confidence not only is useless but actually makes you more anxious, which is crazy to think about.

You Already Are 1000% Confident

The premise I have for you is something you won't believe when I say it, so I'm warning you right now. But I want to explain it in a way where it feels true for you. Not just because I said it, not because you believe me because I said it, but because it really makes sense in your head and gives you a new way of looking at confidence. Maybe even enough that it dismantles some of the old beliefs you have around confidence.

The sentence is: you already are 1000% confident.

Now I know you're going to look back at your past and go, well, that's just not accurate, that's just not true, that's BS. And I would probably think the same way. But I want to point something out. When you aren't feeling confident, what if it's not about your lack of confidence, and that you have to acquire it and build it? What if it's already there, and it's just being blocked?

It's the same idea, in the moment you aren't confident, but it's one really profound shift. The main issue with a lot of personal development is that it hints that you aren't enough. Even you saying "I have to build confidence" is you saying "I don't have confidence, I have to get it from somewhere else, therefore me, myself, I'm not enough." It sounds small, it sounds subtle, but the mind is literal, and so the more you believe that, the more true it is for you. Not only that, but it completely removes responsibility.

When you shift it to "I have confidence, but I just can't access it right now, it's blocked right now," it's no longer about you fixing yourself and trying to get the right tool. It's now about you trying to uncover what's really going on. It's more about clarity than it is about fixing.

The way I know this is true is, well, let me ask you the question. When you were a kid, were you confident? Kids are more confident than basically all adults. They will do whatever they want to do. They will not care what you think. They will feel happy and courageous and say whatever they want to say, whenever they want to say it. So if confidence had to be built, if you had to take courses or read books or acquire knowledge to become confident, how on earth are they confident? Just let that sink in for a second.

Maybe you could say, well, some people are just more confident naturally, and so it's easy for them. And fine, that would make sense if only a few kids were confident and the other ones were really, really shy. But look at any two, three, four, five year old. Basically all of them, I would imagine, are the same way. There's no sense, no idea in their head of lack of confidence. And that's interesting when you think about it. You can look back on your life. When you were a kid, were you confident? Confidence is a weird word here, because you wouldn't necessarily use that word for a kid, but it's still true.

So if you had it, how did you lose it? Did you really lose it? Is it really the fact that you had it once, and now it's completely gone forever, and you have to put all this work in to get it back? This is the thing about personal development. It kind of implies this linear progression of, I have to do one step at a time, I have to build up this house. Where the truth is, you have access to the same feelings that you did when you were a three year old. It's just that now something is blocking them. That's why you're not showing up the same way.

So the question now becomes, what's blocking my confidence, rather than, how do I build confidence?

Confidence Is Like the Sun

Let me put it this way. Confidence is like the sun, as a random analogy. The sun is always there. Even when you don't see it, you know it's there. You don't go outside one day when it's really cloudy and freak out because you think the sun's gone, we're all going to die, the sun's gone. No, you know it's there. You just also know it's been blocked by some clouds.

What if you felt the same way about confidence? What would that feel like, if you knew for a fact that, huh, I actually do still have confidence, it's just that I'm blocking it? Wouldn't that be relieving? Wouldn't that be the massive exhale of, whoa, okay, it's not that I'm not enough, it's not that I am a failure, it's not that I have to do all of these things to become enough. It's just that I'm blocking myself.

And just by saying that, you're taking back responsibility for how you feel. Because if you had to earn confidence or acquire it from somewhere, you have no control. You have to basically ask someone for it. But if you're the one that already has that confidence, you are then taking responsibility for it.

Everything that I say, and I'm a self-awareness coach, I am never going to tell you what the truth is, because that makes no sense. My answers are different to your answers. I'm going to open up the question for you to ask yourself, and to see and feel if perhaps this is true for you. Because that's how you make real change. Real change isn't doing something because someone told you. It's doing something because you actually see it for yourself. You actually have clarity on, wow, this could actually be real for me. I can completely see how this could apply to me.

Fake It Till You Make It Quietly Trains Self-Monitoring

So if confidence isn't something that you build, but in fact you already have it, you may be thinking, well, why does all the advice make sense then?

Let me ask you this. Have you heard the phrase, fake it till you make it? That's classic confidence advice. And you know what, it makes sense. It makes sense that if you don't feel a certain way, you pretend. Not even pretend, you just try and embody it until you feel that way. And it may work. But there's a very subtle issue with it.

Let's say you want to feel and show up confidently, and so you use this advice. You stand up straighter. You puff your chest out a little bit, put your shoulders back. You try and speak slower, try and hold eye contact more. All the things that a confident person would do, because that is how you fake it till you make it. That can work. But when you perform confidence, you're doing all the things a confident person would do, so you're performing it, and it quietly trains self-monitoring. It quietly trains you to be self-conscious. Because if you're performing, you always have to check yourself to make sure that you are still performing. You have to constantly check yourself to make sure that you're still standing up straight, that you're still holding eye contact, that you're still speaking clearly and slowly.

It isn't an issue to be aware of how you're showing up. The issue becomes that you start to look at other people to validate how you're coming across. You start to look at other people to check if you're coming across confidently, to check if they are treating you the way they would treat a confident person, if they're responding to you that way. Check this for yourself next time you use this advice.

And what's the issue with that? If you're constantly looking around the room, trying to see if people are responding to you in the correct way, or to check if you're still doing things right, you're constantly looking for approval. You're constantly looking for other people to say, yeah, you are still acting or showing up confidently, you haven't accidentally gone back to that shy person, quote unquote. You're trying to save face, in a way.

So if you're constantly looking for approval, is that true confidence? Confidence is the opposite of wanting approval, and so you can't build true confidence by training yourself to seek approval. This is what I mean when I say that by doing that, you will actually make yourself less confident. You will train yourself to care about the way others think of you, and you'll train yourself to always show up a certain way, to always be tense. Because when you're performing, you're putting on an act. You are making sure that the audience is seeing you a certain way, that you're in character. And that isn't true confidence.

Self-Confidence Is Self-Trust

So if that isn't true confidence, and the advice out there isn't necessarily right, what really is confidence? I'm going to break it down in a way that just makes sense, because confidence as a word can encapsulate so many things. People mistake charisma for confidence, or being outspoken and loud for confidence, or being an extrovert for being confident. All these words get mixed in.

But if you really look at the word confidence, self-confidence, it comes from the root confide. What does confide mean? It means to trust. The very root of that word means to trust, and therefore self-confidence is self-trust. Let that sink in for a second.

The feeling of trust is very different to the feeling of what most people consider confidence. Most people consider confidence as this big energy. It's loud, it's assured, maybe even arrogant. It's almost a booming energy. What is the energy of trust? Very different. The energy of trust is calm. The energy of trust is relaxed. The energy of trust is safe.

You can just imagine it. Imagine talking to someone that you trust, someone that you really, really trust. What is the feeling there? And compare that to the feeling you have if I say the word confidence. This is what I mean when I say we've been taught to look at it, in my opinion, in the wrong way.

In truth, confidence has nothing to do with being charismatic or being loud or whatever other word you want to use. It has everything to do with trust. So if you feel like you have low self-confidence, what you're really saying is, I have low self-trust. And again, that makes things simpler, because trust is easier to understand than confidence is. If you said to someone, how do I improve confidence, there are a million things they would say, a million ideas. But if you said to someone, how do I regain trust, how do I improve trust, it's a lot simpler conversation.

So going back to what I said earlier. If you have moments where you feel confident, you feel assured, you feel like yourself, in other words you trust yourself, why do you then have moments where you feel the complete opposite? Where you feel like you're not showing up right, you're worrying about what others think, you're not speaking up because you're worried? In other words, why do you have moments where you lose trust?

Rather than the question of how confident am I, you can get some paper down and draw out the wheel of life, if you're familiar with that, or you can search it up. It's basically a big circle that you cut into slices, like spokes on a wheel, or like a pie chart. You have one slice for finances, one for relationships, one slice for health, and career, and I forget the rest. Ask yourself, how much do I trust myself in these areas of life? Do I trust myself with my health? Do I trust myself with my finances? Score it out of ten.

That's a really good exercise, because in part it answers the question of why on one day I'm feeling really pretty confident, and on another I'm feeling the complete opposite. This is about situational confidence, or situational trust. Where do you feel like you can trust yourself? And when you can't trust yourself, what's blocking that? That's the question. What's blocking those areas of your life where you feel, I don't feel sure about this, I don't feel certain about this, I don't feel confident about this?

Another way of putting it is, how self-certain do you feel about those areas of life? Because trust is certainty. Trust is certainty that the outcome is going to be what you want. For example, if you tell a friend a secret, you're trusting them not to tell anyone else, therefore you have an expectation that they'll keep it to themselves. Same thing. It's a feeling of certainty.

So after you do that, and you can pause this if you need to, ask yourself the question about any spokes in that wheel that are really low. Don't ask yourself why, because your mind will give you a bunch of bullshit. Ask yourself, what's blocking this? If your spoke on relationships is a two out of ten, for example, ask yourself, what's blocking this? What's blocking this from being a ten, or being an eight, or being a five?

Trust Is a Habit

I'll tell you what really blocks confidence, or trust. Most people think confidence is lost in big moments. Confidence is lost when you lose a job. Confidence is lost when you break up with someone. Confidence is lost when something bad happens. And that's true, you do lose confidence that way. But it's not the main way.

I want you to think of confidence, or trust, as a habit. Let's say a bad thing happens every two years. Imagine at the start of the year you set a new year's resolution: this year I'm going to break my self-trust, this year I'm going to be less confident. Imagine you had that goal, and then you only worked on it one time a year, or one time every two years. Would that be a habit that ends up being successful? No. Imagine working out once a year and expecting to gain ten pounds of muscle.

Same thing with trust. Same thing with confidence. If it's not because of the moments where all hell breaks loose and the big things happen, then what actually breaks trust is the small moments. The small moments that you repeat, because those end up becoming habits. They end up becoming patterns in how you think, patterns in how you act, in how you see yourself.

For example, you saying yes to something even when you want to say no. Or you committing to something and then not showing up. Or you saying you'd do something and then not doing it. And it could be really small things, things that we just don't consider. The most basic one is talking to a friend, and when you're about to leave you say, oh, I'll call you, or I'll text you, and then you don't. It sounds so menial, but believe it or not, you're breaking self-trust, and over time that compounds.

The Three Blockages

So I want to go through the three blockages, the three main ways trust gets blocked. These are really practical, so you can change them as soon as I say them. You can recognize them in your own life, and I encourage you to look into your own life and ask yourself, am I doing this? When am I doing this? Where am I doing this?

The first one is outsourcing trust. This is the first block that breaks self-trust. Outsourcing self-trust looks like you asking people to make sure that they agree with your decision. It looks like you knowing the answer but still having to double check with ChatGPT or a friend. It's you having a few options, for example a few options for jobs you want to take or you're looking at, and you already know which one you want to do, but then your mom or your brother or your parents say, no, you should do this one, and you go, okay, maybe I'll do that one. It's you not feeling certain, and again I use that word, not feeling certain in your own decision, and so you need to give that power away for them to validate it, so the power can feel real. It's you giving your foundation away and hoping they give it back to you.

And it's simple to fix. All you have to do is notice it, first of all, and then just pick one or two decisions a day, or a week, and decide without needing to talk to anyone about it, without needing to get someone's opinion. I don't mean intellectual stuff. I don't mean, oh, I have these three job offers and I know someone who's already been at those jobs, maybe I should ask them to see what it's like. That's a very logical thing that makes sense. I mean where you know for yourself that one of those options is right for you, and you still need someone else to validate it, you still need someone else to approve of your decision. So that's number one.

Number two, and we've already kind of been into this, is turning states into identity. It's turning those moments where you don't feel like you're showing up the way you want to show up, or the moments where you feel like people don't respect you or aren't responding to you in the way you want, into a personal failure. It's turning that into who you are. And we all do this. Why? Because negative experiences hold more weight for us. They feel stickier, they feel heavier.

So you could have ten experiences where, for example, you're making everyone laugh and everyone seems really impressed by you, and whatever other logic you need to feel like you're showing up the way you want to show up, and then one moment where people start looking at you weird, or it just doesn't feel right, or you fail that speech, and you'll remember that one more than any of the others. It's just how humans are designed, so it's better to be aware of it, and be aware of where you're being biased.

And then we think about it so much, we ruminate on it so much, that it becomes who we are. Everything we do from that moment on is done through the lens of fear, of I'm not enough, or worry of what are they thinking about me. And so everything from that moment on becomes confirmation bias of what we think we know.

In those times where it feels like that's happening, it's really important to remember that what your mind is saying is not necessarily the absolute truth. It's just what it's focusing on. I'll give you an example. It's you having a bag of M&Ms or Skittles and only ever eating the blue ones, because that feels like you, but the yellow one doesn't feel like you. It's the recognition that we contain multitudes. We have the ability to feel incredibly happy and incredibly sad, incredibly courageous and incredibly shy. So to define ourselves based on one emotion is insane. Completely insane. And it's a nice reminder, you can write that down: I contain multitudes.

The issue with emotion is that it's all consuming for a lot of people. When you haven't trained to create that space between you and the emotion, it's all consuming. And so in that moment, it's not just that you feel bad, it's that you are bad. It's not that you feel anxious, you are anxious. In that moment, you are the anxiety. So the second block is turning states into identity.

The third blockage, which is also very sneaky, and it's the best dressed out of all the blockages, is conditional trust, otherwise known as perfectionism. Conditional trust is you waiting to make a decision because you don't feel certain yet. And it is so convincing, because it sounds like you being planned, or prepared, or thinking logically and trying to have as much information as possible so you can make the right decision. But all of that just hides the fact that you're scared of taking action because you don't feel certain. You don't trust yourself. And you can see how all these words link together again. You don't trust yourself with the outcome, and so it's safer to stay still. Or you'll say, I'll only move when I have all the information, which is impossible. I'll only move when I have this criteria hit in my head.

To put it into perspective, imagine you have, like I said earlier, a friend you really trust, and you tell them a secret, and you go, don't tell anyone, just don't tell anyone. And they go, yeah, of course I won't tell anyone, as long as the day of the week starts with T. I won't tell anyone, I promise. How are you going to respond to that? Bullshit. Absolutely bullshit. But that's what conditional self-trust is. I'll only trust you and only be certain if there are conditions, if the day of the week starts with T. When you think about it that way, it's unbelievably insane. But a lot of us have that. I definitely have this.

Because you want to be certain, but what you're really looking for is to feel safe, which again is trust. So by you looking to feel safe, you're actually losing safety. And what happens when you only act when you feel safe? You only act in your comfort zone, and your comfort zone gets smaller and smaller and smaller.

A Bird Trusts in Its Ability to Fly

So the shift to make here is this. Trust isn't that you're going to achieve a certain outcome, that you're going to get a certain outcome. Trust is a knowing in you that you can handle yourself in the outcome. You know the saying: a bird doesn't trust that when it lands on a branch, the branch is not going to break. It trusts in its ability to fly if it does. That's what true trust is.

So look for yourself at all these different blockages. See which ones apply to your life. See which areas of your life you're blocking, and how, out of these three. And it's very practical. Write them down and start to tackle them, even if it feels scary, because it will. That's the point. Self-confidence, or self-trust, comes from your knowing and your ability to trust yourself in the outcome. And you can't do that if you're scared of the outcome.

So when you feel shy or less confident, rather than thinking, how can I be confident now, ask yourself, what am I looking for here? Am I looking to feel safe before I act? Am I looking for someone's approval so that I can feel I made the right decision? Am I looking to feel better before I make any decisions? Again, it goes back to those blockages. That's a really powerful and practical way to assess yourself, and to have that ability to critically think.