For a long time I considered self-confidence as the Holy Grail of action taking. On the surface it even seemed like the magic bullet that made things happen. People who were self-confident did things in the word and had impact, while people lacking in self-confidence were forgettable and didn’t achieve all that much.
It almost seemed like self-confidence was something you either did or didn’t have. While living with this flawed assumption I found myself perpetually in a state of waiting to be ‘self-confident’ enough to take a stand and do something that actually mattered to me. In order to help you uncover your inner source of self-confidence let’s move through what your current reality might be.
Just because a thought feels heavy doesn’t make it more true
I used to live with the assumption that the heavier a feeling felt the more true the content of my thinking was in that moment. For a number of years I would override numerous potentially good ideas because of this basic underlying assumption. About a year before I started my podcast I had the thought ‘I would love to start a podcast’. About a year and a half before I created a Meetup group I had the thought ‘I could start a Meetup group to meet more people and talk about thing that mattered to me’. However these thoughts were swiftly negated by seemingly more ‘realistic’ thoughts such as ‘what qualifies you to have an opinion? Or ‘who would agree to do an interview with you when you don’t have an audience?’.
It turns out that you don’t need to wait for a readymade list of interested members to start a Meetup group and you can manage to get some big names on your podcast without even having a single true fan. This seems to fly in the face of the conventional narrative of needing credentials before you can even begin to think about giving yourself permission to do something that matters, so you might be asking yourself what trick might I be missing here?
From what I have experienced, the missing ‘X factor’ is often as simple as where you are coming from and what your intentions are. Anything that ever mattered was created from a ‘nobody’ with nothing and the people you admire the most will quite often appreciate this fact because that is exactly where their story began too.
Everyone feels self-doubt – because there is nothing certain in life
As I take more steps along my path I have found it comforting to realise that we are all in the same boat together. It is a little paradoxical that one of the scariest truths about life is also that which has the greatest potential to connect us together on a deeper level.
There is nothing that is certain in life and there will always be a situation where you will feel like an imposter of some sort. Research on effective decision making highlights that an effective decision is reached when you have about 70% of the information, the minimum amount of information required is 40%. Jeff Bezos, Founder & CEO of Amazon, has even said “if you wait for 90%, in most cases you are probably being slow”. Former US Secretary of State Colin Powell coined this the 40/70 rule. The implication of this is that you will never know all there is to know before you do something so there is really no point in waiting.
The power lies in accepting this fact, letting go of the illusion of perfection and allowing yourself to feel the anxiety and do it anyway. The anxious feelings aren’t even aware of what you are about to do or your competency level to do it, they are only there to let you know that you are experiencing anxious thinking in that moment, nothing more, nothing less, but that is where your liberation and freedom reside.
Nervousness as an impulse to help you find your ‘True North’
If you were thinking of doing something that didn’t matter to you then you wouldn’t give it much thought and so it wouldn’t even be in your awareness to begin with. The fact that you are nervous about taking the first step is a good sign. Yes, that is not a typo, I struggle to accept this myself but when properly understood nervousness has the potential to be a helpful guide.
If you weren’t feeling nervous it wouldn’t be something that mattered to you. Nervousness allows you to notice the things that truly matter and a lack of nerves allows you to move past the things that don’t.
So what about self-confidence?
There was a time when I used to chase self-confidence, until I began to notice that the more I chased it, the further it seemed to run away from me. At some point I forgot about chasing self-confidence altogether and I began to work with what I did have. I had ideas, people, nerves, anxiety and imposter syndrome so instead of trying to run away from my reality I decided to embrace it, not all at once mind you, but certainly over time.
After a couple of months and years of consistent action taking I began to notice that self-confidence wasn’t the personality trait I had imagined it to be, rather it is a by-product of doing the work to discover who you are and what you stand for.
I didn’t need to chase self-confidence before I could begin to start creating my life. What I discovered is that I needed to begin creating my life to uncover what self-confidence actually feels like. Underneath the anxiety, nerves and fears lies an unshakable inner source of self-confidence the only question that remains is if you choose to begin the journey today?