One of the issues that many of my executive coaching clients bring up is confidence. Lack of confidence, the need for confidence, how to get more confidence. These questions are all based on the assumption that confidence is an essential ingredient in the recipe for success or high performance. This is unquestioned by the person who raises the issue.
On the surface, it appears to be a valid assumption. When you look around at people who seem highly successful or deeply contented—which, by the way, are not necessarily related—they often do seem to share either a quiet or loud confidence.
So, gaining more confidence would seem to be almost essential for those wishing to replicate the lives and processes of these individuals who light up societal consciousness—thus, the scramble to consume self-help media targeting confidence or its associated characteristics. Again, the fact that more of these books keep coming off the conveyer belt at regular intervals points to the reality that there may be something amiss with this intense search for confidence as a quality in its own right.
Let’s look at confidence through a different lens.
Confidence may be an illusory construct. When someone says they want to be confident in a situation, they are often really saying they want to engage in the situation without anxiety. They equate lack of anxiety with the real definition of confidence. Starting with that premise, they assume that if they are confident, they won’t be exhibiting anxiety. In other words, a lack of anxiety is the metric by which they will know if they are confident enough to engage with the world toe to toe and prevail. That assumption, while perhaps not surprising, is inaccurate. Anxiety is not something to be eliminated or some sort of drag coefficient. It is psychological sensory data to assist us, especially in the pacing of our venture into the unknown, to minimise overwhelm as we expand our zone of comfort and knowledge.
But let us make the assumption, for argument’s sake, that confidence is a construct in its own right rather than simply the label we place on the state of a lack of anxiety in a situation. Great performers don’t necessarily alight at birth with confidence inbuilt in their psychological structures. They also don’t alight with high levels of competence in the they may become renowned for in the future. To gain mastery, lots of fumbling and destabilisation over a long period of time are often experienced to clear the haze, remove the static, and create high-resolution maps that lead to a fulfilling life of values lived and goals obtained.
Think about this proposition:
Confidence most commonly comes at the end of a successful process rather than being part of the starting conditions before the journey begins.
Early in his career, Roger Federer did not look anything like the tennis player he turned out to be. It didn’t seem inevitable that he would one day break the Grand Slam record. The cool, calm exterior he displayed under the spotlight during his mature career was a world away from the 19-year-old version of himself. But looking at the mature Federer, aspiring professionals would be forgiven for thinking they need to acquire that unflappable confidence to scale similar heights.
The reason many people think that confidence is essential is that hyper-competence is what catches the public gaze. This hyper-competence is associated with confidence by the casual or keen observer. But hyper-competence breeds confidence—not the other way around. Or, more strictly speaking, competence is a by-product of the process by which mastery is achieved. Confidence follows a couple of steps behind.
You don’t need confidence to do anything. In other words, you don’t need to eliminate anxiety to be able to step up. You need to be able to process, extract data from, and act independently of the anxiety you experience to whatever degree is manageable at any point in time. You need to do those behaviours that service valued directions in your life. Anxiety is a pacing structure to support the process along that pathway.
Stop trying to chase confidence—it will come find you once you set up the right processes in time. By that stage, it will just be your friend to keep you company and help you enjoy the view, rather than a shield you feel you need for protection. You don’t need to wait for confidence. You can start now…
