earned confidence

action as the catalyst

something that’s been coming up recently with clients and friends alike the past couple of months is:

earned confidence: a belief in one’s abilities rooted in real, tangible proof points of one accomplishing something one set out to do, or surviving something one thought could not be endured, however big or small.

there is a certain activation energy threshold required to move us from desire to action. my hunch is that motivation is what fuels activation energy. enough motivation and we cross the threshold from inaction to action.

motivation is either clean or dirty. intrinsic or extrinsic. selected by self, or selected by others for us. both sources work in the short-term, but only one type of motivation can both (1) keep us fuelled in the long-term and (2) reduce the damage we incur along our pursuits.

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3 possibilities come to mind for why you aren’t doing the thing you’re telling yourself you want to be doing:

the first is that you don’t want to do the thing as badly as you think you do. if you cared enough, you’d do it. this can happen if we do something as a means to an end, so the action itself is not desirable and we rely on cerebrally connecting how the undesirable action leads to the desirable payoff.

not caring enough to take action may also happen because you’re trying to do something that isn’t a priority. you may have not taken the time until now to pause, reflect, and centre on what your priorities are for your current chapter in life. the good news is that stopping halfway through something means you saved a whole half of additional time and effort.

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a second possibility is that either the action, the result of our action, or both are rooted in dirty motivation. you’ve perhaps poorly picked the end, or the goal, such that you didn’t pick it, but rather the external world influenced you to choose the ouput you’re after. the dirty motivation behind our pursuits could be societal expectations or personal insecurities we try to overcome with an ideal image we’ve adopted.

ultiumately, we need to have strong conviction for why we’re doing what we’re doing. getting clear on what the purpose is of your pursuit is something i love exploring with my clients.

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third, is that you’re waiting for more confidence. the core assumption here is that confidence leads to action, or inversely that a lack of confidence is why you haven’t gone from desire to action. if you had more confidence, you’d be motivated enough to cross the activation energy threshold.

while it may be true, it’s a limiting belief. by believing this, you’re more likely to be stuck in inaction. a more enabling belief could be that action leads to confidence, aka earned confidence.

the only way to earn a genuine sense of confidence in oneself is to start racking up wins. so we try to do the hard thing to prove to ourselves that we’re hot shit.

ego in the form of arrogance is a major reason we’re stuck in inaction. we try to clear a high bar on our first attempt with little prior experience. we don’t dare stooping down to lower levels because…what does that say about what we’re capable of? we’re scared of finding out we’re way worse than we think we are. the antidote is humility. you aren’t hot shit, nor do you need to be. instead of that feeling offensive, consider it a liberating permission to not have to worry about how you seem to others. dissolving dirty motivation.

in practice, it seems to be best to start small with a minimum acceptable hurdle to clear such that it increases your confidence. lower the bar to maximize adherence.

example: when i was lacking the confidence to coach extremely smart individuals, i started by basically volunteering: i asked my friends if they knew anyone who was willing to take me on as a coach. the stakes were relatively quite low coaching someone free of charge, so i was confident enough to give it a go. a few months later, i had enough confidence in my abilities to take my coaching pursuit further.

we tend to underrate the flywheel that kicks into action once you accomplish something related to the domain you’re pursuing. even if the bar is low at the beginning, you’ve gone from 0 to 1 in a very literal sense: no action to one action.

one action then quickly becomes some action, and the byproduct of some action is acquiring learning, character, and relationships. what locks us in is having sustainable healthy habits.

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if there’s something you wanna do and you’re not doing it, you either don’t want it badly enough, don’t want it for the right reasons, or you're starting off too high due to a lack of humility.

coming to terms with who we are and our real, limited set of current capabilities allows us to approach our work with the playfulness and curiosity of a child. this makes it much easier to start the task at hand and earn ourselves some confidence we can stash in the back pocket for the harder challenge a week from now.