When Confidence is Shaky

Have you ever had a goal, but you weren’t overflowing with confidence that you could do it? 

Maybe you had a lot of internal chatter telling you it was going to be too hard. That you’d never make it.

If confidence feels too far away, you can use courage power yourself forward instead.

4 Cs of achieving a goal

Here’s the messed up reality of pursuing a new goal: 

1.     Confidence makes it easier to take action.

2.     Confidence doesn’t come easily until you’ve already succeeded. (And then, who needs the confidence, because you’ve already achieved your goal!)

As a business owner, I find this topic fascinating. To make the leap from employee to entrepreneur, you have to have some degree of confidence that you’ll be able to pay your bills as a business owner. You have to believe that you’ll be able to figure out the technology and the marketing. Believe that people will buy what you have to offer. 

BUT… When you start out, you won’t have any evidence that you can actually do these new things. So, how do you keep moving, despite your lack of confidence that you can do it? 

The answer? The 4 Cs. (A concept that I first learned from the wise Frank Kern.)

The 4 C’s go like this:

1.     Commitment

All change starts with a decision. Before the decision, your goal is really just a daydream. It won’t motivate you to action. Two very important things happen when you decide, “This is happening. I’m all in.”

a.     Indecisive chatter stops. Indecision consumes more energy that you probably realize. When you’re in your own head, going back and forth on something, it takes time and energy. Once you make a firm choice, the chatter stops. When I was deciding whether to train as a life coach, I fretted about the career change for like 6 months first. The minute I clicked, “submit” on my Life Coach School application form and paid my tuition, all the chatter stopped. I felt at peace.

b.    You start seeing possibility. Your brain can’t focus on everything, so it only focuses on what you’ve told it is important. Once you’re all-in on a goal, your brain will unconsciously look for opportunities to move you forward. Opportunities that you may have missed if you weren’t committed. For example, while I was still at my day job, the communications manager resigned. I had little communications experience, but I knew I’d need the skills. So, I offered to learn what I needed to learn to fill her shoes for a few months. I now use those skills every day in my own business. Had I not been thinking about entrepreneurship, I may not have jumped at the opportunity.

2.     Courage

When you first commit to a new goal, you won’t have the skills to achieve it. If you did, you’d have achieved it already. This means that you are going to need the courage to try, fail, learn and repeat for a while. That’s the way we build skill. For most of us, failure is a pretty scary event. But if we go in knowing that the journey will be hard and scary, then it won’t catch us off guard. We’ll know the fear means we’re doing it right. Then, we just have to allow ourselves to have the courage to keep pushing through the fear.

3.     Capability

After you’ve tried and failed enough, you’ll slowly notice that you start to feel more capable. You’ll see new skills start to emerge. The hard things will slowly start to feel easier. You won’t have achieved your goal yet, so it may still be hard to feel completely confidence. But you will start to feel capable, which will dissipate some of the fear.

4.     Confidence

Remember how I told you that confidence comes last? If you’re an entrepreneur, for example, you’ll find that the confidence really starts to settle in once you’ve started generating income. Once you have absolute proof that you can make it as a business owner.

The moral of the story

You don’t need to feel confident to commit to a goal and start taking action. If you wait for confidence, you’ll never start.

Instead, make the commitment, then expect the fear to come. Expect it to feel hard. That means you’re doing it right. Confidence will come with time.

To feel courageous, believe in your ability to grow

If you’re setting a new goal and feeling paralyzed by fear, it’s because you’re doubting your abilities.

If you want to feel courageous, shift your focus to your growth potential. The truth is, you probably don’t have all the skills you need yet. BUT, you do have tremendous potential to learn and grow. And that’s the only skill you really need. 

Book a free coffee chat

Could you use a little support to get through this rut, Mama? Let’s have coffee.

During a free, virtual coffee chat, we’ll talk about your unique situation and figure out:

• What’s not working

• What you want instead

• The pathway to get there

From there, we can explore whether Creating Me offers the right tools to help you reach your goal. And if we don’t, I’ll connect you with other resources that might fit better.