What’s so important about confidence?
Why do we care so much about confidence to begin with? Why is this a concept that matters to so many people?
If I had to guess, because we’ve seen over and over again that confident people seem to get better outcomes. The big raise, the promotion, the great boyfriend, the male attention, the respect and the nice things.
And all those things are pretty appealing. You’re probably here because you want a least one of those things: to succeed in work, to be in a great relationship, to feel good about yourself. And you probably feel like cultivating your confidence is one of the missing pieces for you.
But here's where most of us go wrong. We think that…
Today: actions = bad results
If we figure out this confidence thing: confidence + action = good results
When framed in this way, it's no wonder we put so much emphasis on confidence because it seems like the elusive, missing ingredient. But what if the reality is something more like…
Today: few actions = few results
If we figure out this confidence thing: confidence x action = more results
Think about it this way - a confident man will go up to talk to a beautiful woman at a bar and ask her out. She might say yes but sometimes she won't. The fact that he's confident doesn't guarantee him a good result but because he's confident, he goes up and asks more and he gets more answers from more women. When you look over time, comparing him to a less confident man, he probably has more women say yes to a date but he also has more women say no.
And perhaps over time, that man learns more about what makes a successful ask and so his yes vs. no % shifts where he really is getting more yeses. In fact, that's definitely true.
But let's come back to you, friend. You want more for your life. If you get more confident, you're more likely to succeed. But the real lever you're pulling is the number of actions you take, not the % of actions that lead to a good outcome (that can shift, but it's secondary).
Now there are some things I don't want misinterpreted here. Am I telling you to go on the maximum amount of dates or send out hundreds of resumes? No. There's a lot more nuance to this than I can dive into in one post. But this topic seems to come up over and over again in my client work and I've realized that this concept of confidence really is at the core of what I help almost every client with.
Can you take more actions and can you look at every “bad outcome” as a win, based on the fact that it means you’re taking a lot of action? Can you maybe find a learning in that experience and can you show your body, your nervous system that the world didn’t fall apart when something didn’t work out for you? And can you keep going?
