Shadé Zahrai

Confidence.

And when we are delivering workshops or talks and I ask the group of leaders or professionals that we're speaking with, they will, most of the time, 95% of them say confidence.

When we actually look at confidence and interrogate this idea of confidence, confidence is associated with a feeling, and that feeling is associated with a sense of certainty.

So when we start to unpack that, what we discover is this feeling of confidence actually doesn't come before you take action.

It comes after you take action.

Because you have to do the thing to build a certain degree of skill, to gain some competence, which then boosts what's called your self-efficacy.

And that is when that feeling of confidence shows up.

So if that feeling that everyone is waiting for of confidence actually comes after you've done something, there is something that comes first.

What do you do before you take the action?

That's where self-trust comes in.

So actually, the true opposite of self-doubt is not confidence, it's self-trust.

And then self-trust is built on these four core psychological attributes of acceptance, agency, autonomy, adaptability.

If any one of them is lacking,

You will hold yourself back.

You will hesitate.

You will second-guess yourself.

You will overthink.

Because there's some part of you that doesn't trust that you are worthy, that you can do the thing, that you have any control over the thing, or that you can handle the emotions that come with the thing.

It's a few different things.

So if we, again, bring it back to those attributes, the first step is that you trust that even if it doesn't work, so this is around worthiness and acceptance, even if it doesn't work out, that's not a verdict on who you are.