Introduction
Welcome to The Overachievers Podcast, for those times when achieving everything is still not enough.
There’s something you’ve been meaning to do in your role for a while now. You know exactly what it is. And you’re waiting until you feel confident enough to do it.
It sounds sensible. Nobody wants to charge into things before they’re ready. The trouble is that the waiting assumes confidence comes first and action follows, and for most of what we’re talking about, the order runs the other way.
In this episode, we look at Ruth, who waited eighteen months to change one Monday meeting, and at why capable people in particular learn to treat the feeling of confidence as a green light. We explore what separates confidence from courage, and why only one of them is ever available in advance.
And we look at what’s actually on that list of yours, which often turns out to have rather less to do with skill than you might expect…
Key Themes
- Why confidence turns up after you act
- When competence teaches you to wait
- The wait that keeps proving itself
- Where courage fits when confidence hasn’t arrived
- What’s really on your waiting list
Timestamps
- 0:00 Waiting until you feel ready
- 1:48 When I feel more confident
- 3:35 Ruth and the Monday meeting
- 7:03 The first time you did it
- 8:14 Confidence and courage
- 11:05 Why capable people wait longest
- 14:22 What to notice instead
- 17:01 What’s really on the list
- 18:52 A question to take with you
If You Prefer Video
Connected Blog
The Confidence You’re Waiting For
You have a list of things you’ll do once you feel more confident. Every reason on it makes sense. Here is why that list never seems to get any shorter.
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Episode 026 – Done Is Not Failure
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Transcript
This is the Overachievers Podcast for people who want success without the burnout. There’s something that you’ve been meaning to do in your role for a while now. You know exactly what it is, and you’re still waiting until you feel confident enough to do it. Welcome to the Overachievers Podcast with Keith Blakemore-Noble. Because success shouldn’t cost everything. Hello, welcome back. I’m Keith Blakemore-Noble, the Overachievers Coach. In the last episode, we looked at the things that you know perfectly well, but that you say More softly than you believe them.
And we looked at what separates authority from arrogance. At the end of the last episode, I said we would look at confidence and courage. We’re going to look at what separates them and look at why waiting to feel confident before you act can keep you waiting a very long time. So in this episode, we’re one step further back from that with the things that you haven’t done at all yet. Because a particular feeling hasn’t turned up. If you haven’t already, please do follow or subscribe on whatever platform you’re listening to. That way, every episode finds its way to you without you having to go to look for it. Listen to how capable people talk about what comes next for them, and one phrase turns up again and again.
When I feel more confident. When I feel more confident, I’ll change how the meeting runs. When I feel more confident, I’ll make that call myself instead of running it past everyone first. Hey, when I feel more confident, I’ll start doing the job the way I think it should be done. Sounds entirely reasonable, sensible even. Nobody wants to go charging into things before they’re ready. And there is nothing wrong with wanting to feel ready. Preparation matters.
Heaven knows proper preparation prevents poor performance. We know this. And readiness matters. But notice what that sentence assumes. It assumes that confidence comes first and action follows. You feel confident and then you do it. Trouble is, for most of what we are talking about, the order runs the other way. Confidence is usually something that arrives after you’ve done the thing.
It’s built from evidence, and evidence only exists once you’ve started. Which means if you wait for the feeling of confidence before you act, You are waiting for the very thing which waiting prevents. And that’s the illusion in the title of this episode. The order looks one way but works in the other. To illustrate this, let me tell you about Ruth. Ruth became head of her department after years in the team, and for most of those years she’d sat in the Monday meeting. 90 minutes, everyone around the table, one at a time, giving an update on what they’ve been doing. Most of it could have been an email.
The 2 or 3 things that actually needed deciding, they got squeezed into the last 5 minutes with everyone watching the clock, ready and waiting to leave the meeting. Ruth had always thought that the meeting should be no more than 30 minutes, Built around the decisions that mattered. She had thought this for years, and now finally, thanks to her promotion, the meeting was hers to run. So she decided she would change it once she felt established. After the first quarter of continuing to run the meeting the same way, She thought, once people have got used to me, then I can change it. Then the restructure came, and it made sense to wait until things had settled from that. Oh, then there was the audit, and that did not seem like the moment to change things. She simply wanted to feel a bit more settled in the role first.
And when you look at them in isolation, every single one of those reasons was sensible. If you’d asked her, She could have defended each of them and you probably would have agreed with her. And so 18 months went by. Every Monday she ran a meeting she didn’t believe in, exactly the way her predecessor had run it. She told me later that she actually felt like a caretaker in her own job, minding it for someone else, waiting for the day that it would feel like hers. And then one day, the usual meeting room was actually booked for another event. The only room that was free was available for about 40 minutes and no more. So for one Monday, out of pure necessity, Ruth ran the meeting her way.
30 minutes, decisions first. And here’s the part that mattered. She didn’t feel any more confident that morning than she had on any of the previous 70-odd Mondays before it. She felt every bit as unready as ever, but she did it anyway because the room left her no choice. The next week, the meeting went back to its old room, but Ruth kept the new format. And about 3 weeks, after 3 weeks of doing this, she noticed something. She had stopped dreading Monday mornings, and somewhere in there, without her noticing, she started to feel that the department was actually hers. The confidence that she had waited 18 months for turned up about a month after the thing that she was waiting for the confidence to enable her to do.
Hmm. Let me pause and ask you something here. Think of something that you are confident at now, something that you can do without, without a second thought. Running a meeting, driving, a particular aspect of your work, whatever it is, it’s something that you can do, no problem. You are confident in it. You know you can do it. And now think back to the very first time that you did that thing. How confident did you feel the first time you did it? For most people, the answer is not very confident, probably not confident at all.
The confidence that you have now It’s built out of all the times that you’ve done the thing. That’s where the confidence came from. You don’t, you just don’t remember the order because the feeling has been there for so long. It feels as though it was always there. But you did the thing and then that created the confidence. That’s the way around these things are. Which brings us to the distinction at the heart of this episode, confidence and Courage. Now, we tend to use the two almost interchangeably, or we treat courage as a sort of emergency version of confidence, the thing you reach for when confidence runs out.
I’d like to propose that there’s actually a more clear separation between the two. Confidence, confidence is a feeling. It’s the feeling that you can do something. And confidence comes from evidence, evidence that comes from the many times you’ve done it before and it went okay. You can’t necessarily— you can’t really summon confidence on demand any more than you can decide to feel rested. It arrives when there is enough evidence for it. That’s where confidence comes from. Courage, on the other hand, now courage is a decision.
It’s choosing to take the next step whilst the feeling of confidence is not there. Courage doesn’t need evidence because it comes before the evidence exists. All it needs is the next step. And a reason to take it. We might hear that courage is described as facing your fear. You don’t need to be frightened for any of this to apply. I mean, Ruth wasn’t frightened of the Monday morning meeting. Nothing terrible was going to happen if she changed it.
She just didn’t feel ready. And she’d taken that as information. So confidence is something that happens to you after the fact, and courage is something you do before it, which means only one of them is ever available in advance. That, that, my friend, that is why waiting for confidence before you act, you’re actually asking the impossible of yourself. You’re asking the result To turn up before the thing that creates the result. So the question, do I feel confident enough to do this, can only be answered once you’ve done it, which is why it never actually gets properly answered. The question that you can answer right now is whether this thing is worth doing, even though you may not have the feeling of confidence. Is the thing itself worth doing? So given all of this, why do capable people get caught by this? You’d think that they would be the last to wait.
They’re usually the ones who are heading forth and getting on with things. I think, I think the answer lies in where their confidence has always come from. So if you’re the sort of person who listens to this podcast, and you are because you’re listening to this podcast, then for most of your life confidence, confidence has arrived as a byproduct of competence. You’re prepared, you work hard, you know your stuff, the feeling follows reliably pretty much every time. Revise properly, Walk into the exam feeling ready. Know your brief inside out, you walk into the meeting feeling ready. So without ever deciding to do— without ever deciding to, you learned to treat the feeling as a green light. When it was there, you were ready.
When it wasn’t, you hadn’t prepared enough yet, and the answer was to prepare more. And that rule has served you for years. And hey, to be honest, in plenty of places it still does serve you. But a role asks for some things that preparation cannot produce the feeling for. Your judgment, your way of doing things, the decisions that are yours to make the way you would make them. What’s being asked, or what’s being asked for Well, what is being asked for there is you, and you can’t revise for being yourself in a role you haven’t yet been yourself in. If you haven’t done it, how can you revise for it, right? There is no brief to learn here. The only evidence comes from doing it, which is why you never get the green light.
And then the waiting starts to confirm itself. Every morning you check for the feeling of confidence. It’s not there, and its absence is read as proof. Yeah, see, I’m still not ready. Better leave it a little longer. Okay. Except the reason it isn’t there is because you haven’t started. Every day of waiting adds no evidence at all.
So each day The reading comes back the same. Each day it looks— but each day that looks a little bit more like the truth about you, even though it’s not. That’s the cost of waiting, and it’s a cost paid by you. Part of the cost is time. In Ruth’s case, 18 months of Monday mornings. That’s a lot of time. The larger part is what the waiting teaches about yourself. It teaches you that you’re someone who isn’t ready yet.
And the longer that goes on, the more convincing that becomes. So what do you do with this? I’m not going to suggest you push through. I’m not going to suggest you build your confidence up first. Certainly not that last one, because that’s the very thing that you— that’s kept you waiting, right? So I’m not going to suggest you do more of that because you’ll just keep waiting. What does help is noticing a few things. First of all, notice your own when I feel more confident, I’ll list. Most, most, most of us have one, even if you’ve never actually written it down. The things you’ve been meaning to do in your role once you feel ready.
So notice your own list and notice how long each item has been on that list. Second thing to notice is that courage rarely feels like courage. It doesn’t feel bold, it doesn’t feel dramatic. Had Ruth chosen it rather than had it handed to her, forced on her by a room booking, It would have felt like an ordinary Monday morning, maybe with a slight, slight unsettled feeling in the tummy, and that’s all. Courage mostly feels like doing something reasonable while not really feeling ready to do it. And the third thing I’d invite you to notice is to notice what Ruth needed all along. What Ruth really needed was a reason Bigger than the missing feeling. Needed something bigger than that missing feeling in order to move her into taking action, and really confidence had very little to do with it.
The pre-booked meeting room provided the reason by accident. Courage is providing that reason by yourself. So for any of those things on your list, the question to consider is what would make it worth doing even though you don’t have the feeling that you’re ready? What would make that thing worth doing even though you don’t feel ready to do it? Sometimes the answer is that it isn’t worth it. And hey, that’s absolutely— excuse me— that’s Absolutely useful to know too. That’s fine. Then once you’ve done that, notice something about what’s on that list. When people look at theirs, a surprising amount of it has nothing to do with skill. It’s running a meeting the way you think it should run.
It’s making a decision the way you make it. It’s bringing back a part of how you work that you put to one side when you stepped into the role. In other words, it’s about doing it as yourself. It’s about you being you. It’s not skill, it’s just you being you. Which is why it’s crazy that so many very capable people are waiting to feel confident enough to do it. Remember, the confidence that they’re waiting for only comes from doing it. And the version of you that feels at home in the role is built out of the time to show up as yourself.
There is a good deal more underneath being yourself in a role than we have time to explore fully in this episode. It’s exactly what we explore in Leading Without Losing Yourself, which is a course inside the Overachievers Club. Go check that out if you want to take a much deeper look at it. But that’s where I want to leave this for this podcast episode for now. In the next episode, we’re changing things up, stepping things up to a new topic. We’re looking at the visibility gap. And we’re looking at competence and visibility and why being very good at what you do doesn’t mean that anyone actually knows it. That’s coming up in the next episode.
For now, I’d like to leave you with this question. Think of the one thing you’ve been waiting to feel ready to do. If the confidence only ever arrives after you start, what specifically are you actually waiting for? Can’t be waiting for the confidence because that becomes— that comes afterwards. So what is the waiting Actually waiting for specifically? Something to think about. Hopefully you found this episode useful. If you did, hey, please do leave a review or a rating on wherever you’re listening to this. Helps other people find the show and it helps me to see which pieces really resonate with people. Do also share it.
Share it with someone who you know is Is waiting to feel ready to do the thing. See if it helps them actually take the action that you know they are more than capable of taking. And if you haven’t already, piece of action you can take, hit follow or subscribe so that you’re here for every episode. Also, head over to KeithBN.link/TOP where you’ll find all of the episodes. Find this episode, check the show notes there, and you’ll also find some additional resources which are well worth exploring. That’s it for this episode. I’m Keith Blakemore-Noble, the Overachievers Coach, and I’ll be your guide as we explore a healthier way to succeed.
