Borrowing Belief.
Most people are looking for the same thing when it comes to working with me.
Confidence.
They want to feel confident before speaking.
Which makes sense in many ways.
Confidence leads to action which leads to whatever it leads to.
The challenge is that confidence doesn’t really work that way.
And if you are waiting for it before you do something, the chances are you won’t do it.
Back in 2017 I was asked to host a podiatry conference.
Was I ready? Nope.
Did I have confidence? Not really.
Yet I still said yes.
Partly because I was curious about whether I could do it.
And because I trusted the person who asked and I knew they wouldn’t ask if they didn’t have confidence in me.
Turns out that it was a great experience and I led to me hosting that event two more times.
If I waited for confidence, then it wouldn’t have happened.
And I certainly wouldn’t be doing the work I am now.
When I learnt to drive we had cars without power steering.
Sounds barbaric, right?
To steer these cars you needed forearms like a wrestler.
But there was a hack.
If you need to turn the wheel while stationary it took a load of force.
If you moved the car slightly - even a centimetre - the steering became a lot lighter.
That small movement.
That tiny action.
Totally different outcome.
I see this all the time in my coaching work - from workshops to individual clients.
They normally arrive tell me that they can’t speak in public.
And all of that is real.
Because when you feel it, you feel it.
The work I do is to show people that speaking doesn’t have to be big stages and TEDx.
It can be simply sending a voice note to someone.
Or doing a social media video for your marketing.
If it is about the bigger stages, but there’s a fear of getting there, it’s the smaller steps that make it possible.
When people come to me asking for confidence, I wonder if they are looking for something else?
I suspect it’s permission and support.
Permission to start before they feel ready, and to be okay with it being less than perfect.
Support from someone who can see things in them, that perhaps they are not ready to see.
And sometimes - okay, more than sometimes - it’s about a borrowing of belief.
While they build their own.
In many ways that’s what I offer.
Yeah we can work on skill stuff.
But when you understand who you are, what your story is and have someone else believe in you, then the confidence comes later.
You don’t have to feel ready.
You just need to start.
Because I believe that you can do it.
If you’ve been waiting to be confident enough before you speak in public, then maybe it’s time for us to have a chat.