An Engineer Finds True Confidence

Sometimes I talk about “true confidence” and how it can help people face intimidating tasks and get more done, without having to “fake it till you make it.” But it might be hard to imagine how people find this confidence and what it feels like. So I’ll share a story of a session I had with a client that I’ll call Andy, where he uncovered his true confidence, not by faking it or convincing himself, but as a natural consequence of looking inside himself.

Andy is an engineer who loves to make art projects in his free time. He’s been working with me because his job includes a task that feels impossible, and when he tries to do it, he bounces off of it and automatically reaches for something different to do.

By this session, Andy said that The Impossible Task was already feeling “more approachable.” He’d broken it down into subtasks, and some of them felt achievable, but some of them still felt impossible. So we picked one of the impossible subtasks – a report he needed to write up and present in a meeting – and started exploring his feelings around it.

“I should know how to do this”

Earlier that day, Andy had tried to write a checklist of what needed to be done for this report. He ran into a feeling of resistance against writing the report and thought to himself, “I should know how to do this. I should be able to just write this thing.”

But in reality, the task was unclear. Even the people he asked about it at work didn’t know exactly how it should be done. So fears came up: “I can’t figure it out. And I’m going to go into this review and they’re going to be like ‘everything’s wrong!’”

Somatic relaxation

This fear was showing up in his body as tension in his head and a hunched over feeling. So I guided him to bring some compassionate touch to his head, which often allows that kind of tension to relax. 

Andy noticed that some of the tension melted away, and he started to feel an “energetic flow.” When you notice a sort of tingling, relaxed but energized feeling flowing through your body, that’s a sign that you’re getting into an emotionally regulated state where you’ll be able to see new possibilities.

Recruiting an excited part

But first, Andy noticed a part of himself that was impatient with the idea of sitting here in a coaching session when there were so many interesting projects to work on. Andy is an incredibly creative person who’s always juggling several projects, so it was easy to understand why this part of him would rather get to work on something!

I asked Andy to invite the impatient part to help him get more of that energy flowing. We used some gentle breathwork to increase his energy level. Andy found it really helpful to recruit this part rather than just try to get it to calm down. And then, he said:

“I can feel that energy flowing through the top of my head and all the way down into my body. I can feel a very peaceful mindset and nothing’s trying to interrupt or take over with thoughts. I like that.”

Getting intuitions

This flowing energy and lack of interruption signalled that his parts were relaxed and he was ready to do deeper work. I invited him to think about his whole situation and notice the feeling or mental image that it gave him.

He got a mental image of the impossible subtask as something buried in the snow. He said it would take hard work to dig it out. He sensed that this meant he would need more clarity on the task. 

“If I break the task down into smaller pieces or if I focus on a part of it that I know how to approach, then those parts become more visible in that snowbank, they start to stick out of it.”

The kind of confidence you don’t have to fake

I asked Andy if he felt the ability to do that hard work, and he said “Yeah, I do.” You’ll notice this is much more definitive answer than he would have given at the beginning of the session.

So I asked him what that ability felt like. He said it felt like strength, confidence, groundedness. This is how people tend to describe one of our innate resources. This is the kind of confidence that you don’t have to fake. A little-known fact about it is that you don’t have to learn this kind of confidence or acquire it or practice it. You already have it; it’s just hidden under some fears.

Andy was feeling this resource almost everywhere in his body, and said it’s the feeling he gets when he looks at a rock climbing route and just knows he can climb it. 

“I am certain of my ability”

It’s one thing to feel an inner resource; it’s another to own it as your own. That’s what makes the difference between thinking “that was a cool experience, I wish I could feel that way more often,” and thinking “from this experience, I learned something about myself that’s true no matter how I feel in the moment.” Andy was ready to make the shift to owning this resource. Once I explained how, he found that easy to do.

“Yeah, I can be that confidence and I can be that grounded certainty.”

I asked him to finish the sentence “I am ____” and he said “I am certain of my ability. I’m strong. I’ll be able to dig it out.”

Notice that I never gave him a pep talk about how capable he is or told him not to doubt himself. You wouldn’t tug on a plant to get it to grow; you’d just make sure nothing is blocking its sunlight. Similarly, my role as a coach isn’t to tell people what to become, but to help them move their inner blockages out of the way of their natural ability to grow.

Integration

I began to help Andy integrate this resource into his life, by asking him to look back at the task buried in the snow.

He said, “There will be broken pieces, there will be things that are hard to uncover, but I can put together the shape of it. I’ll be able to piece it together. I’ll be able to dig it out.”

Next, I asked how it would feel if he had to wing it a little bit and it wasn’t going to be perfect. He named the pieces of the task that he can do well and said of the remaining piece, “If nobody really knows how it’s supposed to be, then maybe I can just impose my will on that vacuum and give it a form that people will accept. And if somebody shows up with their own very different clear idea of how it’s supposed to be, I can change it and adapt it and make it meet that.”

Checking the belief

To really seal the deal, I checked on Andy’s belief “I should already know how to do this.” How does that idea strike him now?

“Of course I shouldn’t already know how to do this. Even the three people I’ve asked already don’t know how to do this. Why should I know?”

A lot of people would have been tempted to suggest this to Andy at the beginning of the session. He came in saying that no one knew how he should do this task, and yet also saying that he should know how to do it. It’s one of the classic ways perfectionism distorts our logic. 

But if I had just tried to convince him to change his mind, it wouldn’t have changed his feelings deep down. And then he might have felt even worse about himself for having those feelings even though they were irrational. That’s why it’s so important to use the route of self-acceptance: it leads to a deeper transformation than advice does. Andy wasn’t trying to talk himself into not believing that he should already know; it was just obvious to him now.

He also wasn’t feeling the hunched-over part of him that had been intimidated by this task anymore. He decided that if he did feel it again in the future, he would let that part know that it didn’t have to take responsibility for this task – that he’s got it.

Memory reconsolidation 

There was one more thing to do for integration. Andy’s belief had changed, which meant the process of memory reconsolidation had begun. To make sure it reached completion, I guided Andy to retrace his steps: he used to feel hunched over and like he should already know how to do this task, and yet he couldn’t do it, and now he feels capable of doing the task well enough and iterating on it as needed.

Holding his old belief and his new belief side-by-side like this helps to replace the old belief with the new one in long-term memory.

Hope for the perfectionistic procrastinators

The task Andy faced was a perfect storm for procrastination:

• It was unclear
• It was uninteresting
• He was very unlikely to get it 100% right on the first try (if there is such a thing as 100% right – we literally don’t know!)
• And to top it all off, he was going to have to show it to important people at his company.

These are some of the most common reasons why people procrastinate – all in one assignment!

And we know the solutions: break it down into small pieces, do a “good enough” job, and then improve it as needed. But we often don’t have time to think of those solutions before our bodies kick in and say “Nope, do something else! Anything but this!”

But by working with Andy’s body instead of fighting against it, we found something so much better than the fake confidence and white-knuckled willpower that people often think is the only way forward. We found true confidence. And you can find it too. It may not come this quickly; Andy has been working with me for a while and his parts have become relaxed enough to let him sink into these resource states fairly easily. But it can happen. You don’t have to fake it till you make it and then feel like an imposter. You can discover that you already have what it takes.