The Road to Confidence
My flagship package, On Solid Ground, is a journey to find your true confidence. This confidence comes from the inside, and so it’s also a journey to the center of yourself. Here’s how it works.
Milestone 1: Grounding
In order to be able to dig deep, you need to be able to access a feeling of safety. You can’t grow when you’re terrified!
Life is full of risks and challenges, and coaching won’t change that. But we can use nervous system regulation techniques to help your body recognize the relative safety that exists in moments when you aren’t actually under attack.
Crucially, we’ll use these techniques in session so that we can continue on the journey. But you can also use the techniques I teach you in your everyday life, when your body is acting as if an email from your boss is as scary as a hungry tiger.
These techniques act quickly, calming you within minutes so that you can get some work done with a clear head. But their effect can also wear off quickly, which is why we need to continue down the road to confidence.
Milestone 2: Sensing
The next skill you need for this journey is the ability to sense your inner landscape, also known as interoception. This is a new addition to my roadmap, because some people already have this ability and don’t need a pitstop here. But I’ve noticed that other people struggle to notice the physical correlates of their emotions, and it seems to make the rest of the journey more difficult. So I’m experimenting with ways we can build this skill. As of spring 2026, if we determine in a Strategy Session that you’re struggling with this milestone, I can work with you at a discount because I want to gather more information about what works well here.
There are a number of techniques that can help:
- body scanning meditation develops inner awareness
- breathwork turns up the volume on inner sensations
- tension dampens inner sensations, so tension release methods can also turn up the volume
- movement can be easier to sense, so you can practice sensing slow movements first
You don’t need to become a master meditator – once you’re able to find emotions in your body, you can move on to the next step.
Milestone 3: Befriending Your Guards
At this point in the journey, we come to a line of guards: your protective parts. Most people think that building confidence is about teaching these guards to fight off self-doubt and criticism. But that’s how we cope with insecurity, not how we create security from within.
For true confidence, we have to go further down this road, past the guards. But we don’t want to sneak past them or fight them – that would feel threatening, and they would close ranks, making you feel even more insecure.
So the trick is to show the guards that you’re trustworthy. Parts work gives us a way to do just that, so that your guards can happily let us through.
Milestone 4: Feeling and Releasing Your Emotions
The next thing you find on this journey is usually a river of emotion. It may be the feeling of a fear of rejection, or an anger you didn’t think you were allowed to feel, or even a happiness that you thought was too much for other people.
Your guards didn’t think you could handle this river; they thought it would flood you, so they’ve been trying to keep it dammed up.
But now that you know how to sense your feelings and ground yourself, you can let this river flow just enough, and put the dam back up when the current is getting too strong.
That way, you don’t get flooded. You just let the river flow a little bit at a time. As it flows, you feel the emotion, but from a grounded place. And then it flows right on out of you, letting you move forward.
Milestone 5: Inhabiting Your Confidence
As you move forward from that emotion, you find yourself in new territory. People often say “everything is okay,” or “I feel relaxed and energized at the same time.”
The truth is, everyone ends up in this promised land from time to time, but if they don’t know what to do here, then it just becomes a happy memory. But this is more than a brief reprieve from feeling insecure. It’s a window of opportunity.
If you pay attention, this territory has a flavor. Depending on which road you took, it may be an energizing place where you feel strong and capable of standing up for yourself. It may be a sunny, fascinating place where where you feel excited instead of daunted by the unknown. It may be a cool, solid place where you feel like nothing can knock you over. Or it may be a sweet, luxurious place where you appreciate yourself the way you always wished other people would.
The road to the center of yourself took you to whichever flavor of confidence you needed in this moment. And there are three benefits you can get from here:
- You can make wise, confident decisions about the life situation that you brought to the coaching situation. Even if the feeling fades later, you’ll still have answered a key question and planned a next step.
- You can learn something from this place. Allowing something about your current sense of confidence to overwrite something about your old sense of insecurity can create a permanent change in your mind through memory reconsolidation.
- By trying to make yourself at home here, you’ll irritate some of your guards who still aren’t sure you belong here. This is a good thing — we want to meet them and build trust with them so that they’ll let you through when you try to come back here later. We can do several passes over milestones 3-5 to make this road easier and easier to travel.
Milestone 6: Acting on Your Confidence
Now it’s time to show up in life outside of your sessions and act from this flavor of confidence. One of two things will happen:
- You’ll do a great job!
- You’ll run into roadblocks and guards that still aren’t ready for you to be confident in real life. But that’s not a failure – that just tells us what to work on in our next session!
I’m not an “accountability coach” because I don’t want the fear of disappointing me to be the thing that drives you to apply for that job, give that speech, or ask for that raise. I want your own confidence to be the thing that drives you. So there’s no failing this step. There’s just information that you can use to take your next step forward.
Since there are many flavors of confidence, there are many roads to confidence, and many of them probably need some work. But before you get discouraged, consider this:
- Every time you work on one road, you’re building the skill of taking the journey inside yourself. These skills are transferrable to every road.
- This is gonna sound weird, but it’s as if your guards can sort of gossip to each other about how trustworthy you are. So once you get through the guards on one road, getting through the guards of the next road tends to get easier.
- Some of those roads are already better paved than others. Sometimes, starting with an easy road helps us get momentum and makes it more doable to tackle harder roads later.
Where are you on the road to confidence?
Everyone is starting from a different place, and everyone’s inner terrain is different. So there’s no set timeline, and no comparison between people. There’s just one question: what is your best next step?
To find out, you can fill out my form for locating yourself on the roadmap. I’ll add you to my mailing list, and give you a personal response to it within a week.