Confidence Insights Archives - Parts with Presley

How One Flavor of Confidence Helps You Find Another

Are you great at starting projects and terrible at finishing them?

It’s such a common problem among my friends! We’re a curious, excitable bunch. In my Flavors of Confidence framework, a person with this pattern usually has a lot of access to their Adventurous Confidence (the kind that makes people feel excited about new things) while they’re blocked on their Steady Confidence (the kind that helps people persevere).

This pattern is common in people with ADHD, and seen beyond ADHDers as well. It can feel like an immutable personality type. But recently, I got the opportunity to give a session to a friend and fellow coach, Alan, who was dealing with this pattern. In this one session, he was able to get in touch with his Steady Confidence and disprove the idea that he just doesn’t have what it takes to persevere.

This session shows one reason why it’s helpful to understand that confidence comes in many different flavors: a flavor of confidence that you’re strong in can actually become a portal to a flavor of confidence that you’re out of touch with.

Alan gets in touch with his Adventurous Confidence

Alan loves to learn new things, but has trouble following through. He told me he could get all fired up about something today, and then by next week, not have made any progress towards it.

The Many Flavors of Confidence

Did you know that confidence isn’t just one thing?

There are actually many kinds of confidence, and when you know about all of them, you can understand why your confidence fluctuates so much, and give yourself credit for the confidence you do have.

I call these flavors of confidence instead just “types” of confidence, because each one has a distinct inner experience. It makes you feel a certain way — determined, or excited, or soothed, say — but it also has its own, well, flavor.¹ When you get to know these flavors, you get better at noticing the first hints that some confidence is welling up, and you can stick with it and help it come out more fully, instead of getting distracted and missing the moment.

Like the colors of the rainbow, there’s a whole gradient of kinds of confidence, but as with colors, I find it useful to chop up the spectrum into a manageable number of types. So let’s look at the five main flavors of confidence.

Five Myths About Confidence

We all have the ability to become more confident, and yes, that includes you. But if you bark up the wrong tree, and it doesn’t work, you can get discouraged and conclude that you’re just “not a confident person” or that “imposter syndrome never goes away.” So let’s look at five common myths about confidence that keep people from becoming more self-assured.

Myth #1: You can persuade yourself into confidence

Your boss knows you’re good at your job. Your friends know you’re smart. Your resume shows that you’ve put in the work. So surely you can just point all this out to your brain and it’ll stop telling you that you’re a fraud, right?

But when you try, you end up saying something like “Rationally, I know better, but I don’t feel better.” You still get the jitters when it’s your turn to speak. You still get queasy when it’s performance review time. You still can’t bring yourself to hit send on that application.

It’s not that you didn’t persuade yourself hard enough. It’s not that you’re being irrational. You’ve done great work at the mental level, but you also need to work at a deeper, more somatic level — where those jitters come from.

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.

Do you have Imposter Syndrome?

I thought I was just an imposter

When I was getting a PhD in linguistics, we were all told about imposter syndrome. They told us everybody has it, so don’t worry!

That didn’t help me at all. One of my classmates and I would just talk about how maybe everybody else had imposter syndrome, but we were actually imposters.

But perhaps I wasn’t an imposter, because when I defended my dissertation, and my committee deliberated, they came back out and called for “Dr. Pizzo.”

I dedicated this dissertation to “the impostors,” as you can see in this screenshot.¹ Why not to “the people with imposter syndrome?” I wanted the people who thought they were actually imposters to be able to be sure, for once, that something was intended for them.

So it’s no surprise to me now that one of the most common questions I get as a coach for people with imposter syndrome is, “do I have imposter syndrome, or am I actually an imposter?”