Ask a founder when their confidence dropped and most cannot tell you.
Not the date, not the comment, not the meeting. Something was said, or something happened, and the self-worth just quietly washed away. No announcement. No obvious wound.
That is how it goes with the people I coach. It is almost never the strategy or the calendar that breaks first. It is the self-worth, and it leaves without a sound.
So you keep running the company on a foundation that whispers you are one mistake from being found out. You perform over the top of it. From the outside you look fine.
Here is what I want you to hear. The confidence did not leave. It went quiet. You still have it. You built this whole thing on it.
The work is not earning it back from zero. The work is plugging back into what is already there.
When did yours last go quiet, and can you even name why?
Transcription:
Your brain was never the problem. Your unconventional thinking was never the problem.
Sit with me for a second because it goes against everything you were trained to believe, but actually, you already have a lot of the confidence you need. You just need to plug into it. How do you think you built such a successful company? You have more thoughts and more ideas in a single day than most people have in a month. You are three moves ahead while the room is still catching up with you on move number one.
That way of thinking found the opening nobody else saw. It is the reason people look to you for direction. Do not forget that. The wiring was never the flaw. The story about the wiring was… is the flaw. I’ll tell it to you a thousand times. We gotta bury that belief. The thing my clients lose first when a high-performing leader starts working with me, here is what I watch for in the first few s- I’m telling you, I usually see it in the free coaching call.
Not a strategy gap, not a calendar issue. It’s the self-worth. The self-worth, the self-confidence are almost always the first thing that go, and they go quietly. You don’t even notice it. You don’t… So often, people can’t even tell me if what was said or how it was said, but something, something was said, something happened, and all of a sudden, their self-worth just feels like it washed away.
You can run a business, close deals, lead a team, and still be operating on a foundation that whispers, “You are one m- mistake away from being found out. Be very careful. You are one mistake away.” You’ve gotten very good at performing at the top of that whisper. Most people around you have no idea it is there.
I know it’s there, by the way. Rebuilding that foundation is step one. Not step four, not the thing we get to once the systems are in place. Step one. Step one is this. I’ve written before that self-worth is step one, and I mean it as literally as it sounds. Everything else waits on it. Everything else is sitting on it.
Why worth comes before strategy. Here’s the part I see a lot of coaches skipping. It is the reason so much of it does not stick for you when it comes to other coaching you might have tried, other systems, so forth. No tactic holds on a foundation of something is wrong with me, right? It’s got nothing to stick to.
It can’t… You can’t build on that foundation. I’m just telling you. You can learn the framework, you can s- install the system, you can leave the workshop fired up. Trust me, I’ve done it a ton of times.