My heart is breaking a little as I write this because my youngest son is suffering from serious anxiety right now.
I just dropped him at school and I’m writing this from the kindergarten parking lot because he feels safe when he knows I’m near.
I left him with tears in his eyes.
There were many tears in my eyes, too.
And I said these words, “Sweetheart, as your dad, I have two jobs. The first is to keep you safe. The second isn’t to make life easy for you. It’s to help you understand that you can do hard things.”
[Quick reminder for anyone reading this who feels called to reach out to me with guidance, support, referrals, or advice. Thanks – and we’ve got this. We have plenty of support and I know my son will be OK in the long run. Please resist any feeling or desire to share your advice.]
As I wrote in my previous newsletter, I’ve had my own journey and struggles with confidence for much of my life.
I also have a track record of close to 20 years of coaching some of the most extraordinarily successful leaders, entrepreneurs, and executives on the planet. So, I know firsthand that most people (no matter how successful or accomplished) struggle with confidence – in at least one area of their life.
The paradox of confidence is that self doubt can prevent success but it’s also often an unexpected consequence of success.
So we suffer from fear, doubt, and anxiety on the way to becoming successful. And surprisingly, we suffer it once we’ve become successful too!
This means, as a coach, if you don’t struggle with confidence in at least one area of your life, you are probably not playing a big enough game! Interesting thought, right?
It also means, as a coach, that no matter how successful the clients you work with, you’ll be supporting them at some point with their own challenges around confidence.
It may seem counterintuitive that highly successful people can struggle with confidence-related issues.
Here are five of the most common challenges they might face. Let me know which is strongest for you, personally:
1. Impostor Syndrome
The most successful you become the more you can feel like a fraud. There are times when you don’t believe you deserve the success, and that it’s only a matter of time before you’re exposed as an impostor. This feeling can be particularly strong in high-stakes, high-pressure environments.
2. Perfectionism
Holding yourself to extremely high standards is often a great path to success. But when you fail to meet your own high standards, even in minor ways, you can experience a significant blow to your confidence. This feeling that you’re not good enough can lead to procrastination, burnout, and self-doubt.
3. Fear of Failure
The more successful you become, the higher your visibility and the higher the stakes. This can make the thought of failure even more daunting, which can result in over-thinking and “paralysis by analysis.” So your success can result in hesitancy, self-doubt, and a loss of confidence.
4. High Expectations
The more successful you become, the greater the pressure to maintain or even surpass it. This can lead to chronic stress, burnout, and a fear of disappointing others, all of which can undercut the confidence that created your success in the first place.
5. Lack of Peer Support
The more successful you become, the more isolated you can feel because now you have fewer peers who truly understand your unique pressures and challenges. This can make it difficult to seek support; leading to a sense of loneliness and a decrease in confidence.
It’s important to know that self-doubt and lack of confidence are not a sign of weakness, but a normal part of the human experience.
Mission #1: Increase your self-awareness, as well as your understanding of what creates confidence, and what can take it away.
Mission #2: Seek out a great coach and a community of peers who can guide and support you to build your confidence at every level of success.
I spent the past year designing an exclusive training to address these challenges head-on…
ACBC: Advanced Confidence Building for Coaches is tailor-made for high-performers. I understand their unique challenges and I have developed practical tools to overcome them.
ACBC is designed to build an unshakeable belief in your capabilities and help you develop lasting confidence.
And ACBC is designed to help you coach high-performers to conquer their confidence issues and boost their performance.
Don’t wait to be “ready” for this program. Trust your intuition. Confidence is about making rapid decisions, not making “perfect” decisions.
Ellington and I love to build Lego together. For my birthday we just bought the second biggest Lego kit on the planet. This week we begin building the Titanic. 9000+ pieces!
Love. Rich