Where does confidence go when it is lost?
How our unconscious thoughts about ourselves determine our success
Tiger Woods was an athlete at the top of his game. Today he is still considered one of the most successful golfers of all time. But his career is tarnished by one night when everything changed.
In 2009, controversy surrounding Woods’ marriage and infidelity started a downward spiral, infamously resulting in crashing his car into his neighbour’s yard in the middle of the night. After a self-imposed hiatus from the game, and several brands ending their sponsorship relationships with him, Tiger returned to golf with a 107 week losing streak. By 2017 he had plummeted to #1199 in the world rankings.
How can a pro performing at such high calibre fall so far, so fast?
Golf is a mental game that involves deep concentration, tapping into our subconscious minds and our physical bodies. Every shot requires us to connect inward, playing from a place of stillness and an assurance in our ability to deliver.
This is confidence. It is a place of sharp clarity within, and an enduring belief in ourselves and what we have to offer.
Whether you are a musician, athlete, parent, entrepreneur, or are about to settle in to your first job — no matter where you choose to deliver your talents, you need confidence to do your best.
Think of confidence as a lamp with a dimmer switch. When the energy running through the lamp is low, the light is dim. If the dimmer switch is turned even a tiny way back, the light might go out entirely.
And if the dimmer is turned the other way, to its highest position, we risk the light going out from too much energy in a bulb that cannot support the surge of power.
Confidence is the strength of the light that shines within us. We want it to always be on, illuminating the world. It may dim, or it may burn too bright. But at any given moment, it is our own hand on the switch. We control our confidence.
How we react to our external world, the words of others in our heads, and the presence of the “imposter” inside each of us influences our hand on the switch. Only we are responsible for our own bright light.
So where does the confidence go? If once we feel assured in our abilities and value in the world, how do we get knocked back?
Over assurance is a delusion that impacts our sustained abilities. Billy McFarland, responsible for the Fyre Festival debacle, is a prime example of a leader who’s ego was greater than his ability to deliver. In this extreme case, the result was a stereotypical con man — arrogant, deceitful, lacking empathy and dissociative to the reality of the situation he’d put himself and thousands of others in. A light that burns too bright disappears because it was fuelled by a lie.
Lack of confidence is based on the same state of ego. When we see ourselves as small, incapable, and undeserving, we are allowing a story to take control of our lives. We become the perception we have of ourselves, frozen in fear. Like Tiger Woods, we choke, and our light goes out.
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Matt and Sarah* are two leaders who have lost their confidence. They represent a typical story of the leaders that I coach every day — people who want to grow their business and support their teams to reach their potential. As their business and lives have changed, something has also shifted inside each of them.
Matt is the founder of a tech start up that’s growing fast — doubling in size and revenue year on year. The business is exciting but different, losing that family feel it had when it was just four people in a shared office space. Now the pressure of taking care of so many people, while ensuring the brand stays ahead of the competition chasing their heels, is getting to him. He often struggles with standing up to lead the charge. And he doesn’t like the fact that he is seen as a “young” success story, having started the business when he was just 25 years old.
While the stress seems manageable, how it shows up in Matt’s life now is through a feeling of boredom. As a result he’s more withdrawn, spending less time inspiring the team and more time making sure “shit gets done”. He admits to me he’s lost his mojo, and confesses he doesn’t know where the business needs to go next.
Losing confidence doesn’t always mean we crash and burn. The stress we feel and how we choose to dim our light is personal to each of us. For Matt, his lack of belief in taking the business to the next level has meant he feels less valued and confused on what to do next. The result is a team working for him that is less challenged, taking less risk, feeling comfortable but not creative. Matt’s low confidence has been trickling down over time to impact the rest of his people.
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Sarah is coming back as a senior leader in her team after some time away taking care of her young family. Her initial enthusiasm at returning wanes as she struggles to navigate her new routine and find her place in a team that she thinks has moved on without her.
She tells me she’s exhausted and feels like everything she does takes extra effort because it’s so different to what she remembers from before, and she doesn’t want to fall behind or contribute less than her fellow leaders. While she used to see herself at the top of her game, now she feels relegated to the bottom of the league.
Sarah, like Matt, feels less valued. But instead of the boredom Matt experiences, she is in deep anxiety. The challenge of the workplace is often crippling and heavy, impacting on her ability to make quick decisions. Her team gets stuck as momentum in her leadership slows.
Both Matt and Sarah are experiencing the perfect storm of limiting beliefs that are impacting on their confidence and dimming their light. Though their contexts are different, both have lost confidence in themselves.
Lost confidence appears in our lives as three main “limiting beliefs” — the unconscious thoughts that stop us from growing:
We no longer believe in our ability to perform. Though Matt and Sarah have had success in the past, each now sees themselves as less useful to their business success today. Whatever abilities they have gained as they grew, including Sarah’s skills as a parent, feel irrelevant. When we suffer a knock back, are criticised, or given feedback that addresses our performance, we can often lose confidence — despite any proven past track record of our success.
We do not see the possibilities of personal growth ahead. It’s in our nature to compare ourselves to others, in our own teams and those we look up to. We often convince ourselves there are patterns that determine success, and when we do not conform to them something must be wrong. When others determine our success, we see the world offering only one way forward. When we fail on this single path, our confidence diminishes.
We do not think we are worthy of continued success. The voice of our inner imposter becomes the loudest. Who are we to win? Why should we have what we want when we don’t deserve it? In fact, who are we to be leading at all? For Sarah, this could be the guilt of juggling a family and working life. For Matt, his lack of experience and age will be a mental battle he will never win — he can never be as old or have as many years under his belt as the other entrepreneurs around him. And for Tiger Woods, an imposter’s story that he is not deserving to be a champion once more, crippled by his failures felt as a husband and father.
Each of these limiting beliefs is our hand on the lamp, dimming our light. Confidence fades as we allow ourselves to accept a story of who we are that causes uncertainty in our own value and abilities.
Luckily our lamp never loses energy. There is always a glow inside. How we choose to shine is up to each of us. There is no single fix to restoring confidence. And no one person or action can give our confidence back to us.
Confidence returns when we become aware of the story we have created about who we think we are supposed to be, and the success we are expected to have. It comes back slowly as we get back into flow, form new habits, but most crucially, when we break free from the stories we tell about ourselves. Then our light can shine bright again.
*Matt and Sarah are characters created for the purpose of this story. They are based on the lives of real leaders I have worked with in the US and Europe. Your own story might resonate with theirs — no matter where we have worked, we’ve all felt the crippling doubt of limiting beliefs in our lives.
