Every single person struggles with self confidence on some level, but I think lack of confidence can be especially confusing when you are an otherwise capable, successful person.
You may be crushing it at work while privately wondering whether you’re actually good enough for the position you’re in. You might have built a successful business and still question whether you know what you’re doing. You may walk into a date so focused on getting the person sitting across from you to like you that you completely forget to ask yourself whether you even like THEM. Or maybe you’ve reached a point in life where you have more freedom and options than ever before, yet every decision suddenly feels harder to make.
That’s the sneaky thing about self confidence. You don’t have to walk around thinking, “I suck” to struggle with it. Sometimes lack of confidence looks like overthinking every decision, constantly asking other people what they think, comparing yourself to everyone around you, staying in situations you’ve outgrown or knowing exactly what you want and then talking yourself out of it.
As a Dallas life coach who works with stuck go-getters across the country through virtual coaching, I see this ALL the time. My clients are capable people. They’ve accomplished things. They’re used to figuring stuff out. But somewhere along the way, they stopped trusting themselves.
And that distinction is important because building self confidence isn’t about becoming louder, more outgoing or convincing yourself that you’re amazing every second of the day. It’s about creating a relationship with yourself where you trust who you are, what you want and your ability to handle what comes next.
Why Do We Lose Self Confidence?
There isn’t one single reason people struggle with confidence. Sometimes it’s a gradual process that happens over years, and sometimes one major life change makes you question everything you thought you knew about yourself.
Comparison is a big one. We have more access than ever to everyone else’s careers, relationships, bodies, houses, businesses, vacations and accomplishments. It’s incredibly easy to look around and decide that everyone else is somehow ahead of you. Someone gets the promotion you wanted. Someone gets married while you’re still dating. Someone launches the business you’ve been thinking about starting. Someone seems completely certain about where her life is headed while you’re sitting there thinking, “What the heck am I doing?”
But comparison isn’t the only thing I see affecting confidence. High achievers are often TERRIBLE at giving themselves credit. You accomplish something you’ve worked incredibly hard for, give yourself approximately 14 seconds to enjoy it, and immediately move the goalpost.
You got the promotion? Great. What’s the next one? You built the business? Great. Why isn’t it bigger? You reached the goal? Great. What’s next?
When you’re constantly focused on the gap between where you are and where you think you should be, it’s incredibly easy to overlook all of the evidence that you’re already capable.
Life Changes Can Shake Your Confidence Too
Sometimes confidence takes a hit because life changes in a way you didn’t expect. A breakup or divorce can make you question yourself in relationships. Losing a job or changing careers can shake an identity you’ve spent years building. A major health event can change the way you experience yourself and your life. Even a positive transition can leave you feeling uncertain when you’re suddenly standing in unfamiliar territory.
I’ve experienced heartbreak, major career transitions and significant health challenges in my own life, and I’ve had seasons where I’ve had to reconnect with who I am too. I don’t believe confidence means becoming a person who never gets knocked down or never questions herself again.
It means developing enough trust in yourself that when life DOES knock you sideways, you know you can find your footing again.
And this is something I think capable people forget all the time: you have evidence. You’ve made difficult decisions before. You’ve survived things you didn’t know how you were going to survive. You’ve learned new skills, figured things out, changed direction and handled uncertainty before.
Sometimes confidence isn’t about becoming someone new. It’s remembering who you’ve already proven yourself to be.
How Do You Build Self Confidence?
One of the biggest shifts you can make when you’re trying to become more confident is realizing how much of your confidence you’ve outsourced to other people.
And let’s be real, compliments feel good! Recognition at work feels good! Being chosen feels good! Social media likes feel good! Having somebody tell you you’re doing a great job feels good! I am certainly not going to pretend we’re supposed to become robots who don’t enjoy any of those things. 😂
The problem comes when you need them in order to believe you’re okay. Read that again.
If your confidence depends entirely on whether your boss praises you, whether somebody wants a second date, whether your business hits a certain number, whether your body looks a certain way or whether the people around you approve of your choices, your confidence is always going to feel fragile because you’ve handed somebody else the ability to take it away.
Building self confidence requires developing an internal source of validation too. That means knowing yourself well enough to have an opinion about your own life.
What do you think? What do you want? What matters to you? What decision makes sense for the life you are trying to create?
Those questions sound simple until you realize how much of your life you’ve spent asking everybody else first.
Self Confidence and Self Trust Are Connected
This is one of the biggest patterns I see in coaching: when someone tells me they wants more confidence, I often discover that what they’re really struggling with is self trust. I see this in men and women of all ages.
Think about what happens when you have a decision to make. Do you immediately call three people and ask what they think? Do you make a decision and then reopen it 24 hours later? Do you know what you want but talk yourself out of it because somebody else might disagree? Do you spend so much time trying to make the right decision that you eventually make no decision at all?
That’s not always a lack of information. Sometimes you’ve stopped trusting your own judgment.
And there’s another part of self trust that I think gets overlooked: Do you trust yourself to do what you tell yourself you’re going to do?
Maybe you tell yourself you’re going to apply for the job, have the difficult conversation, set the boundary, go to the workout, start the business or finally take one small step toward something you say you want. Then another week goes by and nothing happens.
One missed yoga class isn’t going to destroy your confidence. Life happens. But if you repeatedly abandon the things you tell yourself matter to you, eventually you start collecting evidence that your own word doesn’t mean very much.
The good news is that you can start collecting different evidence.
How to Build Self Trust When You’ve Lost It
Rebuilding self trust doesn’t require some enormous reinvention of your personality. In fact, I think starting smaller is usually more powerful.
Make a commitment to yourself that you can actually keep, and then keep it. Make a decision without polling six people. Say no to something you genuinely don’t want to do. Speak up when you would normally stay quiet. Apply for the opportunity before you’ve convinced yourself you’re not qualified. Go on the date as yourself instead of trying to become the version of you that you think the other person wants.
Every one of those moments gives you another little piece of evidence: I can listen to myself. I can make decisions. I can follow through. I can handle discomfort. I can trust myself.
That doesn’t mean every decision will work out perfectly. Confidence isn’t knowing you’ll never make a mistake. It’s knowing that even if you do, you trust yourself to handle what happens next.
That’s a VERY different kind of confidence.
High Achievers Can Look Confident and Still Struggle With Self Doubt
This is why I think confidence coaching can be especially powerful for high achievers. From the outside, you may already look confident.
You have the career. You run the meeting. People come to you for answers. You’re the dependable one. You’re good at solving problems. Maybe you’ve spent years being praised for how capable, responsible and successful you are.
But being capable and feeling confident in yourself aren’t necessarily the same thing.
You can be incredibly competent at your job and have no idea what you want your next career move to be. You can make complicated decisions all day long for other people and become completely paralyzed when the decision is about your own life. You can be everybody else’s biggest cheerleader and then absolutely destroy yourself internally when you make a mistake.
Sometimes the problem isn’t that you need more accomplishments to prove you’re good enough. You’ve got plenty of accomplishments.
The work is learning to stop requiring another accomplishment before you allow yourself to believe it.
Confidence Matters When You’re Trying to Figure Out What’s Next
This becomes especially important when you enter one of those weird gray spaces in life where there isn’t an obvious next step.
For years, you may have known what you were working toward. Get the degree. Build the career. Get promoted. Make more money. Build the business. Find the relationship. Raise the family. Hit the goal.
But what happens when you finally have choices?
This is something I see with clients who come to me saying, “I know something needs to change, but I don’t know what.” They aren’t necessarily in crisis. Sometimes their lives are objectively pretty good. They’ve just reached a point where the old goals don’t fit anymore and nobody is handing them a new checklist.
Now they have to choose.
And choosing is really freaking hard when you don’t trust yourself.
That’s why the work we do around confidence often becomes much bigger than “How do I feel better about myself?” We’re figuring out who you are now, what you actually want, which voices in your head belong to you and which ones came from everybody else’s expectations.
Because eventually, I want you to be able to make a decision without needing ten people to tell you it’s the right one.
How Can a Life Coach Help You Build Confidence?
Life coaching for confidence isn’t me sitting across from you telling you how wonderful you are for 50 minutes. I AM everybody’s biggest hype girl 😂, but that’s not where I want your confidence to come from.
If you only feel confident because I’m telling you that you can do something, we’ve missed the point.
My job is to help you see the patterns you may not be able to see on your own. We look at where you’re second-guessing yourself, where you’re looking outside yourself for answers, where you’ve stopped following through on what you say you want and where you’ve built your decisions around what you think you’re supposed to do.
We also look for the evidence you’re discounting. High achievers can be so focused on everything they haven’t figured out yet that they completely ignore everything they’ve already figured out.
I want you to leave coaching knowing yourself better, trusting yourself more and feeling increasingly capable of making your own decisions. The goal isn’t for you to need me to tell you what to do. The goal is for you to trust yourself enough to figure it out.
Looking for a Dallas Life Coach for Confidence and Self Trust?
I work virtually with adults across the United States who feel stuck and want to get clear on who they are, what they actually want and how to move forward. Sometimes they come to me specifically wanting to build self confidence or overcome self doubt. Other times confidence is the pattern underneath a career decision, relationship problem, life transition or that frustrating question of, “What do I actually want now?”
Building confidence is layered because YOU are layered. There isn’t one universal confidence exercise that’s going to magically fix everything. We look at your patterns, your decisions, your experiences and the relationship you’ve built with yourself, and then we start figuring out what needs to change.
You don’t have to become an entirely different person. In fact, there’s probably a pretty freaking capable person already in there.
If you’re ready to stop second-guessing yourself and start figuring out what YOU actually want, apply for a complimentary consultation! 🙌
