One of the most common things I hear when someone starts working with me is some version of this:
“I need to work on my confidence.”
And I believe them when they say it. The feeling is real. The frustration is real. But in almost every case, what they’re describing isn’t actually a confidence problem.
It’s a misdiagnosis.
I was working recently with a newer client — a jail sergeant. Someone who walks into volatile situations daily, manages people under pressure, and has built a career in one of the most demanding environments imaginable. He came to me saying he wanted to work on confidence.
You can’t be a jail sergeant and not be confident. You can’t strap on a duty belt, walk into a cell block, and manage a crisis without it.
And yet there he was, claiming he lacked it.
What he actually meant — what he clarified as we dug in — was that he lacked confidence in specific situations. In front of certain people. In particular kinds of conversations. Not everywhere. Not always. In specific places where something about the dynamic made him feel less sure of himself.
That’s an entirely different problem. And it has an entirely different solution.
When we say “I lack confidence” as a global statement, we do something quietly destructive. We throw out all of the evidence to the contrary. We ignore the situations in which we show up fully, make decisions clearly, and handle difficulty competently. We collapse a nuanced, situational reality into a sweeping verdict about who we are.
If you’re focusing only on where confidence is missing, you’re also missing the map that would show you how to find it.
Because here’s what’s true: the only reason you can identify a gap in your confidence is because something exists on either side of it. The situations where you are confident flank the ones where you aren’t. And those situations — the ones where you do show up well — contain information. They tell you something about what conditions bring out your best, what kinds of challenges you’ve learned to navigate, and what strengths you’ve built that you may have stopped giving yourself credit for.
The gap is real. But it’s surrounded by capability. And if you can understand what’s different about the situations where confidence is present versus the ones where it isn’t, you’ve found your actual starting point.
This is harder than it sounds because we tend to be more fluent in our weaknesses than in our strengths. We notice the gap. We live inside it. We’re much less practiced at stepping back and seeing the fuller picture.
But the fuller picture is there. And learning to see it — really see it — is often more useful than any amount of working on confidence in the abstract.
You probably don’t lack confidence. You lack it somewhere specific. And specific is something you can actually work with.
Photo by Compagnons on Unsplash
