The Climb #15 – You Already Have the Proof You Need to Be Confident

Most of my life has been me thinking that confidence was something I just didn’t have but that other people did. Or at least, not in the areas that I wanted to be confident in.

I would look at the guys that could just walk into a room like they owned it and just be so envious. They were the ones speaking up and taking the risks that I was just thinking about taking. They made decisions without apologizing to anybody. Meanwhile, I’m over here second-guessing every little thing I did and replaying conversations in my head and then wondering what I was missing that they had and I didn’t.

And the thing that was funny to me, and maybe some people that knew me from the outside looking in, is that if you would’ve looked at my life on paper, my lack of confidence wouldn’t have made much sense.

I was a top athlete when I was young.
I’d learned to survive things that had just outright killed a lot of other people.
I’d completely rebuilt myself repeatedly. Granted, mostly from disasters that I created, but still…
I had somehow learned to adapt to a world that wasn’t made for me, or at least that’s how I always felt.
I had repeatedly figured things out with nobody around to help because I had pushed them all away. .

But, the thing is, none of that registered as proof to me.

It just felt like life happening. I didn’t see any of those things as special because it was just me doing what I had to do.

But I did eventually learn something that helped me feel more confident about myself. And when Justin Welsh wrote a piece recently, it reminded me of what I did. The core message in the piece that he wrote was pretty simple and pretty uncomfortable for a lot of people: Nobody’s coming to save you. Confidence doesn’t appear first, action does. It’s something we hear a lot in the self-help world these days. And he’s not wrong.

But the thing that stuck with me about his article, though, with all due respect to Justin, was that it was just a little bit incomplete. It was missing one final piece. Because there’s a step that you have to take after you take action, and I think it’s the step that I failed to take for so long, and I think a lot of other people do as well.

His message was that if you take action first, then that’ll help build your confidence. And while I think that’s definitely true, I think it’s missing the fact that confidence isn’t an automatic step in that process. Confidence does come from action, but only if you stop and pay attention to what that action left behind.

The evidence.

Most people never stop and look back and give themselves credit for what they’ve done. .

Or, at best, if we do, we discount it. We minimize it. We tell ourselves it doesn’t count because it didn’t go as smoothly as we wanted it to, or it wasn’t really impressive enough.

We tell ourselves stories about:
“You didn’t really choose to do that, you had to do it. “
“You only survived because you had no other option.”
“Just because you did it once doesn’t mean you can do it again. “

So the proof you need stays buried.

From the outside, for anybody looking in, it’s obvious as hell. Other people can always see the things that you’ve handled. They see how you show up. They see your potential. They look at you and they think, “Man, this guy’s got it all figured out. Why can’t he see it?” But meanwhile, inside your own head, you feel like all you’re doing is just winging it, like you’re one mistake away from being exposed as some kind of fraud. While confidence is still something that eludes you for some reason.

So if you’re like I was, and sometimes still am, let me just be the one that says it outright: “You f*cking earned it, man. You just never claimed it.” Seriously, I don’t give a shit what it is you’ve done. If you’re still here and kicking in a world like this is today, you got something a lot of other people don’t.

Think about it from the outside for a minute. You lived through periods of time where you were broke as hell but guess what? You somehow still figured it out. You had relationships that ended like sh*t and guess what? You still got up in the morning. There’s been so many times that you’ve just felt completely overwhelmed and underprepared and scared and unsure of all those things, and yet you still got up and made decisions anyways. You pulled through and you carried that responsibility when you didn’t feel like you were ready.

I guarantee you’ve adapted so many more times than you can even count. And I tell you what my friend, that’s not luck, that’s a demonstration. It’s a demonstration of how much shit you can handle and still keep going anyways.

But I think because it happened gradually, or quietly, or without some big applause, your brain just filed it away as “normal.” And the thing is, that’s not how confidence gets built. You have to note it consciously, or else you’re gonna start living like somebody that doesn’t have any track record at all. You’re gonna hesitate. You’re gonna wait. You’re gonna look for permission from people that don’t need to give it to you. You assume that other people have something that you don’t, but guess what? News flash: they don’t! All they’ve done is just made their own evidence conscious.

And I think sometimes too, that’s maybe why confidence looks so arrogant to people who don’t have it. But it’s not confidence that makes people think they’re special. It’s just that they trust themselves, because they know they’ll respond when things get hard. And why? Because they know that their own history says they can. That’s just them trusting themselves. And trust like that only comes from one place. It comes from their own knowledge that they have the evidence to back up what they say.

Because here’s the thing: real confidence isn’t really loud. It’s not arrogant. It’s just grounded in something stronger than anything else: truth. It’s just a feeling of calm that says, “I don’t know exactly how this is gonna go, but I do know that I’ve handled worse and I got this shit.”

So, my message to you is if you’re feeling stuck right now, here’s a simple thing to try:

I want you to take an inventory. I want you to write down all the moments that you’ve been skipping over from your past. All the times that you didn’t quit. All the times that you adapted to something that you didn’t think you could figure out. All the times that you learned the hard way and just kept going anyway. Not just a highlight reel, but at the risk of sounding cliche, your survival reel.

Because trust me, that’s all you’re gonna need to do to give your mind the proof that it needs, that’s all it’s been missing. You don’t have to become a new person and reinvent yourself, all you have to do is just see yourself a little more clearly.