The Architecture of Confidence — Beneath The Surface
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On today's episode, we are going to be exploring confidence. And not just explore it to help you feel more confident. This episode is going to help you break free from that fragile, performative, or conditional version of confidence that is so often marketed as truth, but too often just leads to dependence or anxiety.

Now, we're also going to help you build confidence and confidence that's rooted in integrity, in alignment with who you deeply are. And then at the end of this, we are actually going to help you evolve beyond the need for confidence. So if you want to understand confidence in an entirely new way, let's dive in.

Welcome to Beneath the Surface. I'm Sean Delaney. This series is a space where I bring you the ideas I'm sitting with most, the ones I can't let go of, the ones I return to again and again in my own life, and the ones that show up constantly in the conversations behind closed doors with high performers, creatives, leaders, and people who are on the path like you, not just to do more, but to feel more alive while doing it. These episodes aren't about giving you another strategy or chasing another version of success.

They're about going a level deeper, getting quiet enough to hear what's underneath the noise, and remembering what actually matters. So if you're looking for a place to slow down, think deeply, and reconnect to the part of you that most of the world forgets to speak to, you're in the right place. Let's begin. Let's go beneath the surface. If I've lost confidence in myself, I have the universe against me. Ralph Waldo Emerson

We all know what Emerson is alluding to really feels like, right? Like when you don't have confidence in yourself, it really feels like you have the weight of the world or the universe working against you. So I think it's critical to explore this idea of confidence because of how a lack of confidence can so utterly disrupt and cripple your life. And I've seen this happen with so many people. And I've seen at times where lack of confidence can cripple me. There

There has been so many beautiful and brilliant souls who just end up diminishing themselves for a lack of confidence. So hopefully, by exploring confidence to its depth, we can start to understand it better so we can learn and build a more sustainable path to earn confidence and then even understand how to evolve past it.

So what we'll do is we'll walk through some of the foundational pillars that you need in place in order to have confidence. And I'll walk you through some of the misconceptions and common errors, especially the ones that the bestselling books get wrong. And then we'll go beyond confidence. And I'll show you why confidence, this thing we all seem to be seeking, is actually fragility and not what we're searching for. So that'll be the end of this episode.

And like I say in pretty much every episode, I'm not trying to give you answers. I want to give you a greater and deeper understanding of confidence to allow you to live more into it. So let's really get into this. Confidence is not black and white. There aren't five steps or tips to confidence. It's not some place that we're going to arrive at. Confidence isn't one thing. Confidence is contextual, right? It's a relationship.

one that changes based on where we are, what you're doing, what your sense of self, and whether or not you've earned a sense of trust within yourself in that specific space. You see, confidence is more like a mosaic and one that can also be fleeting because confidence is going to change based on the context and the situation you're in.

Think about it. You could have wild degrees of stable confidence in the boardroom, but then when you walk in the front door at the end of the day, you've got zero confidence in how to take care of a baby. Or in the arena of sport, you walk into the field and you've got absolute, deep, earned confidence within yourself. But then after the match, when your partner wants you to open up emotionally and you've got to be vulnerable, confidence seems to disappear.

You see, confidence isn't universal. It's situational. You can't say someone is confidence. They can't have it in every arena of their life. Confidence is based on how you're interpreting the situation in front of you and if you have the internal skills to navigate it. So if you're facing a situation, even if it's one you haven't faced before, and you're thinking to yourself, all right, I can figure this out. I can navigate this, right? I built up an arsenal over years of psychological and technical skills that can help me figure this out.

If that's how you're thinking, if that's what the internal narrative is like, then you're going into that situation with higher level of confidence. Or you could be entering the exact same situation and thinking to yourself, man, this moment scares me. What are they going to think of me? Do I actually have the skills or the ability to navigate this? That's when your confidence is low.

And that's going to be situational dependent. Now, what's important to understand is the truth of your psychological and your technical skills. You cannot lie to yourself here. You have to understand if you've actually put in the necessary reps and time so that you have earned confidence. Not false confidence, but real confidence. And if you haven't put time under tension to earn the skills through reps,

then it's just false belief. And we see false belief all over the place. It doesn't matter if it's in the boardroom or on the athletic field. You can't fake it to yourself. But one thing that's important to note on is that reps alone cannot provide confidence, which is what you hear a lot. There's even this one bestselling book that is making the rounds all over social media right now. And there's this part multiple people have sent to me, and it talks about dealing with fear. And the overarching theme is you have fear because you haven't done it before.

And it's basically saying, just do it and you don't have fear. And this is so wrong. And I see people reading this and thinking this is truth, but it's not at all. Yes, reps and experience can create more confidence. But think about plenty of people on the world stage through the musical arts, through athletic endeavors in business. They have gotten thousands or tens of thousands of reps.

but all of a sudden they still wrestle with doubt. They have lack of confidence. They may have gotten the reps and the experience, but they're still wrestling with confidence. That means that reps alone won't give you confidence. So what we need to understand, reps and performance, they do not guarantee confidence, but they can create it.

But also, there are people with no reps in the unknown, and they still have confidence. So both confidence and doubt, they're actually not realities. They're just beliefs. So confidence is not proof. Confidence is simply something that you believe about what hasn't happened yet. Same thing with doubt. It's a projection into the future. And so what I want you to know is confidence is trainable. Not false confidence, but real confidence. And I want you to know that confidence is both nature and nurture.

there are some individuals that are born with more confidence.

And a lot of times people fight this, but it's like, just look at anyone. Anyone who has multiple kids sees this. One of your kids was born with certain traits, personality traits. They might naturally be more gifted or less gifted. The same thing is true for confidence. Yes, certain people are born with a natural predisposition towards higher self-assurance. They've got this lower sensitivity to judgment, or they just seem to have this natural boldness. So yes, some people start ahead of the game.

Okay, but everyone can develop more confidence. Confidence is trainable. And many times the people who actually respected the most for confidence are the ones who didn't have it easy. So if you feel like, whoa, I'm riddled with self-doubt or anxiety, or I've had no confidence, look to some of the people, someone like Abraham Lincoln, who wrestled with the exact same thing. And now we greatly admire him for his confidence because he had to overcome these things.

So it doesn't matter where you are right now. Just be where your feet are and begin taking a more intentional step in the direction you want. One towards confidence because you need to think of confidence like a muscle. Sure, some people have more naturally gifted body types, but also there's all these people who build up an incredible physique. Same is true for confidence. So yes, natural disposition matters.

But the experience, your identity, your emotional regulation, your environment are going to help build and shape your muscle over time because you're not locked into that baseline. You're not defined by your starting point. You can grow confidence. You can repeat exposure and discomfort. The more time you spend in discomfort, the more comfortable you get. So to me, this is what confidence is all about. Confidence is knowing who you are, trusting the truth of your ability and having the courage to enter discomfort and the unknown while staying true to yourself.

Let me say this again. Confidence is knowing who you are, trusting the truth of your ability, and having the courage to enter discomfort and the unknown while staying true to yourself. So let's unpack that. And to do that, let's just go into more of the architecture of confidence. In the architecture, I think about a first pillar. And the first pillar is self-trust. This is the root of all confidence. Do you have the ability to trust yourself? Have you earned the ability to trust yourself?

Self-trust is not about thinking you're great. It's more of a grounded belief that says, I can handle what comes. I know myself enough to respond, to adapt, and recover no matter the situation. To know that even if the outcome isn't certain, I will find a way to handle it anyway. Cicero said, if you have no confidence in yourself, you are twice defeated in the race of life. But with confidence, you have won before you have even started.

Without this, you have lost before you've started. It makes me think of the quote I'll probably bring up on every episode by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. When you trust yourself, you will know how to live.

Self-trust is built in small moments. When you show up when you say you would, or when you follow through on what matters even when it's hard, these are the small elements that help you build self-trust. So I will be diving into more details into each one of these pillars here, but just know that developing this internal integrity, this level of self-trust is built in small moments. You show up when you say you will for yourself and others. You know how to follow through on what matters even when it's hard.

You can tell yourself the truth. You can face the truth, even when it's uncomfortable. The more you keep these internal promises, the more solid the ground beneath you actually becomes. That's the foundation of self-trust. Self-trust is earned by follow-through of your words, of your values, of your inner knowing. So every time you do something difficult, but that's aligned, you prove to yourself, I can count on me. I can count on me.

I always tell my clients, if you ever need to rely on an external crutch to do something or be someone, then you're going to fail long-term. You have to be the one that you can count on.

It makes me think of this really great and beautiful idea by someone I've learned a ton from. I view them as a mentor, and that's Jim Detmer. He was actually on episode 257, which was an incredible episode. So go back and listen to that. But Jim Detmer said, I think life and the quality of life are really made up of three things. That is self-awareness, self-discipline, and self-confidence. Do you know yourself? Can you control yourself?

And do you believe in yourself? If you lock those three things down and get good systems in place for knowing yourself, controlling yourself, and believing in yourself, you are going to build a great life. I just love that. And I feel that encapsulates so many of the elements that we're talking about and will be talking about. The next pillar for the architecture of confidence is competence earned through repetition.

There really is no substitute for showing up and doing the thing again and again and again, right? Hitting record on the podcast again and again and again. The more familiar you are with challenge, the less threatening it does become to a degree. Confidence is about that earned reputation. It's not imagined readiness. It's, oh yeah, you know what? I've done 400 plus of these. So when I hit record, there's a deep level of trust there because I put in the necessary reps.

Aristotle said, we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit. Do you have the habit of earning competence through repetitions? Next up is going to be your emotional fluency. This is one of those foundational layers that so many people miss, but I think is one of the most profound and deep principles we can actually learn and embody. So let's explain this one. So you are actually not afraid of doing the thing.

What you're afraid of is the feeling that thing might trigger. So think about this. You do not fear public speaking. You fear the potential shame if your speech goes wrong, right? You don't fear leaning in for that first kiss. You fear the rejection if you fail. Kelsey, thanks for not rejecting me and leaning in. You do not fear the challenge in front of you. You fear the identity crisis if it breaks your image. This is very important to understand. You do not fear the thing.

You fear what you might feel. So confidence doesn't grow just from doing the thing. It grows from learning how to feel what that thing brings up and then not flinch in the face of it. This is emotional fluency, the ability to experience the full intensity of your internal state without letting it dictate your choices. Let me say that again. Emotional fluency is about the ability to experience the full intensity of your internal state without letting it dictate your choices.

The people we think of as most confident are not emotionless. They just know they can hold the feeling and that knowledge sets them free. Like I might lean in for the kiss here and they might reject me, but I can handle that. My speech might fail. I might fall flat on my face, but I can handle that. I might lose the game, but my worth isn't entirely dependent on that. I can handle that. And that level of knowledge sets you free.

So the next pillar I want to get into is centered around the same theme, and that's clarity of identity. You got to know what you stand for. You got to know what you believe, what you're about, and what you do.

When your inside essentially is going to match how you show up on the outside, you experience this internal coherence. It's also viewed as confidence. When what you are on the inside matches how you show up on the outside, there's coherence there. But when you betray yourself, when your actions are out of step with your values or your truth or your authenticity, all of a sudden you've got internal tension. And over time, what happens? You doubt yourself.

Even if you're outwardly successful, we've seen this plenty of times. People at what appears to be the top of their game are riddled with self-doubt because they've been betraying themselves all along the way. This is why living in alignment is not this moral idea. It's the psychological one. Confidence is the natural result of knowing who you are and being able to embody the actions that are aligned with that. So when you don't know your values, what do you do? You outsource your worth.

People who don't know who they are, they chase validation all over the place. But the people who do know who they are, and I want you to picture someone that you feel is deeply rooted in who they are. Those people, what do they do? They radiate something different. They don't need to prove. They just naturally express who they are. And there's this magnetism towards them where we are drawn towards them.

It's those people that we really feel have this inner clarity that they're like, this is who I am. This is what I stand for. This is what I won't tolerate. And all of a sudden, it's like they're a different level of leader because of this internal magnetism they have. Makes me think of a line by Lao Tzu. He said, he who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened. He who conquers others has strength. He who conquers himself is mighty.

Think about that. Are you living in alignment? Are you standing in to your truth? It comes from living the inside out. The deepest confidence comes from you know who you are and the inside matches how you live on the outside. Do I trust myself? Can I count on myself? Have I put in the reps and training to earn the confidence? Am I clear on my identity? And this allows you to take agency and full responsibility, full control for your response no matter what the situation is that you find yourself in.

Let's hit on for a second what confidence is not. There's a couple common myths. And I think a lot of people think confidence is the absence of fear. But it's not the absence of fear. Fear is always present where growth lives. And so many times you can still have confidence and be afraid. But it's what you do in that moment. That's where courage comes in. And I did an entire episode on courage. That's important to remember. It's not the absence of fear.

And also, it's not about perfection or always knowing what to do. It's the willingness, it's the groundedness that you can figure it out, that you can enter the unknown, that maybe you haven't done this before, but you know and trust in yourself that you will figure it out. So to do that,

We want to think about some skills that we can practice. And the first one I always go towards is awareness, self-awareness. I did an entire episode on awareness because awareness is the starting place for everything. The ability to notice your thoughts, your emotional patterns, that internal dialogue in real time.

These are the hallmarks of confidence because you can't shift what you don't see. If you are unable to be aware of those things, then they're controlling you. You cannot control them. So confidence begins with knowing the landscape of your inner world. You know, what are those fear triggers, those tripwires to anxiety? What are the stories you believe you have to live under, the ones that create all that pressure, right? Where do you tend to collapse? Where do you constrict during performance? Or where do you open up? Where do you expand? All of this

is about awareness. And so a few things you might want to try daily journaling. You can look back on your experiences. What did I feel? What did I fear? What did I do? It's about expanding and deepening your relationship with yourself. I use that phrasing a lot. It's about expanding and deepening your relationship with yourself. Not just what you're good at, not just what you're bad at, but all of it, the whole mosaic of you. Another way to heighten your self-awareness

some form of meditation or breathwork practice. Can I develop the ability to create the space between stimulus and response and not act mindlessly? Am I aware? Have I slowed down and stilled my internal waters enough so I can view my thoughts? This leads to emotional regulation, right? The ability to stay grounded in the presence of discomfort or fear. Now you might be asking, why does that matter?

You are not afraid of the situation. I said this a few minutes ago. You're afraid of the feeling that it brings up. So if you learn how to be with those feelings without bracing or numbing or running, what happens? All of a sudden, fear starts to lose its grip. And a few ways I like to train emotional regulation, I like to do some extreme hyperventilation breath work.

There, all of a sudden, my emotional state gets risen and I learn how to stay in it. You can do things like cold exposure to train that stress response. You can even just practice stillness. When you're in the middle of an uncomfortable conversation, can you breathe? Can you relax? Can you stay in it? So I'm sure you can find your own ways to train emotional regulation. The main thing is that you are staying grounded in the presence of the discomfort or the fear.

Next up, let's dive a bit deeper into integrity, into this self-trust. It's the muscle of doing what you say you'll do, especially when no one is watching. To me, this is one of the absolute, absolute hallmarks. You do what you'll say you do when no one is watching.

Let me repeat that. You do what you say you'll do when no one is watching. And the reason this matters so much is confidence without self-trust is just this house built on sand, right? Every time you keep a small promise to yourself, what do you do? You're building that house of internal reliability. So you begin to believe. When I say I show up, I do. Why? Because I've got 10,000 examples in my history of doing that. Okay.

So how do you train this integrity, this muscle, this ability to do things and show up when you say you will? Well, I joke with my clients all the time. I share them this book I wrote. It is a one-page book, and all it says is just fucking do it. That's really it. I cannot stand when people try to complicate this. When you say you're going to do something...

Even if no one knows about it, you just fucking do it. I don't want to hear about the hacks you have, all the dopamine dissertations that float all over, the whole Q reward loops. No, you just fucking do it. And then the next time, you do it. And you just fucking do it again and again. This is not complicated, and I hate when people try to overcomplicate these things.

You do that enough times and you build up the muscle. Makes me think of this really profound line by Carl Jung. He says, the spirit of evil is negation of the life force by fear. Only boldness can deliver us from fear. And if the risk is not taken, the meaning of life is violated. Bold.

Be bold. Just fucking do it. Right? It's about courage, action in the presence of fear. And I did an entire episode on courage. I'd go back and I'd listen to that. And I think there's some really insightful things that we cover there. But just know the repeated practice of moving toward discomfort instead of away from it.

that's where confidence will grow. Confidence is going to follow your courage. So the more you step into fear and the more you survive in that environment, the more your nervous system recalibrates to what's possible. And you start to develop that trust within yourself, you know, that I did it. I learned to breathe in fear and I went into it.

And so you can do that again and again. Next, let's go into another one, which is self-talk. So if you are not working daily to master your inner dialogue, then you are doing your life a grave disservice. How you speak to yourself in difficult moments defines your relationship's confidence. And I most likely will do an entire episode on self-talk and inner dialogue because of how important they are.

But just know the most important voice you are ever going to hear in your life is the silent one you have inside. And you need to know if that's working for you or against you. You need to become intimately aware of what you say to yourself. And too often, I see people allow the external experiences or even their past to dictate the internal state they're in right now. Because you can train every single skill we're talking about. You can do all of those reps like we were talking about in the beginning.

But if your self-talk is still defeating you, if you're still saying, you know what? I can't do this. I'm not good enough. Wait a second. Look at all those people. They're judging me. Oh man, I mess this up every single time. You are unconsciously undermining your own effort. And I don't care how many reps you've done. If that's your self-talk, you are not going to succeed and thrive in that moment. Gandhi said, man often becomes what he believes himself to be. Your self-talk determines what you believe yourself to be.

Let's add a little bit more context to this because I think it's important. Let's use a real world example. You've got to talk. You're speaking in front of 50 people. Your heart's racing. You understand there's importance to this moment.

This is what untrained self-talk would be like. You're about to walk up on a stage, you know, why am I so nervous? I shouldn't be nervous right now. I'm going to mess up again. Oh, oh, there it is. There's my heart. I can feel it. I can feel it's beating out my chest. Oh, oh man. Everyone's going to know I'm unqualified. Oh man. We've all been in that situation. That's untrained self-talk. The mind, the monkey mind is running wild. And then all of a sudden we're feeding into our physiology.

Let me walk you through same situation, walking up on stage, what trained self-talk looks like. All right. I feel that heart racing. There we go. Palms are getting sweaty. This feeling. Oh yeah. That's the energy. I felt this before and I know how to use it. Right. I'm channeling this energy. It's bringing my blood to my brain. So I'm even more alert.

And you know what? I've spent 12 years in this industry developing my expertise in this topic. What I have to say is valuable. And man, I'm going to deliver this today because all this that I have in my brain, I'm going to help my team out right now. This feeling, all of this energy, this is my green light. I know I'm in my activated engagement state. So let's fucking go. Let's nail this.

Do you see the difference? Same situation, same person, same physiological and psychological elements taking place in their life and in that moment, but it's a completely different relationship. So confidence without trained self-talk is just going to collapse because you can train your body, you can rehearse all the lines, you can study the craft as much as you want, but if that inner voice is cutting you down every step of the way, what's going to happen long-term? You will crumble.

And an important element to hit on, though, is that that trained self-talk, it needs to be truthful. The line I was saying, what, the 12 years of industry experience, right, developing that expertise, you can't make that up. You need to know that you actually have the skills to back it up. And it also needs to be encouraging. It needs to be grounded. It needs to be present tense on skills that you have. Next up, let's dive into the identity alignment, right? It's the clarity of knowing who you are and to live like it.

This matters so much because your actions, they need to reflect those deepest values. And the more you do that, the more at peace you are in your own skin, even when things are hard. The people who embody and live their deepest values, they live their authentic nature, they live their truth. They are at peace in their own skin, even when things are hard, even when things don't go the way they want.

So this is really about just defining your personal code. What do you stand for? What are you all about in life? What are your values? Do you know what they look like in action? What's your authentic style? What are the deepest truths? And then are you reflecting on them? Are you embody them, right? Were you aligned with your values today? Did you live authentically? Did you embody those deepest truths?

And then what you want to do is you need to eliminate those inauthentic behaviors, right? Even those small ones. The more you can get rid of some of those things that take you away from your values or your authenticity, the more in alignment you're living with. And there's this line by Napoleon that I always loved. He said, always carry yourself as if you were marching to victory. Always carry yourself as if you were marching to victory. And I think what he was getting at has nothing to do with false bravado, but about knowing who you are.

Your deepest identity, knowing who you are, what crowns you, and then living in alignment with that no matter the situation or circumstances. It was essentially like I'm walking into battle right now and I'm so rooted and so grounded in who I am and what I'm all about. It doesn't matter what I face right now. I can handle that. And what that leads into is adaptability, the skill of being able to adjust, to recalibrate, to rebound, to learn, even when things don't go the way you want.

That's how we experience and grow through failure or through adversity. If your confidence is brittle, it's going to die when you make your first mistake. But if you train yourself to learn through breakdowns, even when your worst days become part of a learning process, all of a sudden you've evolved that relationship with failures and setbacks. And these are growth opportunities. So what you want to do is learn how to reframe.

You know, ask the question, what's the lesson here? What did I learn? It didn't go my way. Why didn't it go that way? What could I do differently here in the future? And all of a sudden, each thing that you experience in life becomes a learning ground. It's a learning opportunity. This is so critical. And because it's uncomfortable at times, we so often resist it. But if you can become more comfortable by just practicing that, all of a sudden, it can truly start to transform your life.

Now, there is a meta skill under all of these that I want to hit on, and that's presence. It's the ability to be here in the moment, fully there, all in, as yourself in what is happening right now, the truth of the moment. The more present you are, the more clearly you can act from your truth.

And what that allows is you to show up as your best self. As I'm describing all of these pillars and all these elements and things we can practice, it really makes me think of seeing confidence like water. You know, water can shift. It can meet the moment. It can become steam. It can become ice. It can morph. It can flow in different directions. It shifts to meet the moment. But guess what? Water never forgets what it is. No matter what form it takes, what does it remain? H2O.

Its essence stays the same. Its essence stays the same even as that expression changes. That to me is real confidence. It's not about rigid performance or just this illusion we have of control. It is about a grounding in knowing who you are even as the conditions shift that you have and put in the time to build confidence. Like I said in the beginning,

On this episode, I actually want to go beyond confidence. Because when you peel back the layers, confidence isn't on the ground floor. It is more of a surface-level strategy, and albeit a desirable one, one that actually is very powerful and important and essential. But if you need to feel confident, all of a sudden, that can become a form of dependency. Think about that, right? If confidence, this desirable emotional state,

If we need it before we take action, then all of a sudden we've created fragility. If we need confidence before we take action, then actually we're owned by it. Needing to feel confident can become this form of dependency. I know this is subtle, but think about that. This is basically saying, I'll act, but only if I feel a certain way, only if I feel confident. And what this means is that confidence is conditional.

Anytime your strength is conditional, it's vulnerable, right? Confidence and self-belief actually in these situations is just fragility. So do you see how confidence can become a trap? Because if you make confidence your end goal, all of a sudden you're creating dependence. Confidence becomes this prison we've created. You know, it feels good. I enjoy this beautiful prison. But the moment you need that feeling, that feeling of confidence in order to move, to take this step, what happens?

You are no longer free. You are dependent on confidence. And so you've built this internal contract that says, I'm going to act, but only when I feel ready, only when confidence is there, right? Yep. I'm going to speak my truth, but only when I've got that confidence. Yep. I'm going to take that step, that bold step, but only when confidence is fully there. And now instead of just like going into life, right into the fire, you're just waiting for that fire to go out. That

That's not true liberation. That is not true freedom. And what we desire, the deepest desire, is that we're free. We are unchained from all of these emotional weather patterns. And this is the paradox. The most powerful people don't feel confident all the time. Let me say that again. The most powerful people don't feel confident all the time. They've just learned how to act without needing to feel confident. They have learned how to act without the needing to feel confident.

This is the shift I'm talking about. It's I need confidence to I can handle whatever life throws at me. This is a major shift that breaks the trap a lot of people have lived into forever. Okay, you stop trying to feel confident and you start training the capacity to handle anything emotionally, psychologically, handle anything that life throws at you. So all of a sudden, you can stand in uncertainty, you can stand in the unknown, you can stand in the face of fear.

and you don't allow it to completely erupt you. You build this type of inner freedom that is rooted in presence. That's not defined by the moment, but it's actually deepened by it. Confidence is going to tell you that I can do this. But what I'm talking about, this type of inner freedom says, even if I can't, I can handle what happens next.

That to me is real strength. That is real freedom. This is the most evolved level of confidence. You still care about winning. You still want to win. You still want to nail the presentation. You still want to be excellent. You still want mastery on the court, but your identity isn't riding on it anymore. You are not using the outcome to complete yourself.

That is the real maturity we're talking about. You give your full heart to something, but without it requiring to validate who you are and your worth. Okay? This is you desire something deeply. You want to win the game, but then you release completely. You give everything to it, but you need nothing.

What this state actually is, is full hearted engagement without grasping. You step on stage, you walk into the arena, you are on the court, you ask and you want the win, but inside you're free because your sense of wholeness isn't dangling from the scoreboard anymore. This is the evolution from I need to win to feel worthy to I want to win, but I'm already whole. The evolution from I want to win to feel worthy to I want to win, but I'm already whole.

that's when your power becomes effortless and your performance becomes more fluid and free. Let me pause for a second and say this. If all of this feels like a lot, if you came here just wanting a little more confidence in your next presentation or your next game, right? And now we're diving to surrender and wholeness and detachment from outcomes. That is okay. Don't feel behind or overwhelmed or like you're missing all of this. You are exactly where you are. And this is not about mastering everything all at once or leapfrogging 50 steps.

It's about seeing confidence. Real confidence isn't about having it all figured out. It's about slowly and steadily learning to trust yourself in the middle of the unknown. It's not feeling unafraid. It's feeling afraid and still showing up. It's the ability to develop a relationship where you notice your doubts, you notice your fears, and you can stay in the room. You know, when your voice starts to shake, you still speak your truth. You can choose the hard things, even when you're nervous, even when you're afraid, and you can still go into there.

And from there, something deeper starts to develop within you. There is this type of inner presence, the kind that has a certain gravity that pulls others into its orbit. It is a quiet knowing that no matter how chaotic life is, no matter what is on my plate, I can handle it. So wherever you are right now, just start there and take the next intentional step.

I'll see you on the next one. If this episode resonated with you, if it stirred something, opened something up, or even challenged something, I'd love to hear about it. You can connect with me directly at whatgotyouthere.com. That's where you'll find my writing, my books, more about my executive coaching work I do with the people who want to live and lead from a deeper place. And if this episode made you think of someone, a friend, a teammate, a partner, someone who's been in the grind and might need to hear this, send it to them.

Because sometimes all it takes is a single conversation to shift the direction we're heading in. Again, it's whatgotyouthere.com. You can reach out, learn more, or just say hi. I always love hearing from people walking this path. Thanks for listening, and until next time.