On coaching confidence
I have been thinking a lot about confidence recently. So many of the people I work with come to coaching hoping to fend off the imposter syndrome and find more confidence — before a big presentation, a promotion, a difficult conversation, a career change. And almost always, there's an assumption underneath the request: that confidence is something other people simply have, and that its absence is a personal failing.
I don't think that's true. Confidence isn't a fixed trait, and it isn't the absence of fear. It's closer to a sense of trust — in ourselves, in our ability to handle whatever shows up. You can feel afraid and still be confident, because confidence doesn't mean being certain. It means feeling safe enough to engage anyway.
That reframe changes everything about how I coach confidence. Confidence isn't a destination you arrive at and then keep forever. It's a relationship you grow with yourself, and like any relationship, it has better days and worse ones.
One of the most useful ways I've found to think about this with clients is the Comfort, Stretch, Panic concept. There's the comfort zone — familiar, safe, but with little room to grow. There's the stretch zone — where there's some discomfort, some challenge, and that's exactly where confidence actually builds. And there's the panic zone — overwhelm, threat, shutdown — where nothing useful gets learned at all. Confidence dips when we push too far into panic, or when we stay too long in comfort and never test ourselves. Growth happens in that stretch zone, and it needs to be supported by real periods of comfort too, not constant challenge.
It's also worth naming that dips in confidence aren't evidence that something has gone wrong. New situations, comparing ourselves to others, losing a sense of expertise, moments of visibility or transition, the fear of being judged — these are completely normal triggers. They don't mean you're failing. They mean you're human, and you're somewhere unfamiliar.
But the piece I keep coming back to with clients is this question: where is your confidence actually coming from?
Broadly, it comes from two places. External referencing — where confidence depends on other people's feedback, results, or approval. And internal referencing — where it's grounded in your own values, your own sense of self-trust, your own meaning. If you're mostly externally referenced, your confidence becomes conditional: I'm confident when things go well and people like it. If you're more internally referenced, it becomes something sturdier: even if this is messy, or someone disagrees, I still trust myself.
Most of us need a bit of both. External feedback is useful information. But when it becomes the entire foundation, confidence gets fragile — it rises and falls with things outside our control. Building an internal anchor, and treating the outside world as data rather than verdict, is often where the real work of coaching confidence happens.
There's an identity piece here too. Confidence is often tied up with who we believe we are, and who we're becoming. When our identity is performance-based, confidence tends to be brittle, because it's conditional on the next result. When it's values-based, it tends to be steadier, because we hold more of the reins.
I recently attended a fantastic workshop from the How To series delivered by the wonderful Zoe Hawkins and Jo Wheatley from In Good Company and it helped really consolidate my learning and approach to supporting my coaching clients with confidence. A couple of questions worth asking yourself from this workshop were:
"Who would you be if you trusted your ability fully?"
“What’s possible when you trust that confidence can grow, rather than appear instantly?”
Confidence isn't something you either have or don't. It's something you build, wobble with, and rebuild — a relationship, not a single point in time.
If this is something you're navigating right now, I'd love to explore it with you at Rise Again Coaching.
Comments