The Confidence Guy

“It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

If I was to sit you down now and go through everything that you’re currently getting up to I’m sure it would be a pretty long list. All that stuff in your head, all that stuff that occupies your time, all the people, all the to-do’s, all those things you’d love to do if only you had the time. Yep, it’s a pretty long list.

To paraphrase Shakespeare in the quotation from Macbeth above (my English Literature O’Level wasn’t wasted), you get so busy with everything on your list that all that ’stuff’ becomes a load of busyness and pressure that sometimes doesn’t add up to a whole lot.

So sometimes I throw this curveball question at my clients – “On a scale of one to ten, with ten being you at your best, how much like you do you feel right now?”

Think about it. Right now, as you’re reading these words, how much like you do you really feel?

Being a ten out of ten means that you feel absolutely right, like you’re completely yourself, in the perfect place or that you’re able to be exactly who you want to be. Take a moment to figure out where you are on that scale right now.

You may or may not be surprised to learn that when I ask people that question, the vast majority quietly answer “6“, which is a pretty low place to be on the ‘Being You’ scale.

Blowing my own trumpet for a moment, by the time I’m finished with them I always hear them confidently say “9” (10 out of 10 is normally reserved for those utterly ‘perfect’ moments that come and go).

Wherever you scored yourself, it means that the remainder of the scale is busy doing something other than being you. If you scored yourself as a 6 out of 10, it means that 40% of you is busy doing something else. While 60% of you is busy being you the other 40% is occupied with other things that have nothing to do with being you.

Now, I don’t know about you, but that seems as crazy as a soup sandwich.

As long as there’s a chunk of you that’s busy doing something else you’re not giving yourself the chance to be at your best or to feel like yourself, and over time it’s pretty obvious that you’re sense of self will shrink along with your self-confidence.

You need to get to grips with what that other chunk of you is focused on – otherwise you’ll never feel as much like yourself as you deserve to feel.

That’s part of the thrill for me in working with my clients – that I get to see them climb that scale and become more ‘them’. So think about what that other chunk of you is doing. What stuff is it busy trying to deal with? Is it struggling to find a way to make what you want happen? Is it resisting the place that it finds itself in? What’s distracting it? Is it dreaming about what comes next?

Having a piece of you that’s busying itself with not being you makes as much sense as having Ernest Borgnine lead a Jazzercise class.

So tell me, what are you really up to?