“Just what the hell is a confidence coach?”

That was one of the questions I heard many times when I was chatting with people during my trip to New York. Whether it was the girl or guy sitting on the bar stool next to me (and a big “Hey” to all the random people I met and talked with, especially the good folks from Calgary), or someone I was introduced to through a friend, when I said to them “I’m a confidence coach” they’d look at me with a smirk/frown and ask me 2 questions –

1. What the hell that means, and
2. How the hell it worked.

I thought I was always pretty clear, but considering the questions seemed to be fairly consistent, I thought I’d put my answers into an article for everyone right here.

What the hell do I do as a confidence coach?

I make people more confident. Next question.

Just kidding. What I do is this. I help people to figure out who they are way down deep; the person that they know or hope they are, but have somehow lost touch with.

I help people find the real them, and trust themselves implicitly.

Confidence problems manifest in all kinds of ways. It could be that you’re at a career crossroads and don’t know which way to go, or feel lost in your current job. It could be that life isn’t turning out as you thought it would when you were in college and you don’t know what to do about it. It could be that you struggle somehow with dating and relationships, or that some social situations leave you doubting yourself. It could be that you just feel like you’re not living up to your potential or feel like you’re doing the wrong thing in the wrong place.

People come to me with all of these scenarios and more, and having worked through these areas for over 6 years I’ve found that a solid sense of who you are and what you’re about is the very best way to navigate through them. It boils down to trusting yourself to make decisions and allowing yourself to roll with the punches in a resilient way.

What I do is all about building inner confidence, real confidence, practical, long-lasting confidence.

How do I do it?

Over the last few years I started noticing that every client of mine ended up being more confident, and that the confidence they gained simplified things in their life and gave them the tools to deal with all the stuff that life throws at us. How this happened kinda puzzled me for a while, so I took a look at what was happening.

I pulled together all the elements that I saw contributing towards that greater self-confidence, added more elements and tuned the whole process to make it work as easily and simply as possible. What I ended up with is my own coaching process that takes people from where they are to a place of true inner confidence.

People call me up on the phone every couple of weeks and we dive right into things. It’s not necessarily a linear process – I’ll pull elements out of the methodology depending on what’s going on and where the individual happens to be.

After each session I’ll send out an action list for them to take away and put into practice based on what we talked about in the session – this is about seeing results so it’s important that things are put into practice and insights are leveraged in the best way. As momentum builds up we continue to gauge progress and look at where we need to focus.

As having fun is one of my key values, it’s not all heavy stuff. I love to laugh with clients, and encourage lightness and silliness in sessions as much as the more serious stuff. I’m lucky enough to call a number of ex-clients good friends of mine, simply through the relationship we developed along the way.

So that’s what I do and how it works in a nutshell, and hopefully it’s pretty clear.

Anything not clear? More questions? Feel free to fire away below.