Sure, she’s made a couple of real stinkers when it comes to her film career (Charlie’s Angels 2 anyone?), but when I read a Sunday Times interview with her my pro-Demi opinion was proved correct. Not just because she’s pretty hot, apparently very charming and with a rare spirit, but because she seems to have things nicely together in her personal life and exhibits all the signs of true confidence.

In the interview, Demi talks about the different challenges she’s faced in her life. From her career doldrums to her harsh upbringing (alcoholic parents, kidney disease as a child and a step-father who committed suicide when he was 40 – enough to permanently f**k up most people) she takes it all and uses it to become a better version of herself.

“It’s like all things in life,” says Demi, “it’s a challenge that you have to find ways to make interesting for yourself.”

I love that. A lot of people would have crumbled against the challenges, pain and heartache she’s faced in life, whereas Moore experienced it all and became a better person and strong, confident woman as a result.

She used what happened in her life as a force for good in her own life, rather than a source of excuses that strip her self-confidence and self-esteem.

In the interview she goes on to talk about one of the most important things she’s learned, which is something that’s central to my coaching method:

“You have to find a sense of value that comes from within, not, as it was at times for me, from ego, from external things like success in my career. But that’s hard when you grow up without a sense of self-worth.”

That sense of value is what it’s all about, and it’s at the centre of true self-confidence and self-esteem. As she says, without it there’s a real temptation to look for success and validation externally and to develop an ego that has no centre or purpose, other than to feed itself.

Yes, it’s bloody hard to find your way when you don’t feel good enough to have what you want in life. I’ve been so low and lost that I never thought anything better would come along, and I thought that life had beaten me.

But if – and this is probably the only thing that Demi and I have in common - you find the thread of gold that runs through you it lays the foundations for true confidence and for everything that follows.

Now, anyone know how I can ask Demi out for a coffee?

Can you believe that 7 years have passed since 9/11? Time certainly flies, but the pictures from that morning in New York still send shivers down my spine and the stories from people who witnessed it (including 2 friends of mine), the people who survived against the odds and the people who lost a loved one are as emotive as ever.

It seems like the world isn’t changing for the better and it’s easy to be cynical and pessimistic in a world filled with accusatory, partisan politics, doom-mongering financiers, celeb obsessed media and ongoing global conflicts, but today of all days I choose to look at something altogether more profound - the potential we all possess for having a positive effect on another human being.

What I learned on that day isn’t how evil we can be or how twisted our beliefs can become, but how much spirit, courage, compassion and generosity lies just under the surface of New York City.

I believe that those qualities exist just under the surface of every city, town and village in the world.

I honestly believe that we all hope we’re greater than the sum of our parts, and I know that we are - that’s why I started coaching in the first place. Don’t be lazy and give in to the cynicism, apathy and indifference to others that can so easily take over - strive to be a better version of yourself by plugging into what really matters to you, and remember the spirit, courage, compassion and generosity that the world saw that day.

That’s how the world can change.

Did Richard Branson know how successful he’d be when he woke up one morning in 1970 and decided to start Virgin? Did he know just how far the Virgin brand would reach and did he ever imagine being so respected and successful?

How about Bill Gates? Did he know he’d be a pivotal leader and innovator in the IT world, and that he’d see his dream of a PC on every desk and in every home come true. Did he know how successful he’d become and how much he’d be able to do with that success?

I doubt it very much. I’d bet that they started off with an idea that made sense to them, even a germ of an idea, something that excited them and made them want to do something about it.

I’d bet that they didn’t know if their idea would work out or where it would take them. I’d bet that they were just doing what felt right and best at the time, applying all of their strengths to deliver on their ideas.

I’d bet that they knew they were going out of their comfort zone but didn’t let that influence their decisions and what they did or didn’t do.

I’d bet that they didn’t get everything right. They would have made mistakes along the way that might have thrown them or cast doubt on things. Nevertheless, they rolled with the punches and kept on going.

So, which comes first – confidence or success? There’s no doubt in my mind that confidence comes first, and it’s confidence that I’ve just been describing.

True self-confidence brings personal success with it

Being truly confident leads you to success, a success that actually means something to you and has a personal relevance, rather than the hollow kind of success that comes from simply doing what you think you ought to be doing and ignoring what really matters.

By the way, there are cases where success comes before confidence. It’s called getting lucky.

A brilliant man died recently.

I’ve mentioned Ryan Pausch and his fantastic Last Lecture here before, and wanted to mark his contribution again. It’s a poignant, uplifting, funny and empowering demonstration of what true confidence is all about, and he certainly made me think (and smile).

Surrounded by his family, he died at his home on July 25th.

Just check out this article and read some of the comments to see the impact he had - just stunning. If you haven’t seen it already you owe it to yourself to see what over 10 million people have seen.

Check out the Last Lecture and you’ll see what true confidence really means. You won’t regret it.

You may have noticed the colour switch of the blog from purple to blue. If you haven’t noticed, don’t worry – it used to be purple and now it’s blue (it now matches my eyes). This is interesting timing, because I’ve been kinda down for the last couple of weeks since coming back from my trip to Stockholm.

I’ve been in a slow feeling, nap taking, schlepping around, not-doing-much, puffy-eyed, hayfever funk, and haven’t been in the best of moods. I’ve finished at the London ad agency and the change in pace and lifestyle has been marked.

This me-not-being-at-my-best period also ties in with a post I’ve been following over at Brazen Careerist, where there’s been a discussion about whether living up to your potential is something valid, or if it’s just a bunch of BS, which stirred me and spurred me to add my two-penneth.

Does the last couple of weeks mean that I haven’t been living up to my potential? Well, if you look at just the last couple of weeks, then sure, I haven’t been living up to my potential. It’s been tough making myself get out of bed, I’ve been watching too much TV and I haven’t accomplished much of anything.

But if you look at it in a broader sense, then I know that this time is necessary so that I can live up to my potential. It’s a continuum, not a series of starts and stops.

In her post Penelope talks about how getting out of bed each day is an act of faith for many of us, and I completely recognise that. Life is hard. Sometimes it takes a huge amount of effort to go about your day with any kind of gusto, and feeling like good things are happening and knowing that you’re doing well seem a world away.

But at the other end of the ‘realising your potential scale’, why not ask an Olympic medalist whether it was worth realising their potential? You can bet they’ll tell you how tough it’s been, how bloody hard they’ve worked and how many sacrifices they’ve made. But having watched a couple of medalists being interviewed, just look at how alive they are knowing they’ve nailed it.

Does the fact that I’m feeling pretty crappy and can’t compete with an Olympic medalist mean that I should forget about living up to my potential?

No. Not a bit of it.

Feel free to forget about what the self-help industry has preached for too long - life isn’t about competition and it isn’t about achieving goals – if you think it is then I’m sorry to point out that you’re missing the point.

But - and this is a big but - without the concept of living up to your potential there’s a lack of meaning, and it’s by engaging with the things that mean something that we step into whatever potential we have.

This is the whole point of what I do – to take people to a point where they know what matters to them and build their natural confidence so that they’re able to engage with those things without worrying or second-guessing. That’s truly confident living. Say it with me.

The tipping point isn’t being kind or nice as Penelope suggests, but making a deep choice about what matters and having the self-awareness, self-esteem and self-confidence to prioritise those things.

It’s not easy. It takes guts, it can be bloody hard and sometimes it just plain sucks, but if you’re participating in what matters and what has meaning to you, it doesn’t matter a jot if you have a down period or feel blue sometimes in the middle.

Are you living up to your potential or do you think it’s a bunch of hoo-ey?

I just re-read a post from Jamie Harrop called ‘Rekindling Our Child Like Self Belief‘ that struck so many chords it could have been the London Philharmonic.

I travelled around Europe as a teenager without knowing where I was going or where I was going to sleep each day. I went on holiday to Boston, Mass. by myself on a couple of occasions, confident that I’d meet people and have a whale of a time without my friends around me. I took part in a couple of dozen stage plays at school that earned me the ‘Best Characterisation’ award in the schools equivalent to the Oscars.

There’s a bunch of stuff I still want to do. I want to live and work in New York City for a while, I want to do more great work in world-class ad agencies, I want to be the best damn confidence coach in the world, I want to be a published fiction author and I want a relationship with great girl who makes me laugh, cry and learn all the time.

I bet you have a list of your own.

I’ll also bet that too often those things stay on that list and rarely get off the page. I’ll bet there are things on your list that you know, somewhere inside, that you won’t do, be or have.

Why? Because it’s too difficult and the chance of failure is high. If you knew you could get it the chances are you’d already be doing it; the fact that there’s the chance that you could go for what you really want and not get it is enough to stop you and most other people in their tracks. But the most tragic thing in life isn’t knowing what you want and failing to get it, it’s knowing what you want and not bothering to try to get it.

Jamie’s article reminded me of what it’s like to have that child-like self belief. The kind of self-belief that means you don’t even question whether something’s possible or achievable, you just have the confidence to go right ahead and try it. The kind of self-belief that sees you pushing your own boundaries without even being aware that a boundary was there to begin with.

Where that self-belief goes I don’t know. Maybe as time goes on and you see how hard life can be and discover that things don’t always turn out as you want, you teach yourself to aim lower and think smaller. Maybe you learn to look at what you stand to lose before you look at what you stand to gain.

What I do know is that the diminishing of that child like self-belief happens slowly over time, and is one of the great tragedies of life, stripping away self-confidence and self-esteem as it goes. But it shows us what true self-confidence is all about and what’s at the centre of my methodology – being able to choose your behaviour with implicit trust in that behaviour.

Notice how I didn’t say ‘choose your behaviour with implicit trust in the outcome’? The difference is one of predictability. Nobody can predict exactly what will happen with something you’re working on, but you can predict that you can deal with whatever happens - and that’s true confidence.

Sometimes things work out, sometimes they don’t. But if you approach everything you do with a willingness to engage and a feeling in your bones that you can deal with whatever happens, then that’s pretty damn close to that child like self-belief Jamie talks about, and that’s flippin’ well good enough for me.

I’m a frequent visitor to The Onion, and stumbled across this great video.

It reminded me how sometimes the trickiest thing to do is not to begin something, but to let go and move on.

Not so long ago I was coaching full time and working from home every day. My commute was from my bedroom, down the hall into my home office. The only time I spoke with people was ordering my morning coffee and while on the phone with a client, which ended when the session was up.

I have to admit to going stir crazy and being bored silly. As much as I loved and still love coaching, doing it from home on a full-time basis doesn’t work for me. I need to be around people a whole lot more than that.

So I needed to make a different decision, and switching to coaching part-time wasn’t an easy decision for me to make. It felt like I was giving up on something that meant a huge amount to me, it felt like I was letting down my coaching peers and it felt like I’d be seen as quitting.

Nevertheless, I knew I needed more stimulation and more human interaction, and it was clear that that was more important to me than sticking with a full-time coaching business. I took a deep breath and went for it, and it was most certainly the right move.

The safe and stupid thing for me to do was to keep doing what I’d been doing simply because it was a known quantity, but the confident thing for me to do was to make a decision to move on. That’s a decision you need to make if:

1. What you’re doing no longer matters to you in the way it once did, and has no relevance to what matters to you now.
2. Neither what you’re doing or what you’ll gain along the way will contribute towards something that matters to you (in whatever measure), or is part of the game you really want to play.
3. You’re squeezing yourself into a box that’s too small for you, pigeon-holing yourself in a way that, left unchecked, will damage your sense of self.

Feel free to write the worlds foremost text on anteaters, igloos or hairnets if that’s what matters to you. Otherwise, make a decision to let go and move on.

That’s me when I was around 4 years old (funnily enough I have a very similar polo shirt that I wear now!). Of course, at that age I had no idea what was in store for me, and just a couple of years later when I was around 6 years old I remember being asked by my primary school teacher what I wanted to be when I grew up. I reflected for a moment and torn between two options I said ‘I’m not sure. Either an artist or an inventor.’

I had two pictures - one of me in a huge studio, being swept along in the moment as I created magnificent works of art that would make people weep, and another of me in a lab coat with crazy hair surrounded by bubbling test tubes and all manner of electronic devices as I used all I knew to build Something Amazing (TM). Those two sides have always been there for me (I’m a typical Gemini) - the art and the science, the creative and the logical, the head and the heart.

In my 20’s I got sidetracked by a successful but personally damaging career in IT, which lead to me hitting my quarter-life crisis, losing my self-confidence and having to rebuild myself piece by piece, and I can see that part of the reason for hitting that crisis point is because I came to live purely in the logical part of me and pretty much ignored the creative side.

As a 6 year old boy I’d identified that both themes were hugely important to me, but ended up paying an extremely high price for it when I went forward with a life that didn’t reflect that.

Those two themes persist for me to this day, and a day where I can use my logic and my creativity is a great day because I get to use the things that have always been there and still persist for me.

Another memory that’s been a puzzle until fairly recently, is when I was 13 or 14 in my Religious Education classes. In some classes we’d ditch the normal teaching format in favour of a debate, where the teacher, Mrs Evans, would lead us all in a debate on particular topics related to religion in the world. One day, she asked me to come up to the front of the class, invited me to sit in her chair and told the class that I was going to lead the debate that day.

It felt great - I was sitting in the big chair at the head of the class, I was letting people speak and counter, and I was managing the flow of the whole thing. I remember clearly how much I enjoyed it.

Mrs Evans asked me to lead the class in a debate 3 or 4 times, and never asked anyone else. Why would she do that? I think the only reason can be because she wanted me to see something. To be honest, I’m still figuring out exactly what, but I think it has to do with leading people and bringing out what’s important to them.

Thanks so much Mrs Evans.

The great thing is that my work now - both the coaching and the ad project management - is a fantastic combination of head and heart, thinking and feeling, creativity and logic, orchestrating and leading - and that’s why it works.

I share this all with you because I’ve worked with hundreds of people who come to me with low confidence, not knowing what they should be doing, and they want to figure out how to be more confident so they can go forwards with something that feels right.

They feel stuck, like they spend just a tiny amount of time doing what they love and want more out of their lives and careers. Some of them even wonder if wanting something more is too much to ask for.

In my opinion and experience, having work that includes the things that have persisted for you is absolutely critical in terms of loving your work and getting more richness out of your working experience.

So figure out what your themes are. In your early days at school, what did you want to do when you grew up? What did you want to be when you were a kid? In your teenage years or at college or university, what did you really want to be, regardless of whether you took that route or not? What have been the most enjoyable and rewarding parts of the jobs you’ve had?

What patterns can you see? What are the themes that come out and what still persists for you to this day?

Look at the patterns and themes that have always been there for you. Those things aren’t going anywhere, and ignoring them is ignoring who you are and who you’ve always been, and that’s a sure-fire way to lose all confidence in yourself.

I’m willing to bet that there’s something you’ve always wanted to do.

Maybe you want to write a novel, maybe you want to visit Africa, maybe you want to open a little coffee shop in your neighbourhood or maybe you’ve had an idea for a neat little product that just might change the world.

Everyone has at least one thing that you dream about, and 99.9% of the time you never do anything with them.

You persuade yourself that it’s pie in the sky, that’s it’s just a pipe dream and that it could never actually happen because you wouldn’t know where to start, couldn’t afford it and it probably wouldn’t work anyway. You lose faith in your ability to make your dream reality, and lose a little faith in yourself in the process.

The more you filter what you wish for, the more you train yourself to think small, and the less confident you become.

But what if it was possible? What if you could make some or all of it happen? What if you had what it took to see something come to life? Wouldn’t that be cool?

Here’s my 3 step process finding the confidence to do what you’ve always wanted to do.

1. Look into it

   Do some leg work and investigate what might be needed to get going. Look online for resources and examples of how other people have done similar things. Go talk with people who’ve been there, done that (use Ecademy or LinkedIn to find good people to talk with).

   Write down what you need to know and what you need to figure out so that you can make a decision to do it or not. Having investigated you might find that in reality it’s not up your alley after all, or you might find yourself getting pretty darn excited at what you’re discovering. Either way, looking into it won’t cost you anything and you’ll never know without doing the leg work.

2. Make a choice

   Once you’ve looked into it, you need to make a choice based on 2 things.

   a. What matters to you. Is the choice founded on something that matters to you personally? Is it something you can engage with on an ongoing basis? Is it something you’ll enjoy no matter how it turns out? If not, you’re much less likely to follow through with it.

   b. Your priorities. How does this fit in with your other priorities (family, finances, career, hobbies, etc)? What compromises are you willing to make going forwards, and where are the boundaries? It might be the case that your priorities are such that now isn’t the right time, in which case figure out what criteria needs to be satisfied and when is the right time.

   Once you’ve figured those 2 things out, make your choice and commit to it. That commitment is what will carry you through, and it’s an attitude and a way of behaving that shapes your experience and behaviour as you go forwards.

3. Do one thing
   If you’ve made a choice to go forwards, do one thing today. Just one thing. Then do one more thing tomorrow.

   That’s all.

   Do one thing every day - no matter how big or small - and in a year you’d have done a whopping 365 things towards something you want. Even the most complex of tasks (and the Biggest and Messiest of projects) can be achieved simply by doing one thing followed by another, then another, then another. Don’t elevate the task to something bigger than you, break it into chunks that you can deal with and tackle each one in turn.

   If the one thing you do on a particular day doesn’t work out, don’t sweat it. There’s the next day to try it a different way so don’t beat yourself up – you can’t control how everything turns out.

   Oh, don’t think that once you’ve made a decision that you can’t make a different decision. Often you need to tune things as you go, and sometimes what you learn along the way renders the destination redundant. Being confident means allowing yourself to continue to make choices that serve you well.

You know what, I love doing nothing. I’m actually pretty good at it, and when I’ve been busy it’s just great to sit back, do nothing and relax for a while. I’m a great schlepper, and I’ve come to see that schlepping is a key piece of what makes me productive.

When I started freelancing alongside my coaching I thought I’d make use of my commuting time to write, and that if I took my laptop to work with me I could sit in a coffee shop at lunch time and take care of emails. I tried to squeeze more time out of my day, all of which added to my stress levels and didn’t get me any further ahead.

I was stressed out, waking up in the middle of the night worrying that things aren’t getting done and that the world will fall apart if I don’t’ do them.

I felt bad that things were getting on top of me and that I wasn’t able to do everything. I started seeing myself as failing to get things done, that somehow I was less than because even though I was on the go for 16 hours a day I wasn’t delivering what I wanted to deliver.

Recognise this?

Many of my clients sure do - this is one of the many confidence-impacting problems that I deal with every week. The bottom line is that if you keep on going full steam ahead, trying to do everything with the notion that you ought to be able to do it all, you’ll burn out. You’ll lose yourself in the middle of everything you’re doing, and you’ll find your focus and sense of what you’re about slipping.

Let that ride and your self-confidence will suffer as you focus more and more on what you’re not doing and where you’re not seeing things happen as you’d like them to.

The belief that you need to deliver consistently without ever stopping is a deeply flawed one. It WILL get in the way of what you’re working on, and it WILL impact how you see yourself and your level of confidence.

So stop it.

I want to spell out to you that it’s okay to not do things. It’s okay to slow down, take a break and nourish yourself. More than that, it’s dangerous not to.

One quick distinction to make - don’t think for a second that slowing down is the same as procrastinating. Far from it. This funny little film shows you precisely what procrastinating is.

Procrastinating is busying yourself with all kinds of other things so that you don’t have to ‘get your stuff done’. Slowing down is making a deliberate and positive choice to take a break and nourish yourself.

As I’ve come to see. slowing down can be an amazing strategy for being more productive.

Tell me - Do you have problems slowing down or feel bad that you’re not getting everything done? How do you refuel, recharge and nourish yourself?