A client told me about something a colleague mentioned in passing that week. A competing company was doing really well, and a number of people who used to work for my client had gone there. "It kind of bummed me out, to be honest," they said. "It kind of made me feel a little bit inadequate." Within a few minutes it wasn't about the other company anymore. "For some reason, this made me really feel like, can I trust myself?"
Sometimes one sentence is enough. A colleague mentions a competitor's revenue. A friend says, in passing, how well someone's career is going. The information is small. And then the ground moves. You're not thinking about the comment anymore. You're wondering whether you can do what you set out to do, whether you ever could, whether other people have something you don't.
That comment had opened a much larger question about trusting themselves. I told the client it was as if some part of them had grabbed the steering wheel of their life. I think of it as a bus full of kids, each one reaching for the wheel, while the driver slips into the back seat.
In The Performance Trap, I write about the pressure to earn your worth. When that pressure is present, someone else's success can become a reason to question yourself. That was a possibility we explored in this conversation.
We stayed with what hearing the news had brought up. The business questions still mattered. So did the feeling of being small or frozen that came with trying to answer them.
In this way of working, we might notice a part that compares, another that doubts, or one that wants to defer to someone who seems more certain. Naming them can help us hear the different concerns without letting any one of them settle the whole question.
When I asked this client what they lacked, the list came easily. "Sometimes it's like the aggression and pushiness. Sometimes it's just the energy. Sometimes it's like the capacity to lead."
So I asked them to set the list aside and find the feeling underneath it. "See if you can locate the feeling," I said. "I don't even have to hear what it is, but what does it feel like?" "It feels small," they said. "It almost feels like I want to cry. It feels a little frozen." They started to explain it, and I asked them to go back to the feeling. Then they found where it lives: most mornings, when they wake up, "a little bit frozen, a little depressed, a little like powerless," as if there were forces out there bigger than they were.
Later, they remembered times when they had trusted other people's decisions over their own. "To me, this even sounds cocky," they said. Their gut had been telling them something different. "And honestly, I was often right." That gave us a fuller picture: there were perceptions they valued, as well as doubts that made it difficult to act on them.
Sometimes a situation calls for learning a skill, getting advice, or finding practical support. Sometimes the difficulty is using judgment you already have. We can look at both. In this conversation, we explored what happened when the client began to doubt their own perception.
The hardest part to see is the handoff. I asked that client, "If you can't trust yourself, where does your trust go?" "To whoever I deem kind of has that energy, with a lot of will," they said. "Oh, they must be right, because they feel so confident."
Here, deferring to someone else's confidence had sometimes meant setting aside something the client had noticed.
Asking for advice can be useful. This client also recognized something else in their own version of it: "I use this humility as a way of actually just masking that. I'm afraid of putting myself out there." We could explore that fear while taking their need for sound advice seriously.
A useful question here is what feels at stake in making your own decision. The answer may include real consequences as well as fears about what a mistake would mean about you. Both deserve attention.
The question I return to is whether you can give your own perception a place alongside the information and advice available to you. Confidence may come and go. You can still consider what you know, what you need to learn, and what you are willing to try.