When Confidence Comes From Within
Evan came in with a question he asked the way other people breathe. What am I going to be good at? Truly good at, top quartile at least?
He asked it the second he woke up and the second he went to bed. Late twenties, an investment firm, two years in, and by his own account he walked in the door already feeling like he was not a favorite.
He had spent four years getting into the industry. Hundreds of conversations, most of them awkward, all of them aimed at one prize. Then he got the job. “The second I did it, I didn’t think it was that hard. I was like, oh yeah, anyone could do this.” Four years of wanting, written off in a week. That was the pattern everywhere. “The second I achieve something, I discredit and discard it.” And then, in one session, the sentence underneath it: “I am constantly miserable because I don’t take satisfaction in anything.”
Before one of our sessions I gathered written feedback from three of his closest friends. They all said versions of the same thing. Relational. Loyal. Perceptive. The kind of person who shows up with a truck on the worst weekend of your life, which is a thing he had done. He read the document and shrugged. Those qualities don’t trade on the desk he sits at. “If I’m such a relational person, then why don’t I have more friends?” When he looked in the mirror, he told me, he saw nothing special.
We did not argue with the critic. We slowed down enough to watch it work, taking each win and marking it down to zero before he could feel it. He started catching it in the room, out loud, mid-sentence. “I walked into that one, didn’t I.”
I told him about planting a willow in the desert. The willow dies, and the desert calls it a bad tree. He finished the thought without my help: “I keep placing my willow tree, my gifts, in the desert.”
He left without an answer about the job, and that is not the failure it sounds like. What he wants, under all of it, is to feel like he’s in the circle. He said that too. The work now is learning to count what he already carries. He doesn’t know where that leads yet. Neither do I.