When Confidence Comes From Within

Mary came in with a question she asked the way other people breathe. What am I going to be good at? Truly good at, top quartile at least?

She asked it the second she woke up and the second she went to bed. Late twenties, an investment firm, two years in, and by her own account she walked in the door already feeling like she was not a favorite.

She had spent four years getting into the industry. Hundreds of conversations, most of them awkward, all of them aimed at one prize. Then she 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 her 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 she had done. She read the document and shrugged. Those qualities don’t trade on the desk she sits at. “If I’m such a relational person, then why don’t I have more friends?” When she looked in the mirror, she told me, she 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 she could feel it. She started catching it in the room, out loud, mid-sentence. “I walked into that one, didn’t I.”

I told her about planting a willow in the desert. The willow dies, and the desert calls it a bad tree. She finished the thought without my help: “I keep placing my willow tree, my gifts, in the desert.”

She left without an answer about the job, and that is not the failure it sounds like. What she wants, under all of it, is to feel like she’s in the circle. She said that too. The work now is learning to count what she already carries. She doesn’t know where that leads yet. Neither do I.