You don't need confidence to pursue your calling
Yep, you just don't need it
Reporting live from the trenches:
3 months into this journey of embracing my full weird and committing to this R&D process of building a healership business and practicing publicly as an intuitive, I’ve come to a very real conclusion: following a calling is f*cking hard.
That isn’t to say it hasn’t also already been a beautiful and expansive experience full of learnings and self-growth, but doing anything alive and true that falls outside of the script you’re used to will always feel a little awkward, a bit like wearing a spiritual waistband extender. Symbolically, I’m “sizing up,” and with that comes a trace of self-consciousness. I’m changing, yet I don’t want to abandon the best parts of who I’ve been. But I also need more stretch for these newer dimensions that are just beginning to emerge, still in their unboxing moment, untested and uncertified by experience.
This whole “experiment”, as I like to call it, has me reflecting a lot on the demands of entrepreneurship, and the vulnerability of putting yourself out there, being seen, received, and potentially rejected. And as self-assured and in-touch with myself as I’ve become over the years, this experience has exposed every raw layer of my psyche: the doubts, insecurities, fears, feelings of inadequacy, the “will-they-still-accept-me-if-I-change” questions. In that swirl of uncertainty, I haven’t been at my most confident. But I also know that’s par for the course. I’m not just doing something different—I’m becoming someone different. I’m touching the disruptive force of change, and it’s making me grapple with what I actually need to move with it.
Is it actually more confidence?
We keep getting told by the world that confidence is what we need to have if we want to be more successful, to move the needle in our relationships & our dreams, to grow, and to live a vibrant and meaningful life. We view confidence as a universal solution to all of our blocks, and if we could simply fulfill the task of becoming more confident, then nothing could hurt us. We believe confidence can shield us from the vagaries and vicissitudes of the world, a kind of talisman against vulnerability.
But I have found that confidence isn’t always a reliable protector. More often than not, it’s a moving target. It’s contextual, fluid, and shaped by a complex mix of mood, environment, feedback, internal narratives, and the ever-changing cultural, social, political, psychological, and economic landscapes we inhabit. Confidence thrives in familiarity, but wavers in times we stretch into new territory. It’s not something that “arrives” once and for all, and yet we cling to the myth that it will. So we wait for the moment confidence will arrive to bless us and finally authorize us to live more fully.
But in the waiting, we simultaneously press pause on the important stretches and moves we need to make. I have certainly told myself, “I can’t take the risk until I feel more ready and certain.” In studying this narrative, I have come to see it more clearly as a strategic misdirect to maintain the status quo and a way to delay discomfort. It’s the voice of the inner critic, trying to protect me from risk—but in doing so, it resists and rejects the very experiences meant to grow me.
The allure of confidence is a false god. Not that confidence isn’t useful or important—I certainly would love to have more of it all of the time. I also know that confidence does indeed grow with time and experience. But once I hit the next growth edge, the baseline resets. There will always be flux.
I believe that what we need to ask for is not more confidence, but more courage. In practical terms, courage is the ability to do what’s necessary and true, even when conditions aren’t perfect. It’s the strength to self-affirm or to move forward for the sake of a higher purpose in spite of perceived and real difficulties; to pursue worthy goals consistent with our values and ethical responsibility even in the face of dangers, adversities, and external pressures to give up. It’s something I have grown to see as one of the most central pillars of authentic living.
This language of courage (the in spite ofs, the even ins, that inherent energy of noncompliance in those contrasting phrases) is one of benevolent defiance—the willingness to both tolerate and counteract fear, doubt, insecurity, or uncertainty with compassion & agency, even without the assurance of outcome.
To live in the spirit of benevolent defiance is to continuously experiment with our boundaries of personal power and freedom, summoning the will to make sovereign choices in any situation, especially ones that seem to confine us. It’s the permission we give ourselves to lovingly say yes to all our deepest longings, not because it’s easy, but because it’s our work to do—to live a life that’s truly ours, even when there’s no immunity from pain or loss. As the root cor reminds us, courage is of the heart, and the heart’s power is its ability to gracefully hold it all.
This journey of moving towards becoming more of who I am is teaching me to keep showing up and making the scary moves that signal to the universe that I am open to receiving possibility. I don’t make those moves with 100% confidence. In fact each step of the way I’m wracked by fear, uncertainty, and worry. But I’ve come to see that those very feelings aren’t barriers—they’re bridges into courage. And there is a flavor to the courage that feels exhilaratingly like disobedience: I do not need to comply with the part that wants to stay small.
The reality is we don’t need confidence to do the work we are meant to do, are called to do, desire to do. We believe confidence will make us feel safe, but life isn’t about living in 100% safety all of the time. We can’t touch the biggest, brightest rewards that life has in store for us without opening ourselves to the full range of what it takes to get there: the good, the grueling, the unforeseen. I have learned that confidence is not a requisite for taking meaningful action. We don’t need to have all the feel-good chess pieces in play to move towards our own becoming. We don’t even need hope, faith, or even to be fearless.
We need just enough love.
Love that comes when we tune into our hearts: the love to choose ourselves, to choose what matters, to be claimed by something larger than comfort and safety: the values and dreams central to who we are.
We only need enough of that love to grant ourselves internal permission—even if it feels quiet or timid—to walk through the fire of self-actualization. In this way, courage is a form of self-advocacy. It’s the energy of authorship and creation, rooted in the belief that we absolutely deserve to live in alignment with what feels meaningful to us, to find our home in this world. That belief is the root of self-liberation and spiritual reunion with ourselves.
Confidence will come and go—but courage is what empowers us to answer to the part of us that deeply wants to enter life, right now, and cross the threshold into our becoming.