Ep #86: Being Confident Without Belief

The Confident Coaches Podcast with Amy Latta | Being Confident Without BeliefI was recently having a conversation with my January Confident Coaches Mastermind group where I asked my clients where their level of confidence was on a scale from 1 to 10 in terms of their marketing, selling, and coaching. They’ve been at this work for almost six months now, so while most of their numbers were pretty high, no one wanted to claim a 10. Why? Because they sometimes struggle with their belief.

But what if I told you that you could be on the hot mess express, with things in your business not working out the way you expected, your belief down the drain, and still be completely 100% confident?

Coaches, you don’t need success, a certain number of dollars in your bank account, or a number of clients on your roster to feel confident. I’m sharing why confidence does not require belief, how to actually build confidence, and the questions that will help you reassess your level of confidence if you don’t believe me right now.

Applications for the July class of Confident Coaches Mastermind are open, so make sure you’re connected with me! Find me on Instagram or Facebook, or click here to get on my email list! This is how you’ll also get all the information you need to get my four-hour training called Getting Unstuck for only $97 before the price goes up to $2000, so jump on it, my friends!

I’ve created a brand new free training for you called Stop Overcomplicating Confidence. I see my coaches making the process of cultivating confidence way harder than it has to be, and in this training, you’re going to learn exactly how you might be overcomplicating it, what’s creating that, and how to stop. And the best part of it all, it’ll take you less than an hour. So what are you waiting for? Click here to get it!

What You’ll Learn:
  • Why confidence does not require belief.
  • What will make you the best coach and teacher.
  • A better question to ask yourself to assess your level of confidence.
  • The skills you have to build confidence in so that you don’t need belief to feel confident.
  • Why I always rate my confidence at a 10, even when things don’t work.
Listen to the Full Episode:

Featured on the Show:
Full Episode Transcript:

You are listening to episode 86 of The Confident Coaches Podcast, the one where you stop conflating confidence as belief and why. Let’s go.

Welcome to The Confident Coaches Podcast, a place for creating the self-confidence you need to do your best work as a life coach. If you want to bring more boldness, more resilience, and more joy to your work, this is the place for you. I’m your host, Amy Latta. Let’s dive in.

Hello, hello my confident coach. How are you doing out there today? I am recording this on the last day of school for my kids. So there is a big buzz of excitement in the Latta household this afternoon. And yeah, we did get out a little late, our school district had a lot of snow days, and they added them all to the end of the year.

So this is the latest year that I can remember ever my kids being in school. So here we are, summer vacation, and this is what I’ve been thinking about. Of course I snapped pictures of my kids, here’s the first day of school, their last day of school, I was really reflecting on this school year.

How extraordinary it was, right? What an extraordinary year of school for the students, for my kids, for the parents, for teachers, administrators, everyone involved. We’ve literally never seen anything like this year.

And everyone headed into this year truly – none of us, none of us knew how it was going to go down. No one knew how school was going to go down in the time of COVID. I mean, was my kid going to be okay? Where my students going to be okay? If you’re a teacher, how are you going to do it?

And here’s the thing; every school district also did it differently. So you couldn’t necessarily look like right next door because maybe they were doing things differently. My kids were in-person with a bunch of safety protocols in place the entire time.

Whereas some schools around us, they did a hybrid method. I know some schools were never in-person, depending on where you are in the country. So not only did we not know how we were going to do it, everybody was figuring that out very differently, and everybody was doing it differently.

So as a for instance, we took all of those snow days but the district right next door, they just went virtual on those days where we would miss school. So they got out at their normal time. They had no snow days. Everybody did it so differently.

And there was no way anyone knew how it was going to work out. They were literally making it up on the fly. And there were days when, let’s be honest, where we may have felt a little beaten down. We might have felt a little unsure.

And there might have been those days where we’re like, “We’re not going to make it. We are not going to make it through.” I’m talking about the school year in COVID, but we could be talking about the entirety of the past 18 months almost.

Not believing that we’re really going to make it, feeling beat down, feeling unsure, no way anyone knew how this was going to work out, and yet here we are today, this crazy COVID school year is complete. And we were always confident that eventually, somehow, we’d get to this point.

We had no idea how. Now, and I do want to make sure that I understand. I understand that some of you listeners, I personally did not lose a close family member or a close friend, but I have close family members, close friends, and close clients who did lose family members.

So I am not overshadowing when I say and yet we all made it. I’m talking about that kind of metaphorically if you’re listening to this right now and despite what happened over the course of the year, not knowing what happened, and despite that off chance that you are one of those people in that very small percentage who did get COVID and did not make it, we knew inherently life was going to keep going on. That we as a collective would eventually get here.

And it’s really interesting, right? That we know, we know we’re going to get to certain points in our life, barring a sudden death that we aren’t anticipating, which is always possible. But we know we’re going to hit these certain points in our life without having a clue how. And sometimes even despairing about it along the way.

But we don’t just lay down and die. We don’t just give up. And we do this all of the time. We do this in all of these areas of our life. I’m assuming that at this point, I’ve been talking about this long enough that you can kind of see where I’m going with this one, right?

How is it possible that we do this all of the time? We have no idea what’s going to come our way tomorrow, but we inherently believe that next December’s happening, December after that, that’s going to happen and I’m going to be there and things will have figured out. I have no idea how, I’m probably going to freak out along the way but I have clarity and confidence that is going to happen. I just don’t have a freaking clue how.

We do this all of the time. And we started talking about this, this has been a big theme in my own coaching with my own one-on-one coach, as well as the peer coaching that I do in my Two Million Dollar group mastermind that I am personally in. And it came up a lot today in the mastermind that I run.

So I run the Confident Coaches Mastermind. I have two groups going at any given time. I start every quarter and it goes for six months. So right now, I’ve got the January group is in their sixth month right now, and then the April group just started. They are in their third month. And we’re going to be enrolling, we’re actually enrolling for July right now.

So we’re enrolling for that July class of the Confident Coaches Mastermind right now and this is what we were talking about. It’s not how the subject was broached. This isn’t where we started. But this concept, this idea that we keep going and we frequently don’t believe but we have confidence that we’re going to get there, this is where we ended up.

So here’s what happened. I asked my January class who, again, only has a few weeks left in the mastermind, to think about how confident they are in their coaching business. So we’re not talking about measuring clients and dollars and cents. We’re talking about how is your confidence in your growing over the course of the mastermind.

And I use a variety of tools and today, we were talking about the confidence scale, which I have done a podcast before on the confidence scale. Your confidence on a scale of one to 10, what would you say your confidence is in marketing, in selling, in coaching.

And their numbers were so interesting because all of their numbers – and not everybody reported numbers but the people that I coached on, their numbers were pretty high, but no one wanted to claim a 10. No one wanted to claim a 10 in confidence, in any of those categories because sometimes they still don’t believe. Sometimes they still struggle.

So their confidence can’t be at a 10. And I was like, what? Is that true? Is this true? Do you have to believe all of the time in order to be confident in yourself? Is confidence attached to your belief? Is it dependent on belief?

Let’s talk about this. One of my clients said, “Well, I have room to grow in all of these areas so it can’t be a 10.” And another client said that she still gets hard on herself, is still bothered by things not working out and she still gets upset about certain things in her business, so no, she can’t be a 10 either.

And now what happened next, this is what I really, really love. I had never actually thought about it, like cognitively have I ever thought, is confidence also belief? Does confidence equal belief? Is it dependent on belief?

Belief is a part of confidence. It’s what are you believing about yourself you don’t have to and what do you want to believe instead. My very, very simple steps of confidence. Those are the first two ones right there, right? But is it the other way around?

So we had this conversation in my mastermind call today and this is what I mean by I really love this conversation because one of the things that I really pride myself on, one of the reasons why I think I’m such a great confidence coach is because I have no problem challenging my own thinking with my clients by my side.

So in a call, they will say something and then I will say something, and then in the midst of saying it, I’ll be like, “Wait a minute, do I really believe that? Let’s talk about this together.” Because what I think it does is it models to you, my client, that there are so many things that we could know that it’s not possible that we could know every single thing.

Knowing every single thing there is to know about any one thing is never the objective because it’s simply not possible. And that we can be both the teacher and the student at the same time, and our willingness to be both at the same time is actually such a relief in and of itself.

So if I go into a coaching session and I think I’m the teacher and the student, I’m no longer trying to prove to you, my client, that I know everything and there’s nothing that you can’t bring me that I absolutely know that I know how to conquer for you in steps one, two, three.

That makes me feel incredibly tense and incredibly nervous. Because what if you bring something to me that I’ve never talked about before? This is no longer a problem because I’m willing to be both teacher and student and be able to gauge – not just show you your mind, but also get clarity in my own mind if either of us are like, oh, this is a new idea for both of us, let’s really look at this through a different angle here.

And it helps create so much more confidence because I’ve let myself off the hook of always having to have all the right answers and all of the right information. And honestly, the best coaches don’t have all the answers. They hold that space for their client to find their own answers and are willing to change their mindset around things also.

So in today’s session, I said alright, let’s talk about this. And I asked my one client who said because she doesn’t always believe, she can’t rate herself at a 10 on the confidence scale. I asked her about this, and I quickly discovered for me, as soon as we started talking about it, it was like, oh no, confidence does not require belief.

Belief is merely a component of confidence. I went there for half a second and then I came right back. She wasn’t too sure. And so this is what we discovered. Here’s why confidence doesn’t require belief, that belief is merely a component of confidence.

Belief is part of confidence because what you believe about yourself absolutely factors in. And if you believe you’re a piece of shit, or you believe you’re never going to figure this out, or you believe no one is ever going to want anything you ever have to say, then yeah, your confidence is probably in the toilet.

But confidence isn’t just belief. It’s also your ability to feel all the human range of emotion. Confidence that there’s no emotion you aren’t capable of experiencing, that you can’t handle. It’s also knowing that you frequently bring yourself to the future place and you go there and you make decisions from this knowing. I call this Gigi thinking. What does you in the future have to say about this?

It’s deciding what you’re going to do over and over again based on what’s best for you and not someone else. It’s also knowing that you have your own back along the way, that you will love yourself in your most unlovable, or what you deem your most unlovable.

Confidence also comes from evaluating everything you do because this is just one big scientific experiment. And of course there are things that are not going to work and this doesn’t have to be a problem at all. Confidence is all of those things and no one of those things. All five of those steps are not required at the same time in order for you to feel confident.

All of them are a part of confidence. So I think the even better question is how confident are you in your ability to handle whatever comes your way? Where’s your confidence there? That’s the better question. In the confidence scale, I talk about your confidence in marketing, your confidence in selling, in your coaching.

So with this new question, this better question, it’s less how confident are you in your marketing and more how confident are you that you can handle whatever comes your way and may happen when it comes to marketing? That you can figure out new things, that you can figure out what works and what doesn’t work, or if this one marketing plan you got going on is working and then suddenly it stops working, you have the confidence that you’re going to go in there and that you’re going to figure it out and you’re going to solve for what’s no longer working that used to.

How confident are you that when your Facebook ads stop converting, that you can go in there and you can try different things until you solve for that again? Confidence isn’t that your marketing is working all of the time. It also isn’t believing that it’s working or believing you are good at it. Your belief doesn’t have to always be at a 10 in your marketing for you to still feel confident that you can handle whatever may come up with your marketing.

Because it’s entirely normal for your posts to hit a stride and you start getting good feedback on them, and then for reasons, a million different reasons, it just kind of stops. And of course, you would be completely normal if that bothered you, if you got upset about that, if your belief waned just a bit in that moment or in that day or in that week.

You would be a completely normal human being, right? That doesn’t mean though that you’re not still confident when it comes to marketing. Because you’re confident in your ability to figure things out even when you have moments of pity parties, or doubt, or let’s be honest, when you got something that’s really working and it’s converting and it’s go, go, going, and then for any number of reasons, the algorithm, shadow banned, people just got tired of seeing the same thing over and over again, it just stops working.

Yeah, it stands to reason that you might get a little pissed. Stands to reason that you might throw a little pity party. Stands to reason that you’re like, “I did not want to be bothered with having to figure this out right now because right now I’m also trying to figure out this thing in my selling, or I’m also trying to figure out this thing in my coaching, or I’m also trying to figure out this thing that’s happening in my life.”

So experiencing normal human emotion, yeah, it’s going to happen because you’re human. And the same thing goes with your selling. We can work on your confidence in selling, find the beliefs that you will practice sitting in, and reminding yourself when you’re in a consult call to stay out of your head and stop swimming in your doubt and be fully focused and present for them.

But it only makes sense that you will be bothered sometimes by the outcome, or believe you could have done a certain part better. You might have a lack of belief in your ability to bridge the gap but a strong belief in your ability to make a connection with a person and overall still feel pretty damn confident.

Because you have learned to create confidence in your ability to handle whatever comes your way. This is the work we’re doing inside Confident Coaches Mastermind. We are teaching, I’m giving you the tools to find that confidence in your ability to handle whatever comes your way.

This is the work that we’re doing. I’m not teaching you marketing and selling and coaching. I’m teaching you that you can still be confident in where you are right now, even when you still have room to grow in your coaching. That there might be additional certifications that you could earn that would inform your coaching even more than your coaching is right now, but you can still be confident in where you are right now.

Because there’s no place where you will know all of the things all of the time, that you will know all of the latest and greatest coaching tools. You can in fact be a student and a teacher at the same time, and in fact, in fact, I want to offer that that might make you the best teacher, which would completely boost your confidence because you are open to your ability and desire to always be growing and learning new things. And not because you need those things to be more confident, but because you love learning and growing and sharing that learning and growing with others.

Now, how do I know all of this? Because this is me. This is me. I would rate my confidence and my marketing skills and my selling and my coaching pretty much at a 10. I’m a pretty damn confident coach all of the time. But I absolutely throw pity parties when shit doesn’t work out. 100%, just ask my peer coaches. Don’t ask them, they’ve seen some things.

I will let the number of spots I sell determine my belief in some moments. Sometimes I will decide my belief is secure when I sell x number of spots. I’ve absolutely been devastated, devastated, disappointed in myself, and then sometimes even angry at them to find out that clients are not happy with me, that there could have been something that I could have done, if only I would have known.

Because confidence in yourself doesn’t mean you get to escape the human experience. There’s no off ramp to the human experience. Even if you find profound self-love, even if you do work so much on your belief, even if you are a completely confident person, you still are going to experience all the human range of emotion. You’re still going to be disappointed, you’re still going to get pissed off, you’re still going to throw pity parties. Of course you are, you’re human.

Confidence becomes so much less about marketing and selling and coaching and more about your profound love for yourself, even when you are experiencing these – what you might call icky emotions. Loving yourself even when you are really angry at someone, or angry at yourself. Loving yourself even when you are upset, even when you are disappointed, being okay that you do get disappointed and you don’t have to immediately go change your thought in order to have more belief in order to be confident.

And all of those emotions you try to avoid isn’t a sign of a lack of confidence. It’s a sign of your humanity. And you can still absolutely be confident and still be human. Because you can love you, even when you’re feeling or doing something you wish you weren’t. Even when you behave in a way that you don’t personally find appealing.

Confidence doesn’t equal perfection. You don’t have to confuse the two anymore. And what an example you will be to others. You mean I can be human and behave in ways that I wish I didn’t and feel these emotions that I consider unattractive and have my belief go up and down that belief meter all day long and I can still be confident? Yes.

This is why confidence is not actually that hard. We think confidence is so elusive and it’s really not. And the reason that we think it is so elusive is because we think we have to have all these pieces in place all of the time 100% of the time, and it’s just not true.

Confidence is knowing that you can handle whatever comes your way, even in the reality of all of those things. Changing what you believe about yourself is part of becoming a confident coach. But being in belief all the time is not what confidence is.

This is why I love Confident Coaches Mastermind so much, because these are the conversations that I get to have with you every single week. And I can be an example of what is possible as a confident coach. I can be an example of what a confident coach looks like.

How am I an example of a confident coach even while riding along this human experience? I share these stories all of the time with my clients, and I share so many of them with you here on the podcast, or on my social media posts.

And so I actually invite you to answer this question for yourself. How are you an example of what is possible for your clients? Without perfection, without constant 100% belief, without doubt and fear, and sometimes anger and sometimes jealousy, and still be confident in yourself and what you believe about yourself and what you know? How is that true? How are you already an example of what is possible for your clients?

And if these are tough questions, or if these are the kinds of questions that you would love to go deeper on, then you 100%, 100% do need to apply for the Confident Coaches Mastermind. It opens three times a year. It actually opens the month before, but we have a January class, an April class, a July class, and an October class.

So whatever the class that is, that class is open the month before. So we are filling up July class right now. And you can get more information at amylatta.com/mastermind. I’m actually hosting a variety of live coaching hours this month so make sure that you are connected with me so you can learn more because these are the conversations that I think are so important.

When you realize that you don’t have to have this perfect thing in alignment, and we didn’t even talk about what you make other people’s opinions mean because it really doesn’t matter. Whatever you are worried about, well, I might be okay that all five pieces don’t have to be together all of the time, but other people will.

No, that’s still showing you that you still think so too. Because if you truly believed you could be a hot mess express sometimes and still be completely confident, you wouldn’t give a shit about what other people thought, 100%.

So if these are the conversations that you want to have, I’m telling you, this work that I’ve done here has allowed me to keep continuing to dream bigger and bolder and be more myself and to shed these layers of believability about myself, acceptance of myself.

I am telling you; I know the word radical self-love can be so overused sometimes, but have you really considered what that’s like? This is what we do inside Confident Coaches Mastermind. Because when you’re at this level of confidence, you don’t actually need anything else to change because you don’t need those things to feel better about yourself.

And when you don’t need success, when you don’t need dollars in your bank account, when you don’t need a number of clients on your roster, when you don’t need a number of yes’s to happen in a given week in order to love yourself, then you can just go out there and fucking do whatever you want and go blow the roof off of all those things because you don’t need them in order to feel good about yourself.

You just do. This is what you learn in Confident Coaches Mastermind. I would love for you to join us. Alright, so my friends, you know the lines. Until next week, let’s go do epic stuff.

Coaches, I have created a brand new freebie offer just for you podcast listeners. I created a brand new training called Stop Overcomplicating Confidence because I see my coaches do it all the time. Make this confidence thing way harder than it has to be.

In this free training, you’re going to learn exactly how you overcomplicate confidence, what’s creating that, and how to stop it. Here’s the best part, all of it, less than an hour. Less than an hour of your time. You will feel more confident in less than an hour.

Friends, this is the best training I’ve ever done. So visit amylatta.com/podcastgift to get yours. Again, that’s amylatta.com/podcastgift. Go now and feel more confident in just an hour.

Thanks so much for listening to The Confident Coaches Podcast. I invite you to learn more. Come visit me at amylatta.com and until next week, let’s go do epic stuff.    

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Hi, I’m Amy.

For years, I took a ton of action to sign clients.

I learned to create self-confidence and powerfully believe in myself first, and then built a multiple six-figure coaching business.

And I can help you do it, too.

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