When Confidence Stops Being Borrowed

I sat at a dinner table recently, one I would've been intimidated to join only a few years ago.

I didn't think twice about obliging when I received the invitation. Only halfway through that dinner did I have a moment of awareness that something was different for me.

I was comfortable, completely myself, and my body was telling me so. No sweaty palms. No raised heartbeat mid-conversation. No dry throat while I searched for words. I felt a smile forming on my face, a reaction to a sense of unforced personal triumph.

Back at home, I had more time to ponder what had happened.

To be fully honest, my 2022 self would've simply not attended this event. She would've made up the most elaborate excuse to skip it, because my 2022 self, my 2020 self, even my 2015 self, had yet to meet the version she wanted to become, embrace it, and be it. Today's version.

The lesson I've learned building something fully new in my 40s is that meeting YOUR idea of enough is the very definition of confidence.

Your idea of enough is the vision you have of what you're capable of. It's knowing it, trusting it, being it, then showing up in the world as it. Confidence is never about someone else's standard. It's what you deem fitting to run with, because the moment you shift your focus from the destination ahead to look at others is the moment you lose balance and fall.

That dinner also reminded me of something else I coach my clients through constantly.

There's no such thing as a perfect, objective standard to measure yourself against. There’s only the standard you've set for yourself, and that standard is almost always the result of lived experiences and people who live in your subconscious.

Whether you're at a meeting table, in a room full of friends, on a gym mat, up on a podium, or sitting in bed at the end of the day, the most consequential question shouldn’t be, How am I doing? It’s How am I feeling in relation to the world around me? Who am I comparing myself to when I set my own bar? Who am I trying to become when I judge how far I've come?

The answers are the root of almost everything else.

Whether we're happy with where we are. Whether we've built the life we imagined for ourselves when we were younger. Whether we're spending our energy on what we don't have that someone else does—status, success, following, money, intelligence, looks—or actually watering our own grass.

The most useful strategy I’ve developed over time, both coaching clients and catching myself mid-comparison, is a simple series of steps that almost never fails:

First, catch yourself. The moment the emotion spikes. With practice, this gets faster to notice.

Locate it in your body—head, throat, chest, limbs.

Identify it, and ask yourself, What specifically about this person, this moment, this story triggered this feeling in me?

Give yourself a minute. The root cause is almost always ready to reveal itself. Once you find it, ask again, Why?

The answer to that is key, because it allows you to determine whether actually having that or being that aligns with your life, and more importantly, your values.

What would it cost me to get there and is it worth it?

Right there is usually where your nervous system quiets down again.

It's rarely the jealousy, resentment, or envy that need attention. It's the usually misplaced target dressed up as a perceived unattainable goal.

That's the work behind a dinner table like the one I sat at last week. It’s finally running your own numbers instead of someone else's.

Aline.