58. How to actually get unshakable confidence

You've been told that confidence is an inside job — go inward, believe in yourself, hype yourself up, and then go do the thing. But what if that kind of confidence is fragile and incomplete? 

In this episode, I'm offering a fundamentally different model of confidence — one that you don't have to generate at all.

Listen to hear more about:

• The critical lesson that The Lion King (yes, the Disney movie) teaches about confidence that the entire self-help industry gets wrong
• The difference between individualistic confidence and relational confidence
• A concrete practice for the next time you're about to do something scary

If you've been white-knuckling your way through "I believe in myself" and wondering why it never quite holds, this episode will show you what will.

Transcript

Hey friends, welcome to another episode of Liberatory Business. I am your host, Simone Seol, and thank you so much for listening.

I wanna talk about self-confidence today — where it comes from and how to get the kind of confidence that actually lasts. And I'm gonna start by critiquing the premise of self-confidence in the way that it's conventionally talked about.

The premise of conventional self-confidence is that it starts and ends with yourself. That it's an inside job. You go inward, you find the belief in yourself, you cultivate that belief, you hype yourself up, and then you go out into the world and do the thing. That's the story you've been told. You gotta believe in yourself, trust in yourself, have your own back.

Now, I'm not saying that these are wrong. I'm not saying that these are not useful. But I think they're fundamentally rooted in something incomplete. Because I don't think confidence was ever supposed to be a solo project.

I think confidence that's based on who you think you are — divorced from the multitudinous webs of relationships that constitute you — is fragile at best and dangerous at worst. It can veer into narcissism. It's fragile because it depends entirely on your own psychological weather. Whether you woke up feeling good today, or whether your last launch went well, or whether someone said something nice about you or not. If the moment external circumstances change your confidence collapses, that may be pointing you to the truth that your confidence didn't have a lot underneath it.

And that needs to change. Because we do need confidence. We need to be able to believe in ourselves — especially when life asks us to step out of our comfort zone, to do hard things, to withstand the possibility of failure and work through failure when it happens, to overcome traumas and wounds from our past that tell us we have to stay small. We need a rooted and stable and solid sense of self that is stronger than whatever the weather is outside.

Remember who you are

Now I wanna take you on a little journey that may feel a little random, but I promise it's not. Remember one of the greatest movies from the nineties, one of the masterpieces of our time — The Lion King? Maybe you saw the movie. Maybe you also had the great luck of being able to see the Broadway production. I had a chance to see it when I was little. But anyways, I recently had a chance to revisit the movie because I was randomly talking to a friend about it and I was moved to watch it again. I rented it online and I watched the whole thing from start to end. And only then did I realize what an important parable it is.

You all know the story, right? Let's think about Simba's arc together. He's a little lion cub. He's been traumatized. He's been told by his uncle Scar that his dad dying was his own fault. So he runs away, he goes into exile, he sings Hakuna Matata. He gets adopted by Timon and Pumbaa and he lives this pleasant life of essentially avoidance, right? He's like, I'm gonna forget about my past traumas and just live in the day and be happy. This kind of pleasant dissociation.

And then what happens? Does Simba go on a self-improvement journey by himself? Does he journal about his limiting beliefs? Does he do mirror work and tell himself "I am enough"?

No.

Simba goes back to Pride Rock. He fights his uncle and his pack of hyenas and he restores the kingdom. And that is a massive act of courage and confidence. But it didn't come from self-belief. Look where it came from.

Nala shows up. Nala is his peer. She tells him — oh my God, do you even know what's happening back at home? Here are the stakes. Here's who needs you. She says, your people are suffering. You gotta come back. We need you to step up. So he's got his community calling him back.

And then Rafiki shows up. If you remember, Rafiki is the monkey — this kind of elder shaman in that context. A little cryptic, a little wild, but he knows things, right? He's the one that takes a confused Simba and leads him to the water and says, look at your own reflection. What's in the water?

And Simba thinks — I'm just seeing my face. What am I supposed to be looking at? It's just me. But Rafiki knows. You're not looking at yourself. You're looking at an image of your father. And then Mufasa appears in the sky. Simba's dead father, the old king, his ancestor. And what does Mufasa say?

He says, "Remember who you are."

Not "believe in yourself." Not "you've got this, you can do this." He doesn't say "just trust the process." He says, "Remember who you are."

Simba doesn't find confidence by going inward. He found it by being reconnected — to his community, to his elders, to his ancestors, to the web of life holding him. I think that is the only kind of confidence that is strong enough.

Not generating confidence — receiving it

So here's what I really want you to understand. The conventional model of confidence asks you to generate it from inside yourself. What I'm offering you — what I want you to take away from this episode — is what it feels like to inhabit a fundamentally different posture. Not generating confidence, but receiving it. Not producing it from the inside out, but letting it flow to you from the web of life that already holds you, that stretches backward in time.

These are two completely different acts.

The practice

So what might this actually look like in practice? Let's get concrete.

Next time you're about to do something scary — raise your price like we've been talking about on this podcast, send the scary email, step into a room where you feel like an imposter — I want you to try something. I want you to pause. And I want you to remember.

Remember who you are.

Look down at your hands. Because they're not just your hands. They're hands that were given to you by your ancestors. Your hands carry your ancestors' strength, their resourcefulness. Look at yourself in the mirror. Your face isn't just yours. The dignity, the majesty, the power that lives in your entire lineage — that is what you're seeing reflected back to you.

Remember the teacher or mentor or elder. The friend, the partner, the person in your life who knows you — really knows you — and has told you who you are. What they see when they look at you.

There's no need to hype yourself up when you can call in the web. Let yourself be held by all the relationships that constitute you. From that place — from that fullness, that rootedness — literally feel your feet rooted into the ground that holds the bones of your ancestors. Feel the top of your head connected to the heavens. Like Simba in the movie — all the stars in the sky were his ancestors. The sky holds our ancestors too. We are connected to them from above. So feel yourself rooted down below and connected to the above. That's who you are.

And the last thing I wanna say, because I think it's important. Sometimes we do all these things and we can still have moments of feeling scared. It's not like human fear can magically go away forever, at least for most of us. And that's okay too. Because in this framework, confidence does not mean the absence of fear. It's about calling in and being bolstered by the presence of everyone who is behind you — and then deciding to move anyway.

You can be shaking and still decide to step forward. Because you know you're not doing it alone. And when you know that — not as an abstract idea, but as a felt experience in your body — that we are connected and held in ways that can never be taken away — that is unshakable confidence. Not because nothing can shake you. Sometimes you still get shaken. But even when you are shaken, the web holds you. Nothing is going to make you come loose from the web. The web will always hold you.

So pause. Remember. Receive. Let yourself be held. And then move. That's the practice.

I'll talk to you next time. Bye.