Confidence doesn’t create the extraordinary.

Creating the extraordinary cultivates confidence.

It wasn’t confidence that got me on the TEDx stage.

It wasn’t confidence that allowed me to publish my first book.

It wasn’t confidence that created my speaking business and my life (which I love).

It was self-trust.

Let me rewind.

Delivering a TEDx, publishing a book, and speaking for a living were dreams of mine, and for a long time, that’s all they were, dreams.

They weren’t available to me because they were on the other side of my deepest fear:

Being seen and heard as my creative, authentic self.

The idea of putting myself out there in pure, raw, naked vulnerability was like standing on the edge of a cliff perched above an abyss with no bottom.

Leaping meant diving headlong into my deepest fears.

I would be:

• Judged
• Ridiculed
• I’d fail miserably.
• And, the most terrifying, my authentic self would be rejected.

The uncertainty was paralyzing; all the while, the comfort of the status quo called me back to its warm and certain embrace.

Everyone thinks you need confidence to leap into the extraordinary; I know from experience this isn’t true.

When we’re standing on the edge of our fears on the verge of leaping, it isn’t confidence that allows us to leap.

It is self-trust.

Self-trust isn’t the faith that everything will work out hunky-dory when we leap.

As badly as we need to know how everything will work out when we leap, we have no way of knowing that, hence our fear.

No, self-trust is the energy that allows us to leap.

Self-trust is the deep inherent wisdom that when we leap, regardless of the outcome, we will be okay.

We understand we may fall flat on our faces, but we’ll be okay.

We will survive, we will pick ourselves up, and we will go again.

When we know that we’ll be okay, no matter what, we discover our capacity to leap.

Self-trust is an iterative process that cultivates self-reliance; it’s from this journey that confidence is born.

I felt more confident after the TEDx.

I felt more confident after publishing.

I feel more confident after every speaking engagement.

Because I did the thing that I feared the most, but I needed self-trust to do the thing in the first place.

My experience with self-trust didn’t come from a textbook; it revealed itself experientially in prison.

I decimated my self-trust by making thousands of fear-based choices that destroyed the life I knew.

Each choice was made in violation of the inner voice that knew better.

Violating that inner voice eroded my self-trust; my heart, the center of our self-trust, was an empty void.

It’s a feeling I wish on no one.

I didn’t trust myself to make the simplest choices, such as what to eat, what to wear, and what workout to do, all out of fear that I would make the wrong choice again.

I knew that if I were ever going to reinvent my life, I needed to rebuild my self-trust.

The simplest, most effective practice I discovered to rebuild my self-trust was this:

Making and keeping commitments to myself.

The more commitments I made and kept on my reinvention journey, the more I trusted myself.

I became the person who did what they said they were going to do.

I supercharged the practice when I started celebrating myself for making and keeping the commitment. Instead of shying away from my accomplishments, as was my tendency (a product of my upbringing), I celebrated them.

I leveraged my brain’s reward system to my advantage, releasing dopamine with every internal celebration. The more healthy dopamine I released, the more commitments I wanted to make.

Confidence is the result, not the prerequisite, in crafting our extraordinary lives.

Confidence is what happens the second our feet leave solid ground.

But self-trust?

That’s the energy that gets us off the ledge.

Self-trust creates the extraordinary.