If you've ever worked with a coach, you know we start by getting aligned on goals and motivation:

Why do you want to develop as a leader, and why now?
What do you need to achieve? How do you want to grow?
What does your team need most from you?

Almost invariably these days, the answer I hear in response to these questions boils down to one word: Confidence.

The leaders I know want to feel more confident in their own roles (and for many, in their own skin). They want to be able to show up boldly in critical moments and lead courageously amid unfolding crises. They want to be a source of stability, strength and inspiration for their people, but inside they feel anything but stable.

And this crisis of confidence isn't just in their heads. Recent measures of teams' confidence in executive leadership see it slipping year over year, a trend we can see mirrored in our society at large.

It makes sense, right? As the rate of change accelerates and our conditions grow more complex, our terrain becomes more uncertain and so we become less confident—in ourselves and in our leaders. And there, my friend, is the rub. We mistakenly conflate confidence with certainty—knowing what will happen, knowing the right thing to do, and knowing that we know it. We think that's what confidence is, and if we aren't certain, we don't feel confident.

The thing is, certainty isn’t a thing. It never was. Even economists, physicists and mathematicians have come to agree with this ancient wisdom: The only certainty is uncertainty.

So how do we cultivate confidence when nothing is certain? That’s what we’re practicing with this month. Read on.

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.
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And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me,
within me there’s something stronger, something better, pushing right back.”

—Albert Camus

KNOWING X LEARNING

Rethinking Confidence

First, let’s not think of confidence as a trait—as in, you either have it or you don’t—but as a feeling. Sometimes we feel confident, sometimes we don’t. Like any other emotional experience, it’s contextual. So we can release any stories that “I’m not confident,” and focus on a definition we can work with:

Confidence is being at ease with uncertainty.

It's walking into that big presentation knowing your slides aren't perfect, but trusting in your ability to connect with the room. It’s engaging with a volatile conversation without knowing how it’ll go. It’s responding to a difficult question with, “I don’t know" or "What do you think?” It's never being sure how others will respond, and showing up fully as yourself anyway.

This kind of ease is emergent. We can't just switch it on. We have to cultivate it, on purpose. And it grows ever so delicately from a generative tension between knowing and learning—one of the great paradoxes we are continually living and leading within.

The paradox of knowing <---> learning may be best illustrated by the Dunning-Kruger effect, the cognitive bias that causes people with little knowledge to be overconfident. We’ve all known leaders who err on the side of knowing—their arrogance wreaks havoc as they have little regard for all they don’t yet know (and no regard for those who do). But Dunning-Kruger cuts the other way too: The more we learn, the more we tend to underestimate how much we do know.

It's a trap—I call it the Knowing Trap. At each extreme, arrogance or imposter syndrome, is a fundamental insecurity with uncertainty. Whether we think we know the right answer or we fear we don’t, we believe there is a right answer that can be known.

For me, to integrate this paradox (and escape the Knowing Trap) is to trust* that:

1. Curiosity is more powerful and more durable than certainty.
2. While there is always more we can learn, we know enough to meet this particular moment.
3. Our future self can meet the uncertain moments that lie ahead.

That's where true confidence comes from.

*This is a big theme for me right now, as trust is my 2025 leadership intention. I'd love to know: What's yours? And how does your intention support your ability to integrate knowing and learning in your leadership? How does it bolster your confidence?

Mini-Retreat: Confidence without Certainty

Confidence: Everyone wants more of it. But what is confidence? Is it a quality? A feeling? Where does it come from? And how do we cultivate it?

This Mini-Retreat will offer concrete practices for building confidence from within. You'll learn how to be confident even when you don't know what to do, and why curiosity—not certainty—is the antidote to imposter syndrome.

This Friday, February 7, 2025 ​
5 - 6:30pm GMT
12noon - 1:30pm ET
9 - 10:30am PT

Registration: US$50, Zoom link sent upon registration.

Mini-Retreats are free for RadiantLeader.co members, who can RSVP here. 💛

confidence

the older I get, the wiser I am
the wiser I am, the less I know
the less I know, the more I learn
the more I learn, the better I see
the better I see, the bolder I get

Onward together.

Kristen Lisanti
​Radiant Change​
​Training Leaders to Transform Cultures