Every time you do the scary thing, you add one more piece of evidence that you can.
I didn’t understand that for a long time. I thought confidence was something you arrived at. Something you found, or earned, or finally felt after enough preparation. I watched women who seemed to have it and assumed they’d started with something I hadn’t located in myself yet.
So I waited. I prepared more. I told myself I’d move when I felt ready.
Then one day I looked back at everything meaningful I had built and realized something that stopped me cold.
Confidence hadn’t come first. Not once.
A little about me before we go further
I’m Lauren. I’m a keynote speaker and confidence coach, and I’ve spent the last several years doing the thing I’m about to write about: moving before I felt ready.
I’ve built a speaking business from scratch, hosted a TEDx stage, launched a podcast, and coached women through some of the scariest professional moments of their lives. Not because I had it figured out. Because I kept going anyway.
I started this Substack because I wanted a place to think out loud. The ideas that show up here will eventually make their way into keynotes, podcast episodes, and the book I just started writing. But they start here first, a little messier, a little more honest.
Glad you found it.
What I got wrong
For most of my life I believed the sequence was: feel confident, then act.
That’s what we’re taught, implicitly and explicitly. Get the credentials. Build the resume. Learn enough. Then raise your hand.
But that sequence has a flaw. The credentials don’t create the confidence. The resume doesn’t create the confidence. And learning more rarely closes the gap the way we hope it will.
Confidence isn’t a conclusion you reach through preparation. It’s a conclusion you reach through action.
The TEDx applications
A year into building my speaking business, I decided to apply for a TEDx talk. For context, TEDx events are independently organized TED-style events held in cities and universities around the world. Getting selected means pitching your idea, going through an interview process, and being chosen from a pool of applicants who all believe they have something worth saying.
I believed I had something worth saying. I also believed the other applicants had more experience, more credentials, more of whatever invisible thing the selection committee was looking for.
I applied anyway. Not because I felt confident, but because waiting for the feeling had stopped being a good enough reason to stay still.
I got rejected. Then I applied again. And again. A whopping nineteen times before I got the yes.
The confidence I have now when I talk about that stage didn’t exist before any of it happened. It was built in the rejections. In the reapplications. In the decision to keep showing up to something that kept saying not yet.
The first time I named my fee
When you build a speaking business, there comes a moment when someone asks what you charge. Early on, that question is terrifying. You don’t have a rate card handed to you. You have to decide what your time, your story, and your message are worth and then say that number out loud to another person who may or may not agree.
The first time I did it, there was a pause on the other end of the phone that I was certain meant it was over. My brain was already composing the backpedal.
I held the silence instead.
They said yes.
I didn’t become confident in that moment. But I collected one piece of evidence I hadn’t had before. That I could say the number. That the number could land. That I was allowed to take up that kind of space.
One piece of evidence. That’s all it was. But evidence compounds.
What confidence actually is
I think we treat confidence like a character trait. Something some people have and others don’t. Something you either feel or you don’t. And because we treat it that way, we wait for it to arrive like that Amazon package we ordered. We keep checking the door.
But confidence isn’t a feeling that shows up before the work. It’s a conclusion you reach because of the work. It’s the accumulation of every moment you did the uncomfortable thing and survived it. Every risk that didn’t kill you. Every silence you held. Every room you walked into before you felt ready.
Confidence is evidence, and evidence only exists on the other side of action.
What this means for you
The most confident women I know all have something in common. None of them started that way. They became confident because they kept showing up before anyone told them they were ready.
You cannot think your way into confidence. You cannot prepare your way into it.
You act your way into it. One uncomfortable, imperfect, before-you-feel-ready moment at a time.
So take the next step. Not because you feel ready.
But because that’s how ready gets built.
If this resonated, subscribe so you don’t miss the next one.
Thanks for reading Ready Enough. Subscribe for free to receive future posts in your inbox.