Episode Summary

Confidence is one of the most overrated goals in personal growth — and it may be the very thing keeping you stuck. In this episode, Jehanne Marie Burns challenges the obsession with “more confidence” and explains why confidence behaves like a fleeting, unreliable feeling rather than something you can build and keep.

You’ll learn 3 common confidence myths that quietly sabotage action, momentum, and self-trust. When confidence disappears — often right when you need it most — many people assume something is wrong with them, when the reality is much simpler: confidence was never designed to be stable.

Instead of chasing an illusion, this episode introduces a more powerful foundation: clarity. Clarity creates The Clarity Effect — the ability to move forward even when you feel scared, uncertain, or stretched.

In This Episode… (You’ll Learn)

• Why confidence is not a place you can “get to”
• How “waiting for confidence” delays bold action
• Why feeling insecure doesn’t reflect your actual competence
• What to replace confidence with: clarity and The Clarity Effect
• How to use clarity to move forward even when emotions feel messy

If this episode sparked something in you and you’re ready to ignite your inner ninja in your career, business, and personal life, book your complimentary Clarity Conversation — your inner ninja will thank you later!

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Transcript

Welcome to the Pocket Ninja Podcast, where big picture wisdom meets practical tools.

Welcome to the Pocket Ninja Podcast, where big picture wisdom meets practical tools.

Do you want more confidence? Well, sure. Who doesn’t? Right? Well, let me tell you, I don’t, and neither should you. I want you to get rid of the idea of confidence. Put it right in the trash. That’s right. I said it.

Hear me out. The concept of confidence isn’t helping you, it’s hurting you. Confidence is like an unreliable partner. You can’t depend on them to deliver what they promise. So you need to get out of this unhealthy relationship and get into a relationship that works. You need to forget about confidence.

In this podcast episode, I’m gonna break down what confidence really is and what it’s not, how it’s hurting you, not helping you, and most importantly, what to focus on instead of confidence.

Hi, I’m Jehanne. I’m the founder of Pocket Ninja Strategies, where I coach and train exclusively ninjas. And I’m not talking about martial arts, I’m talking about people and organizations who are ninjas in their personal life or professionally. And how we define ninjas at Pocket Ninja Strategies is that they are daring dreamers, purposeful learners, courageous transformers, and bold action takers. Now let’s get into this.

I have asked you to do something very bold. I’ve asked you to forget about chasing confidence, and I’m sure you’re wondering why I would say something like that, because don’t we all want more confidence? Well, in theory, yes. But if we really look at confidence, what it is and how it works, you’ll see that confidence is not working for you in the way you think it is, and I just can’t stand for that.

So in this session, I’m gonna cover 3 myths and truths that will help you break out of the confidence trap.

Myth #1. Confidence is a place you can get to. When you think about confidence, don’t you think about getting to this place where, when you get there, you’re gonna feel good and strong and powerful and decisive? It’s like one day you’re gonna cross this magical line or get to this permanent place where then you’ll be able to do bold things, and you’ll feel calm, cool, and collected on the inside, and you’ll be able to do everything you need to do to achieve your goals and dreams, right?

But here’s the thing. That is not how confidence works. The truth is confidence is not a place you can get to. Confidence is a feeling, and feelings are fleeting. Here one moment, gone the next. Let’s try this on.

Have you noticed that you’ll get really confident about something, only then to have that confidence totally disappear? Like you’ll be really confident about your job, and then get a promotion, and then all of the sudden that confidence disappears. We even have a name for this confidence disappearing. It’s called imposter syndrome. That confidence you had before the promotion wasn’t a permanent state. It was a feeling, and that feeling changed.

Let’s look at another example. If you look at your life, you’ll notice that confidence changes day to day and subject to subject. So one day I’m really confident about my job, and the next day I’m insecure about it. Then in a meeting, I’m confident in the meeting, and then I’m insecure about a decision I’m making. Or one day I’m really confident about a decision I make at work, but then I’m totally questioning a decision about my personal life, and I’m totally scared to, like, take the action and do what I need to do.

So let’s break the myth that confidence is a place we can get to, and accept that confidence is a feeling, and feelings are fleeting, and they’re elusive. We can’t always understand why or how our feelings come and go, and that’s why we don’t understand how or why confidence comes and goes. So when we think we can get and maintain a level of confidence, we set ourselves up to feel insecure, and this is holding us back.

So aiming for confidence is hurting you more than it’s helping you.

Okay. Myth #2. We think that confidence creates bold actions. We think, and we’re taught, when I feel that confidence arrive, I’m gonna be able to take so many bold actions and do everything I need to do to achieve my goals. I’m gonna be great, I’m gonna be powerful. It’s gonna be easy, right?

And you know that feeling where you know what you wanna do, you know the actions to take, and you’re just thinking, wow, when confidence arrives, that’s what I’ll do. The truth is this: waiting for confidence to arrive is what’s holding you back from taking action.

Waiting for confidence is waiting for an elusive, unpredictable, and unreliable feeling. So, once again, trying to rely on confidence to take action is not helping you, it’s hurting you.

Myth #3. Feeling confident reflects the truth of our skills and our success. So when we think about confidence, we often think how we feel on the inside is a reflection of what’s true on the outside. Like if I feel confident, that must mean I have the skills and I’m doing the right things. And the opposite is true: if I feel insecure or challenged by something or I’m uncomfortable, then I must be missing skills or I must be doing something wrong.

Let me give you an example of the truth in life that you might be able to relate to in your own life experience. In all my client sessions, we start with wins. I’ll ask a client, what were your wins in the last week? It can be anything big, small, any area of life.

So I’ll share this sort of specific story with this one client, but really this has happened many times with many different clients. So I had this client show up to a session and they were really upset. Like they felt the week had been really bad, things were off track, and like things were just a disaster. They were almost inconsolable.

And I said, that’s okay. We will get to the challenges, ’cause we also cover that in every session. But we always do wins first. So as we went through and noted the wins, even though they were all really challenging, the client realized there was a win in every challenge. And they got lighter and lighter and lighter as we went through all the wins.

And by the time we were set to go into challenges, the client shared, actually, that they didn’t have any challenges. What they had realized is that the last week had been really challenging, but everything they did was really good. It was in line with where they wanted to go, and it was all the right actions. They were just challenging, and it felt difficult on the inside.

So often we don’t feel confident at all on the inside. We’re scared. We feel challenged, unsure, anxious, unsettled, but yet we’re doing all the right things we need to be doing. So feeling confident on the inside does not actually mean anything about our skills or how good we’re doing outside of ourselves. The truth is that our inner feelings about our skills and how well we’re doing are often very inaccurate.

So I want you to check for yourself. Have you ever done something like a presentation at work where you thought it was terrible, but when you actually got feedback from the outside world, they thought it was great?

For me, the best example I have is when I started my business. I launched my very basic website that I was very, very embarrassed about, but everyone told me they thought it looked so great. I didn’t feel confident on the inside, but the truth was I was succeeding on the outside.

So, thus, feeling confident or not feeling confident is not a measure of how you’re doing, and chasing this idea is not helping you, it’s hurting you.

So we busted 3 confidence myths, right?
Myth #1, confidence is a place you can get to.
Myth #2, confidence creates bold actions.
Myth #3, feeling confident reflects our skills and how well we’re doing. Also a myth.

So now that we know we can’t rely on confidence and it’s hurting us more than it’s helping us, what do we do? I would never leave you hanging. So if I’m gonna ask you to stop chasing confidence, I have to give you something else that you can use or you’re gonna have nothing, right?

So the thing that you actually want, the thing that actually works, the thing that you need to replace confidence with is clarity. Clarity is a superpower. It’s the only tool you’ll ever need, and it’s the foundation of my coaching practice. And all the results my clients have created for themselves come from clarity, not confidence.

And the special power that clarity has comes from what we at Pocket Ninja call The Clarity Effect. See, with confidence, we’re waiting for confidence to show up so we’ll be able to act. But clarity is the opposite. Clarity is compelling. So when we get clear, it starts to compel us to do things, even if we’re scared, and confidence doesn’t give us that.

And I have to add this little story with a client from literally yesterday. We got to the challenges portion of our client session and this client said, how can I have more confidence? And I was like, funny, I’m just working on a podcast about this exact topic.

So I explained to her about the myths of confidence and that clarity is the key. Toward the end of our conversation, I said, so the desire to chase confidence or wait for it or try for it, that’s gonna show up. That’s inevitable. We’re, like, programmed for that.

But I said the way to let go of that, it’s kind of like you’re on the monkey bars, you know those bars where you grab one and then the other, right, when you’re a little kid. So it’s kind of like the monkey bars, and I can’t let go of this one monkey bar about confidence without something else to grab onto. So the way to let go of confidence is to reach for clarity.

So when that narrative comes up to wait for confidence, we can instead reach for clarity. Everything was, like, clicking about the myths of confidence. Then she said, wait, confidence isn’t even a monkey bar. It’s not real. It’s not something we can ever hold onto that’s steady.

And I was like, exactly, exactly the point. It’s like we’re standing under the monkey bars and we wanna get in the game and start playing, but we’re standing there waiting for this non-existent monkey bar of confidence to show up in front of our eyes. But it’s an illusion. It never shows up. So we keep waiting and waiting, and we end up stuck.

Instead, we could have reached for the bar of clarity, a bar that we can define. We can see it and we can use it.

So after the session, this client left so free, so empowered and excited. They were like, oh my gosh, I don’t have to chase confidence anymore. And they can just rely on clarity and the power of The Clarity Effect.

Now I hope I made the case for why you wanna stop trying to rely on confidence, and I’ve got you really curious about The Clarity Effect, and I think that’s enough for this episode. But in the next episode, which is already out, I deep dive into what clarity really is. How do you use it to get The Clarity Effect?

But before you go and deep dive into the next episode on clarity, I wanna ask you, what’s your 1 takeaway from this session? My goal here is for you to identify a key learning that’s changed your mindset or given you a new tool or something to practice.

I want you to pause and really think about this because this podcast is about helping you get clear and get moving so you can have real results. I don’t want you to just find this information, like, insightful. I want you to process it and apply it.

My takeaway from this episode is that every time I think I need to wait for more confidence, that is a red flag. Anytime that pops into my head, oh, I need more confidence, red flag, and I need to ditch that idea and dig into clarity. So I wanna know now, what’s your takeaway?

Thank you for tuning in to the Pocket Ninja Podcast, where big picture wisdom meets practical tools. If this episode has sparked something in you and you want to ignite your inner ninja in business, career, and personal life, go to pocketninjastegies.com to book a complimentary clarity conversation, your inner ninja. Well, thank you. Later.

Disclaimer, this podcast is designed to help you unleash your inner ninja because we want you to experience wellbeing, happiness, and success altogether. That said, the ideas and insights shared here are not customized to your unique circumstances, and therefore are not a substitute for personalized professional advice.

You are the expert in your own life, career, and business. So take what you learn here with your own discernment and discretion. Only you know what’s right for you, what feels empowering, and what risks you are ready to take on.

Ready to go deeper and get clarity on your next level?