Do the Thing Scared

Confidence isn't a trait, it's a practice. I waited 359 days to start. The work took 87.

I was flat on my back, eyes closed, half-drifting, the way you do when someone is working on your face. We were talking about something. I don’t even remember what. And then, out of nowhere, she asked me:

“Have you always been this confident?”

I felt my whole body pause.

Not in a bad way. In a “wait, is that what people see?” way.

Because here is the honest answer, and I want to write it down before I talk myself out of it. No.

I have not always been this confident. I am not sure I am always this confident now, either. But I am often the woman in the room who looks like she has decided something. That is a different thing.

The pause I felt on that table was the gap between the question she was asking and the question I have actually been living. She was asking, have you always been? Like confidence is a personality trait. Something you were born with or you weren’t.

I don’t think that is the right question.

The question I have been living, and the question I think most of us are living whether we say it out loud or not, is: how do you become?

The day after the appointment, I was out with the dogs and my friend Chef Alina, Food Network alum and gluten-free wizard. Her dog is my two dogs’ boyfriend. We walk and we mastermind. I told her the story. She said, “that’s what happens with age.”

I stopped on the path.

Because no. It doesn’t. I know too many women in their fifties who still don’t have it. Age is not the mechanism. If it were, we would all get there just by staying alive. We don’t. Plenty of us stay hovering at the edge of the room, waiting to feel ready, well into decades where we thought we would have figured it out by now.

Alina agreed. And then I reminded her of the thing that probably made her say it in the first place. The two of us surround ourselves with fearless entrepreneurs. From inside that circle, it is easy to look around and think, well of course, everyone gets there eventually, it is just what happens. But it isn’t. We were mistaking our particular room for the whole world.

So if it isn’t age, what is it?

Here is what I have come to believe about confidence, and it is not what I was taught.

Confidence is not the absence of fear. It is not certainty. It is not a feeling that arrives, hands you a permission slip, and sends you into the room ready.

Confidence is what you do while the fear is still there.

That is it. That is the whole thing. It is a practice. It is a track record. It is the accumulation of a thousand small moments where the doubt was loud and you moved anyway. Every time you move anyway, the muscle gets a little stronger. Every time you don’t, it atrophies a little.

Here is mine, with numbers. I waited 359 days to start the book I said I wanted to write. Then I showed up 87 days across five months, and the draft was done.

We think we are watching confident people be born. We are actually watching them be built.

The first time I remember doing it was in college. There was a posting on a bulletin board looking for PAs on an NYU thesis film. Something in me said go. I asked my professors to let me miss class, and I walked down the street to the set.

Alone. My first real set. Not a classroom, not a student exercise. Actual crew, actual gear, actual pace. I didn’t know a single person there. Looking back, that was pretty ballsy of me. I did not feel ballsy at the time. I felt like a kid who had wandered into the deep end and was trying not to look like a kid who had wandered into the deep end.

That was the day the film bug bit me. And the version of me lying on that table years later, being asked if I had always been this way, is the direct result of the girl who read the posting, asked the question, and walked over anyway.

There is a second one, and it matters, because it is the one I am still living. I have decided to direct a feature film. I am a producer by trade. That is the chair I sit in, the muscle I have built, the room I know how to walk into. Directing is not normal territory for me. And the part that is making my stomach flip is not the doing of it, not yet. It is the saying of it out loud. Telling people. Putting it in writing, like I am doing right now, in a place where you can read it and hold me to it.

Yikes.

I am not confident about that one yet. Ask me in three years.

The reason this matters, the reason I keep circling it, is that if confidence is a trait, then the people who don’t have it are stuck. They wait. They wait to feel ready. They wait to feel sure. They wait for the day the doubt goes quiet, and the day never comes, and they call themselves cowards for not moving, and they never learn that the doubt was never going to leave. It was just the toll.

But if confidence is a practice, then everyone gets a turn. Everyone. Including the woman reading this who is convinced she doesn’t have it. She doesn’t have it yet. She hasn’t built it yet. That is a different sentence entirely, and it has a door in it.

So back to the table. Back to the woman with her hands doing careful work on my face, asking me if I had always been this way.

She saw the outcome of a lot of years of doing it scared. She didn’t see the doing-it-scared part. She had just been watching a woman who had been showing up scared for long enough that the showing up had become the thing.

If you are waiting to feel confident before you go do the thing, I want to gently suggest that you are waiting for a feeling that does not arrive on that schedule.

Do the thing scared.

That is the whole practice.

Ten years from now, someone will ask you if you have always been this way.

You will pause. You will remember this. And you will decide what you want to say.

What is the thing you would do if you were allowed to do it scared? Tell me in the comments. I collect these.

And if you know a woman who is waiting to feel ready, send her this.

Stop pre-rejecting yourself. Start asking anyway.

Kristen