104. Lost Your Confidence? How Accomplished Women Can Reclaim Their Power
You haven’t lost your power. You’ve lost connection to it.
You used to trust yourself. You walked into meetings, shared your perspective, and made decisions without replaying every detail afterward. But then something changed. Maybe it was a difficult conversation, a bad review, a conflict, a leadership shift, or simply a season where you started not feeling like yourself. Suddenly, you’re questioning everything and wondering, “What happened to my confidence?”
In this episode, I’m sharing why accomplished women can experience a shake-up in their confidence and why the real challenge is often the story we create about what happened. You’ll learn how to separate facts from the stories your brain creates, redirect your energy toward what you can choose next, and reclaim your power even when you feel uncertain, challenged, or disconnected from yourself.
learn more about command here
What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
Why accomplished women can feel like they’ve lost their confidence after a difficult moment.
How a challenging experience can become a story about what something means about you, your abilities, or your leadership.
Why separating facts, feelings, and the stories your brain creates is essential for taking back your power.
How to stop using difficult moments as evidence against yourself.
How to redirect your energy toward what you can choose and influence next.
Why you don’t need to feel confident all the time to lead with power and authority.
How to choose who you want to be and how you want to show up, even when you feel uncertain or challenged.
Listen to the Full Episode:
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Episodes Related to confidence and reclaiming your power:
98. Why High-Achieving Women Overexplain: From Convincing to Convicted
101. Assertive Authentic Communication: How to Say What You Mean Without Losing Connection
Full Episode Transcript:
“I don't know what happened to me. I just don't feel confident in myself anymore.” This is what hundreds of women come to me and tell me. And maybe you've had that thought lately. You used to trust yourself. You used to walk into meetings and say what you thought. You used to make decisions without replaying them or calculating all the risk. You used to feel grounded and solid in yourself. And now, you're starting to second guess everything, rereading your boss's tone, reading emails again and again. You're wondering whether you've said too much or not enough. You're preparing more than you used to and somehow feeling less certain than ever.
You're leaving meetings thinking, why did I say that? Why am I letting this person get to me? What if I'm actually not as good as I thought I was? And maybe the scariest thought of all is, I think I've lost my confidence. Because you're not someone who is used to feeling this way. You've built a career. You've handled hard things. You're the person people rely on. So when you suddenly don't feel like yourself, it can be deeply unsettling.
Maybe it was one difficult conversation with your boss, a bad review, a conflict, a board meeting where you got flustered, high-pitched, and defensive. One company exit, one season where you were carrying too much, or maybe there wasn't one dramatic moment at all. You just know, I don't feel like myself anymore.
If that is where you are, I made this episode just for you. And I'm not going to give you seven things to fix, and I'm not going to tell you to fake confidence. I'm not going to tell you to just think more positively. I want to help you understand what is actually happening. Because when you understand, there's immediate relief. And then I'm going to give you one question you can use the next time you feel yourself spiraling.
Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.
Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.
All right podcast listeners, welcome to today's episode. This is such a big topic because so many women come to me and feel like their confidence has been shaken. They question who they are. They wonder what is going on, and it can feel deeply unsettling. I've been here too, in many moments in my life, and I'm going to share them with you.
This is something that happens to a lot of people, and if you're a high-achieving woman, this can feel really jarring because you're not used to feeling like a failure. You're not used to feeling not confident in yourself. And people are probably not used to seeing you this way either. So it feels like almost an out-of-body experience. What is happening? So I want to talk to you about this because the problem is not just the hard thing that happened. It is what your brain starts making the hard thing mean about you. Your boss changes towards you, and suddenly, maybe you think I'm not respected. You get challenged in a meeting, and suddenly, maybe you think I'm not ready for this level. Or a launch fails. You're in business, there's entrepreneurs here. Maybe a project fails, and you think maybe I'm losing momentum. Or a relationship ends, and you think maybe there is something really wrong with me.
These difficult moments can become evidence, and then you start collecting more of it. You start saying to yourself, I sounded nervous. I don't look great. I'm not showing up like I used to. I'm getting so emotional. I used to be better at this. This is where so much of our energy goes when we are feeling in a bad place, when we are feeling unsettled in ourselves and we don't understand what is happening. Not just in the original situation, but how we keep interpreting it over and over. Because this interpretation becomes more proof that something has changed and something is wrong.
I'm going to give you some examples of this, both from my personal and professional life because this is something that happens to people. We have this shake-up in our confidence and we start to think that something has gone terribly wrong. And when we think something has gone terribly wrong, our brain, our survival brain gives us more evidence that yes, something has gone terribly wrong. So I'm going to share more. I've just celebrated a six-year wedding anniversary with my lovely husband, William. I love my husband deeply, and we still work on our relationship. We are still going to couple's coaching. We are working on our own selves. We want to be the best partners for each other. But the road to get there wasn't so easy for me. I had these really long relationships that did not work out.
And when I would have a breakup, and typically it would be men breaking up with me, quite frankly. They'd be like, something is off here. I don't know what it is, but you're not the one. And my mind would go to, oh my gosh, what is going on? I trusted this person. We've been dating for years. I thought this was working. How did this go wrong? I can't trust myself. What's going on with myself? The breakup was painful, but the story I built around the breakup was exhausting.
I wasn't only experiencing the loss of the relationship. I was using the loss as evidence against myself, evidence that I didn't deserve a happy future, evidence that I couldn't have a family of my own, evidence that there was something materially broken in me. And all of that evidence took up a lot of my power and energy, and it had me questioning myself in really deep ways.
And this is exactly what happens in leadership too. Something happens. Maybe your boss is really upset. Maybe there's a whole leadership change and somehow the position you've been in is now under fire. And then we turn it into a verdict about ourselves. We use the external circumstance that is happening to us and we use this against ourselves because we are preparing for the worst. This is what happens when we're in that survival mindset, right? We are starting to gear up for even worse things to happen because that's how we think, right? Especially when we are not feeling 100% confident in ourselves. Our survival brains will say, oh my gosh, this is just the beginning of the end, right? So we have to be hard on ourselves. We have to be very disciplined.
And why high achievers are so vulnerable to this. Why is that, right? I'm a high-achieving woman and I get it, right? High-achieving women are used to creating safety through competence, through doing things, preparation, performance, responsibility, reliability, control. It makes us feel safe. And then you hit a level where those things are no longer guaranteed certainty. I mean, I felt this even in my relationships. I was like, I'm doing all the right things. We're going on vacations, everything feels and looks good on the outside. But then something happened and then I'm like, what the heck?
So what I want you to know is you cannot control the boss. You cannot control company politics or leadership changes or M&A activity. You cannot control whether the board agrees with you. I could not control whether somebody wanted to break up with me or not. You cannot control how someone else's reacts. You cannot control whether everyone sees your value. And when your old way of creating certainty, competence, doing work, being valuable, if that is the way that you've been used to creating that internal safety for yourself by trying to control everything, it can feel very scary when it stops working, right? It can feel like you are the problem.
And what I want you to hear is that you are not, but it feels that way. This is why this experience can be so disorienting, especially for high-achieving women. I want to share with you, I've been in business, this is my fifth year in business, owning my own coaching practice. Many of you know I left the corporate world because I went after my passion to empower women, especially in male-dominated spaces, to be heard. And listen, I am still figuring it out. I have a business that I am learning about and figuring out. And I remember when I had my first failed launch, like a launch where I put so much heart and energy in and I remember just feeling terrible. There was loads of disappointment.
And I thought to myself, maybe I'm not cut out to being an entrepreneur. Maybe I'm losing momentum. Maybe people don't want what I have to offer. Maybe I'm not as good at this as I thought I would be. The result was real. The identity conclusion was optional. Me choosing to decide what this moment meant is optional, but it doesn't feel that way, right? In the moment you're bracing and you're like, oh my gosh, there is something very wrong here. The launch did not erase everything I knew. I was still very capable. I was actually still bringing people in. People were still interested in what I had to offer. It was just a moment in time. But I could spend a tremendous amount of energy acting as though something had gone terribly wrong.
And this is so important because when you can catch yourself thinking something has gone terribly wrong or I am terrible or I am worthless, whatever those thoughts are, we need to be able to catch them because if you can catch them, you can really sit with them and ask yourself, is this real? Is this true? So for me, a failed launch was like, okay, part of me is like, okay, I've got to build the emotional capacity to process this disappointment, to be with my feelings, to validate them, not to rush over them and jump into the next launch, right? This is just me being with myself.
But without the story that like I'm a terrible coach, or I'm a terrible person, or I'm not a good leader, whatever the chacha is that your brain is offering you, you can decide. You can decide in that moment to take your power back and to discern what has happened, the emotions that you are having and the story you're telling yourself.
So I want you to know this because you have not lost your power. You are still as capable as you were before. You are still the same woman who built your career. You're the same woman who can handle hard things, and you're the same woman who has evidence of your accomplishments, of your power. You're the same woman who knows how to lead. What has changed is where your attention is going. Right now you may be spending enormous amounts of energy building the case that you have lost something, that there has been something that has gone terribly wrong. And when all of your energy goes to that place, of course you feel disconnected from yourself. Of course you feel like not yourself anymore. Your power is not gone though. Your energy and your mind is pointed at the belief that it is.
This is so important, and this is so powerful to remember and to know, right? This is why it's so important to look at facts and feelings and the story your brain is telling you because the story is where the suffering is. And the story is where much of people's energy goes to that has them in this conflict over and over again. I've worked with hundreds of women on this. They have come to me in so much emotional distress over a bad performance review, over a terrible relationship that somehow came about with their boss and they want my help.
And I help them. I help them through this, but we have to start at this very first place to understand what is the story you're telling yourself. Because if we can't understand that, that story continues to play out and play out and takes you away from your power and takes you away from your energy because all of it is being put on the story that keeps consuming you and has you feeling even more disconnected from yourself.
All right, I want you to think about when you hear this thought for yourself, I've lost my confidence. I want you to ask, where do I want my energy to go now? This is a decision. You may still have that thought I've lost my confidence, but in that moment, you can ask yourself, okay, maybe I've lost my confidence, but where do I want my energy to go now? Not to fix myself, not to become more confident again, and not to just make sure this never happens again. But you want to ask yourself, where do I want my energy to go? Is it to replaying how I'm a failure, replaying how worthless I am, or am I going to prepare for this next conversation? Or am I going to use what I'm learning and be able to somehow impact the next step forward?
So for me, you know, especially with the failed relationships, I'm like, well, I feel worthless. Well, maybe my energy can go towards feeling more worthy of myself. And then this launch, of course, I feel the disappointment. This is not about denying your emotions or disaffirming your emotions. I was like, yeah, I feel really crappy. This launch failed. And what do I want to do next? Do I want to wallow in my failure and come up with stories about why I'm not meant for this? Or am I going to go to school on why I failed and what I want to do next, while still validating and processing my disappointment? So it is a power move to be able to process your emotions and direct your brain forward and direct your energy forward into something else that's going to be productive for you and not the story.
So what's your next move? You can ask yourself, what's the next conversation? What's the next decision? What's the next request? What's the next sentence? One act of self-trust can continue to build on another. Many people come to me because they're like, listen, I don't feel like myself. I've lost confidence. I need your help to regain it. And that is for them their first step in self-trust in being like, I know this is not normal and I need help and I want help to get out of this space. So I want you to just bring that to yourself that you can make a choice right now, even if you feel really bad, even if your brain has given you so much evidence that you are stuck, you can make a choice in how you show up next.
So a small moment where you were challenged, a room where you felt less certain, a senior person who questioned you, an old strategy that stopped working. The pain may have been different, but the mechanisms were the same, the moment. What does this mean about me? This is still going to come up. People are noticing within themselves that things are going to happen and you're still going to have this question in yourself that shakeup of like, who am I? And I want you to actually answer that question, who am I? You know, who do I choose to be? Who do I decide to be to show up in this moment?
You know, one of my clients was having a really bad day and I said, you get to decide how you show up for this event. She had a big speaking event and she was like, I need something, I need help or support to show up. And I'm like, you get to decide how you show up. How do you want to show up? And she was like, that question changed everything. She made a decision to show up in a certain way. And she made contacts with people and she was more open and she was much more powerful because she redirected her energy and her mindset and her leadership to answering that question. Who do I decide to be? How do I want to show up today? Not in the old story, but in this new story.
Confidence says I feel certain. Power says I can stay with myself even when I don't. You can be nervous and powerful. You can be uncertain and powerful. You can be disappointed and powerful. You can be challenged and be powerful. In a room full of people where there's more status, authority or influence, you can still be powerful. The next level is not learning how to feel amazing all the time. That is not true leadership and that is just not accurate. That's not like a place people are supposed to feel 50-50. You have to have the contrast in life. The next level for you is learning how to stop abandoning yourself when you don't feel confident, when you don't feel great.
So I want you to really notice that you have not lost your power. You have been spending it on the belief that you did lose your power or you lost your confidence. And the moment you see that, you get to choose. You get to decide, how do I want to show up? Where does my energy go now? Not in six months, right now, right now in the here and now. This is powerful. This is where you take your power back. And listen, I've had meetings where people have yelled at me. I've walked out of the meetings where I'm like, whoa, that was a lot that happened.
And I decided to still be powerful in the moment. And to take responsibility and to take ownership and say, yes, you're right, that number isn't correct, right? I was a finance leader. I'm like, that number wasn't correct. I owned it and I moved forward powerfully because I chose to. Not because I somehow felt great in the moment. I didn't feel confident. I was like, yeah, that number's wrong. What happened? I got to go talk to my team. But I felt powerful in myself and my own authority to lead myself in those moments. And you can too.
This is what we do. This is what people do with me in my one-on-one, in my command containers. We take back our power, especially when it's been shaken. So, I want you to know you have not lost your power. You've been spending it on the belief that you did lose your power. And when you catch yourself doing that again, I want you to ask yourself, where do I want my energy to go?
All right, that is this week's episode. I want to hear from you. How is this going for you if you're somebody who has felt like you've lost your confidence, your leadership? I want to hear how this episode landed with you and I would love to support you. So come connect with me on LinkedIn or write me an email at connect@aspire-coaching.co. That's co, or of course, leave me a review and tell me how this episode hit you. All right, have a beautiful day. Take care.
Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.
You're leaving meetings thinking, why did I say that? Why am I letting this person get to me? What if I'm actually not as good as I thought I was? And maybe the scariest thought of all is, I think I've lost my confidence. Because you're not someone who is used to feeling this way. You've built a career. You've handled hard things. You're the person people rely on. So when you suddenly don't feel like yourself, it can be deeply unsettling.
Maybe it was one difficult conversation with your boss, a bad review, a conflict, a board meeting where you got flustered, high-pitched, and defensive. One company exit, one season where you were carrying too much, or maybe there wasn't one dramatic moment at all. You just know, I don't feel like myself anymore.
If that is where you are, I made this episode just for you. And I'm not going to give you seven things to fix, and I'm not going to tell you to fake confidence. I'm not going to tell you to just think more positively. I want to help you understand what is actually happening. Because when you understand, there's immediate relief. And then I'm going to give you one question you can use the next time you feel yourself spiraling.
Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.
Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.
All right podcast listeners, welcome to today's episode. This is such a big topic because so many women come to me and feel like their confidence has been shaken. They question who they are. They wonder what is going on, and it can feel deeply unsettling. I've been here too, in many moments in my life, and I'm going to share them with you.
This is something that happens to a lot of people, and if you're a high-achieving woman, this can feel really jarring because you're not used to feeling like a failure. You're not used to feeling not confident in yourself. And people are probably not used to seeing you this way either. So it feels like almost an out-of-body experience. What is happening? So I want to talk to you about this because the problem is not just the hard thing that happened. It is what your brain starts making the hard thing mean about you. Your boss changes towards you, and suddenly, maybe you think I'm not respected. You get challenged in a meeting, and suddenly, maybe you think I'm not ready for this level. Or a launch fails. You're in business, there's entrepreneurs here. Maybe a project fails, and you think maybe I'm losing momentum. Or a relationship ends, and you think maybe there is something really wrong with me.
These difficult moments can become evidence, and then you start collecting more of it. You start saying to yourself, I sounded nervous. I don't look great. I'm not showing up like I used to. I'm getting so emotional. I used to be better at this. This is where so much of our energy goes when we are feeling in a bad place, when we are feeling unsettled in ourselves and we don't understand what is happening. Not just in the original situation, but how we keep interpreting it over and over. Because this interpretation becomes more proof that something has changed and something is wrong.
I'm going to give you some examples of this, both from my personal and professional life because this is something that happens to people. We have this shake-up in our confidence and we start to think that something has gone terribly wrong. And when we think something has gone terribly wrong, our brain, our survival brain gives us more evidence that yes, something has gone terribly wrong. So I'm going to share more. I've just celebrated a six-year wedding anniversary with my lovely husband, William. I love my husband deeply, and we still work on our relationship. We are still going to couple's coaching. We are working on our own selves. We want to be the best partners for each other. But the road to get there wasn't so easy for me. I had these really long relationships that did not work out.
And when I would have a breakup, and typically it would be men breaking up with me, quite frankly. They'd be like, something is off here. I don't know what it is, but you're not the one. And my mind would go to, oh my gosh, what is going on? I trusted this person. We've been dating for years. I thought this was working. How did this go wrong? I can't trust myself. What's going on with myself? The breakup was painful, but the story I built around the breakup was exhausting.
I wasn't only experiencing the loss of the relationship. I was using the loss as evidence against myself, evidence that I didn't deserve a happy future, evidence that I couldn't have a family of my own, evidence that there was something materially broken in me. And all of that evidence took up a lot of my power and energy, and it had me questioning myself in really deep ways.
And this is exactly what happens in leadership too. Something happens. Maybe your boss is really upset. Maybe there's a whole leadership change and somehow the position you've been in is now under fire. And then we turn it into a verdict about ourselves. We use the external circumstance that is happening to us and we use this against ourselves because we are preparing for the worst. This is what happens when we're in that survival mindset, right? We are starting to gear up for even worse things to happen because that's how we think, right? Especially when we are not feeling 100% confident in ourselves. Our survival brains will say, oh my gosh, this is just the beginning of the end, right? So we have to be hard on ourselves. We have to be very disciplined.
And why high achievers are so vulnerable to this. Why is that, right? I'm a high-achieving woman and I get it, right? High-achieving women are used to creating safety through competence, through doing things, preparation, performance, responsibility, reliability, control. It makes us feel safe. And then you hit a level where those things are no longer guaranteed certainty. I mean, I felt this even in my relationships. I was like, I'm doing all the right things. We're going on vacations, everything feels and looks good on the outside. But then something happened and then I'm like, what the heck?
So what I want you to know is you cannot control the boss. You cannot control company politics or leadership changes or M&A activity. You cannot control whether the board agrees with you. I could not control whether somebody wanted to break up with me or not. You cannot control how someone else's reacts. You cannot control whether everyone sees your value. And when your old way of creating certainty, competence, doing work, being valuable, if that is the way that you've been used to creating that internal safety for yourself by trying to control everything, it can feel very scary when it stops working, right? It can feel like you are the problem.
And what I want you to hear is that you are not, but it feels that way. This is why this experience can be so disorienting, especially for high-achieving women. I want to share with you, I've been in business, this is my fifth year in business, owning my own coaching practice. Many of you know I left the corporate world because I went after my passion to empower women, especially in male-dominated spaces, to be heard. And listen, I am still figuring it out. I have a business that I am learning about and figuring out. And I remember when I had my first failed launch, like a launch where I put so much heart and energy in and I remember just feeling terrible. There was loads of disappointment.
And I thought to myself, maybe I'm not cut out to being an entrepreneur. Maybe I'm losing momentum. Maybe people don't want what I have to offer. Maybe I'm not as good at this as I thought I would be. The result was real. The identity conclusion was optional. Me choosing to decide what this moment meant is optional, but it doesn't feel that way, right? In the moment you're bracing and you're like, oh my gosh, there is something very wrong here. The launch did not erase everything I knew. I was still very capable. I was actually still bringing people in. People were still interested in what I had to offer. It was just a moment in time. But I could spend a tremendous amount of energy acting as though something had gone terribly wrong.
And this is so important because when you can catch yourself thinking something has gone terribly wrong or I am terrible or I am worthless, whatever those thoughts are, we need to be able to catch them because if you can catch them, you can really sit with them and ask yourself, is this real? Is this true? So for me, a failed launch was like, okay, part of me is like, okay, I've got to build the emotional capacity to process this disappointment, to be with my feelings, to validate them, not to rush over them and jump into the next launch, right? This is just me being with myself.
But without the story that like I'm a terrible coach, or I'm a terrible person, or I'm not a good leader, whatever the chacha is that your brain is offering you, you can decide. You can decide in that moment to take your power back and to discern what has happened, the emotions that you are having and the story you're telling yourself.
So I want you to know this because you have not lost your power. You are still as capable as you were before. You are still the same woman who built your career. You're the same woman who can handle hard things, and you're the same woman who has evidence of your accomplishments, of your power. You're the same woman who knows how to lead. What has changed is where your attention is going. Right now you may be spending enormous amounts of energy building the case that you have lost something, that there has been something that has gone terribly wrong. And when all of your energy goes to that place, of course you feel disconnected from yourself. Of course you feel like not yourself anymore. Your power is not gone though. Your energy and your mind is pointed at the belief that it is.
This is so important, and this is so powerful to remember and to know, right? This is why it's so important to look at facts and feelings and the story your brain is telling you because the story is where the suffering is. And the story is where much of people's energy goes to that has them in this conflict over and over again. I've worked with hundreds of women on this. They have come to me in so much emotional distress over a bad performance review, over a terrible relationship that somehow came about with their boss and they want my help.
And I help them. I help them through this, but we have to start at this very first place to understand what is the story you're telling yourself. Because if we can't understand that, that story continues to play out and play out and takes you away from your power and takes you away from your energy because all of it is being put on the story that keeps consuming you and has you feeling even more disconnected from yourself.
All right, I want you to think about when you hear this thought for yourself, I've lost my confidence. I want you to ask, where do I want my energy to go now? This is a decision. You may still have that thought I've lost my confidence, but in that moment, you can ask yourself, okay, maybe I've lost my confidence, but where do I want my energy to go now? Not to fix myself, not to become more confident again, and not to just make sure this never happens again. But you want to ask yourself, where do I want my energy to go? Is it to replaying how I'm a failure, replaying how worthless I am, or am I going to prepare for this next conversation? Or am I going to use what I'm learning and be able to somehow impact the next step forward?
So for me, you know, especially with the failed relationships, I'm like, well, I feel worthless. Well, maybe my energy can go towards feeling more worthy of myself. And then this launch, of course, I feel the disappointment. This is not about denying your emotions or disaffirming your emotions. I was like, yeah, I feel really crappy. This launch failed. And what do I want to do next? Do I want to wallow in my failure and come up with stories about why I'm not meant for this? Or am I going to go to school on why I failed and what I want to do next, while still validating and processing my disappointment? So it is a power move to be able to process your emotions and direct your brain forward and direct your energy forward into something else that's going to be productive for you and not the story.
So what's your next move? You can ask yourself, what's the next conversation? What's the next decision? What's the next request? What's the next sentence? One act of self-trust can continue to build on another. Many people come to me because they're like, listen, I don't feel like myself. I've lost confidence. I need your help to regain it. And that is for them their first step in self-trust in being like, I know this is not normal and I need help and I want help to get out of this space. So I want you to just bring that to yourself that you can make a choice right now, even if you feel really bad, even if your brain has given you so much evidence that you are stuck, you can make a choice in how you show up next.
So a small moment where you were challenged, a room where you felt less certain, a senior person who questioned you, an old strategy that stopped working. The pain may have been different, but the mechanisms were the same, the moment. What does this mean about me? This is still going to come up. People are noticing within themselves that things are going to happen and you're still going to have this question in yourself that shakeup of like, who am I? And I want you to actually answer that question, who am I? You know, who do I choose to be? Who do I decide to be to show up in this moment?
You know, one of my clients was having a really bad day and I said, you get to decide how you show up for this event. She had a big speaking event and she was like, I need something, I need help or support to show up. And I'm like, you get to decide how you show up. How do you want to show up? And she was like, that question changed everything. She made a decision to show up in a certain way. And she made contacts with people and she was more open and she was much more powerful because she redirected her energy and her mindset and her leadership to answering that question. Who do I decide to be? How do I want to show up today? Not in the old story, but in this new story.
Confidence says I feel certain. Power says I can stay with myself even when I don't. You can be nervous and powerful. You can be uncertain and powerful. You can be disappointed and powerful. You can be challenged and be powerful. In a room full of people where there's more status, authority or influence, you can still be powerful. The next level is not learning how to feel amazing all the time. That is not true leadership and that is just not accurate. That's not like a place people are supposed to feel 50-50. You have to have the contrast in life. The next level for you is learning how to stop abandoning yourself when you don't feel confident, when you don't feel great.
So I want you to really notice that you have not lost your power. You have been spending it on the belief that you did lose your power or you lost your confidence. And the moment you see that, you get to choose. You get to decide, how do I want to show up? Where does my energy go now? Not in six months, right now, right now in the here and now. This is powerful. This is where you take your power back. And listen, I've had meetings where people have yelled at me. I've walked out of the meetings where I'm like, whoa, that was a lot that happened.
And I decided to still be powerful in the moment. And to take responsibility and to take ownership and say, yes, you're right, that number isn't correct, right? I was a finance leader. I'm like, that number wasn't correct. I owned it and I moved forward powerfully because I chose to. Not because I somehow felt great in the moment. I didn't feel confident. I was like, yeah, that number's wrong. What happened? I got to go talk to my team. But I felt powerful in myself and my own authority to lead myself in those moments. And you can too.
This is what we do. This is what people do with me in my one-on-one, in my command containers. We take back our power, especially when it's been shaken. So, I want you to know you have not lost your power. You've been spending it on the belief that you did lose your power. And when you catch yourself doing that again, I want you to ask yourself, where do I want my energy to go?
All right, that is this week's episode. I want to hear from you. How is this going for you if you're somebody who has felt like you've lost your confidence, your leadership? I want to hear how this episode landed with you and I would love to support you. So come connect with me on LinkedIn or write me an email at connect@aspire-coaching.co. That's co, or of course, leave me a review and tell me how this episode hit you. All right, have a beautiful day. Take care.
Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.
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