#MondayInsight:

“Jeffrey, my confidence has been really shaken”

It was the start of a call with a bright, bold, brilliant client who’d recently had a big health scare.

She’d taken it as a wake-up call and decided to draw a line in the sand, saying “NO MORE” to corporate gigs that would pay the bills, but were slowly killing her.

It was time to craft and deliver the work of her genius… but the prospect of drawing this line in the sand had rocked her world.

My sessions always start with an invocation, and the first thing my guidance said was, “Think about this not like your confidence is shaken, but instead that the foundation upon which your confidence was built has been shaken.”

Her confidence had been built on an old identity – one that included the belief that she couldn’t/wouldn’t be accepted in the corporate world as herself. As a result, she camouflaged her full personality in order to be accepted and get paid as a consultant.

But a funny thing happens when you hide yourself…

You get hired by people who don’t want the full you and aren’t asking for your genius zone work.

And if you try to give ‘em your genius-zone work, it often blows up, because those people didn’t hire you for that!

That’s what had been going on.

I share this because if you’re taking a big leap into your next level calling, you may feel like your confidence has been shaken, that you’ve lost your mojo, or that you don’t have the same motivation you used to.

And it’s easy to want to try to fix that…

By seeking more clarity about what’s next…By trying to push past the lack of motivation by working harder…By engaging in strategy and marketing marketing work to fix it…

All without looking under the hood at the deep identity shift that’s afoot.

Your zone of genius work is an expression of your soul, so it can’t be fueled by pushing and proving.

As your old foundations start to crumble, you lose the sense of a solid foundation under your feet for a while.

This liminal space is an invitation into a deep level of listening, which requires slowing down enough to get underneath the mind chatter, get into your heart, and discern the truth that wants to be embodied and lived from.

It’s a shift from seeking external approval to granting yourself approval. From asking, “Will you like me? Will you hire me? Will you buy from me? Will you validate me?” to affirming, “I approve of me—I approve of who I am, as I am, how I am.”

That’s true freedom.

If you’ve been a confident person but now feel like you’re on shaky ground, it may be that the foundation upon which you knew yourself and your life has shifted. If that rings true, see if there’s a place where you’re asking yourself to get quiet, to listen, learn, and move into this place of deep approval of and appreciation for who you are, as you are.

So you can give that gift to yourself and serve from that new foundation.