Why doesn't confidence grow with success?

I was asking myself this question after coaching amazing women this week who are killer bosses, tech leaders and rockstar moms but underneath they don't feel confident.

Why is it that the most successful among us are the least confident? Here's my take:

Every time you get accepted to a prestigious program or land the next promotion you get a quick confidence boost, but you end up feeling deflated when you find yourself at this next level surrounded by even more brilliant and successful people.

You start thinking: Who am I to be in this group? Am I worthy of this honor? Do I actually deserve to be here? And the unmistakable icky feeling of impostor syndrome sets in.

So what do you do? You work for the next quick hit of confidence!

You kill the next project, earn the gold star and get the recognition you crave to put your impostor syndrome at bay. But you know what happens next, don't you?

You end up right back where you were after that confidence boost wears off, still like an impostor, unsettled and like you don't belong.

And you know this cycle is costing you.

At work, you consistently get feedback that you're a high performer and people want more leadership from you but you can't seem to get yourself to speak up, connect with senior leaders and step into your potential.

At home, you never quite feel satisfied and like you can fully relax. You feel like you don't really belong to a social network and aren't able to fully connect with your friends.

So how do you actually resolve this?

Every time you've up-leveled in your career, you haven't done the inner work to instill a deep sense of worthiness in your nervous system to match your outer success.

Outer success is at a 10 but inner worthiness is at a 2. There's obviously a mis-match here. This is why the most successful among us feel the least confident – they have the greatest disparity between their outer and inner reality.

I lead my coaching clients through highly effective processes to instill a sense of worthiness and belonging deep in their nervous system so their inner and outer realities match and they no longer feel ruled by their drive for success to make them feel good enough. This is where deep, connected, sustainable confidence comes from. 

This is one of my absolute FAVORITE parts of Radiance – getting to see my clients transformed by actually feeling worthy and deeply confident for the first time in their lives!

What would shift in your life if you felt a deep sense of confidence and belief in yourself?