Donna Bauer had been invited to speak at one of the top real estate expos in the country. It should have felt like an honor.
Instead, she felt like a fraud.
Her sales were nowhere near the other top sellers on that stage. She kept comparing her numbers to theirs, and she was thinking, “I don’t belong up here.”
Morty worked with her before that expo. They uncovered several beliefs driving her pattern. One was “I’m not worthy.” It made her feel unworthy of higher sales, unworthy of being truly successful. They eliminated that belief, along with a few others that surfaced with it.
That work changed things.
In her own words: “The following weekend, I increased my sales by ten fold with over $450,000 in sales, and I went on to becoming one of the top-selling speakers in my industry.”
I think about Donna’s story every time someone tells me they’re “working on their confidence.”
Here’s what I want to say back: you can’t work on confidence directly.
Confidence isn’t something you build
We talk about confidence like it’s a muscle. Push through the discomfort enough times and eventually it gets easier.
I understand why. You get up and speak anyway, or you make the call anyway, and something in you does feel a little stronger for having done it.
But that’s not where lasting confidence comes from.
Why?
Because underneath almost every version of “I’m just not a confident person,” there’s a set of beliefs doing the work, beliefs like “I’m not good enough,” “I’m not capable,” “I’m not important,” or “I’m not worthy.”
This is something I hear all the time.
Those beliefs operate in the background. They’re what’s causing the hesitation, the second-guessing, the years of playing small.
Eliminate the beliefs, and the hesitation they were causing doesn’t need managing anymore. It’s just gone.
That’s what happened for Donna. The beliefs were gone, and then her natural confidence showed up on its own.
Try this: find one of your beliefs
Think of the place where you hold yourself back the most. Speaking up in a meeting. Putting your work out into the world. Asking for what you actually want.
Now imagine yourself actually in that situation, right now, about to do the thing.
Notice what happens. The thoughts that show up. The feeling in your body.
Then ask yourself: what would I have to believe, in order to have these particular thoughts and feelings?
That’s how a client named Phil found his. He’d been invited to put on a webinar and kept avoiding it. Six months went by. When he imagined actually doing it, he noticed these thoughts:
“Everyone in the audience is bored.”
“They think my ideas are stupid.”
“They think I’m stupid.”
Following that chain to the end, Phil found a key belief: I’m stupid. He was genuinely surprised. It wasn’t something he’d have said about himself if you’d asked him directly.
Once he saw it clearly, he eliminated it, along with a couple of other beliefs that were tangled up with it, and scheduled the webinar before he’d even settled on a topic.
Try it with your own situation. Write down exactly what showed up, thought by thought, until you land on at least one belief underneath it. That belief, and others like it, are what’s been standing between you and the thing you’ve been avoiding.
What Barbara found underneath hers
My lovely client Barbara, who lives in the Virgin Islands, carried a belief so long she’d stopped noticing it: I’m not capable.
She’d been putting off writing two important letters for years. They meant speaking up for herself, putting her name on something, and standing behind it.
After we eliminated that belief together, she sat down and wrote both letters herself. And sent them.
“Never would I have done that before,” she told me.
She had a second belief too: if people knew me, they wouldn’t like me. It had kept her home on the nights her husband played gigs with his band.
Once that belief was gone, she started going. Open mic nights. Parties. Herself, in the room, no longer hiding.
Where to go from here
If the exercise above turned up a belief, take a moment to notice it. It’s been shaping your life, maybe for years, without you realizing it.
Naming it is the first real step. Eliminating it, the way Donna and Barbara did, is the rest of the work, and it’s not something most people can do alone in one sitting.
One way to make this easier is our free belief-elimination program. The videos walk you through the process step by step.
You can find it at recreateyourlife.com/free.
If it turns out there’s more than one belief in your way, that’s normal. Natural Confidence isn’t a rah-rah cheerleader telling you that you can do it. It helps you unlearn the beliefs that keep you from knowing you’ll find a way to reach your goals and solve the problems in front of you. When that happens, you get the freedom to act.
You can see the program at NaturalConfidenceProgram.com.
If you’d rather talk it through with me directly, I’d love that. In my free strategy sessions we talk about what you’re working toward, what’s actually in the way, and whether working together makes sense: mortylefkoe.com/application.
Remember, confidence is not something you have to build, it’s something we uncover by eliminating beliefs.
