The Truth About Confidence
It's Not What You Think
I ran into a former client I hadn’t seen in years.
“How are you doing?”
“I’m doing great. I love leading a group of leaders now, and I’ve sponsored several of my employees to join their own leadership cohort.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful.”
“Yeah, people ask why I keep sending my team through their own leadership work, and I tell them — I’ve got a complex set of personality traits. I’m a lot. It helps them build the muscle to work with me.”
I laughed. He wasn’t wrong.
What got me wasn’t the joke. It was how comfortable he was saying it. Like: I know I’m gifted, accomplished, tall and handsome, very successful. I’m also a mess and a lot to deal with. That’s mine to own — all of it. So I surround myself with people who are honest and capable, and I submit to their coaching and their feedback. And I want the same kind of support for those who work for me.
That’s the fruit of doing the work.
When we first started, over ten years ago, he was a successful entrepreneur with a thriving business — and the kind of family and lifestyle that looks flawless from the outside. What I appreciated about him even then was how fast he’d go to the vulnerable stuff. In the Townsend Leadership Program — a group that meets a full day once a month, small and confidential — most executives take months to say the real thing out loud. He said it in week one.
I can picture him now, modeling it for the group — his blue eyes brimming with tears. He disclosed how much he struggled with anxiety. Sometimes crippling. The people he led felt his strained moods and high demands. It could be exhausting to work for him.
I watched him go deep with the other leaders in that room. Admitting he came across as arrogant — that people had called him controlling. Admitting that underneath it lived imposter syndrome, self-doubt, a voice that said not good enough on a loop. Even his faith didn’t seem to touch the root of it. He kept bringing the group a hurt young boy who never got his father’s approval, and he stayed just as curious about everyone else’s unresolved stuff as he was about his own.
Three years of that work loosened his grip on perfectionism, and his anxiety faded. He started restoring a part of him that had been shut away.
Then one year, one of his top leaders joined a group in another city — flying out west once a month. Their working relationship went somewhere new: more honest, more collaborative, more eye to eye than boss and subordinate. No longer intimidated, they both raised their performance and shifted the culture to greater psychological safety.
So what does that say about confidence? Is it something you earn once you’ve achieved everything you dreamed of? Or is it a way of seeing yourself that has nothing to do with achievement at all?
Dr. John Townsend built a growth model for leaders around relational, emotional, and psychological development. One of the four core areas in his research — measured on the TPRAT (Townsend Personal Relational Assessment Tool) — is Integration. He defines it as full awareness of your strengths, values, and gifts alongside full awareness of your weaknesses and blind spots. Or, as they say in HR: “developmental areas.” “Opportunities for growth.” Some of those areas never become strengths, no matter how many years you put in.
Early in my coaching career I learned to focus on a leader’s strengths — help them see their shortcomings, but not obsess over fixing them. That’s a waste of everyone’s time. Better to help them leverage what they’re good at, and surround themselves with a team, a board, outside help, so the weak spots don’t sink the ship.
So — what is confidence? I think it’s Awareness and Acceptance.
Fully own what you’re gifted at. What you contribute. What you were simply born with and can’t take credit for, and what you worked hard to build — the skills, the feedback you actually took, the ways you’ve grown, the results that came from all of it.
And then the second half: know, fully, what you’re not good at. You may never be humble, or a great listener, or a sharp analytical thinker, or a natural at sales. Maybe you can command a room but can’t facilitate a reflective conversation to save your life.
Own that too. Get help where it’s worth getting. But know you’ll only improve so much — and stop expecting more from yourself than that.
One client expressed it well, “Make friends with your messy parts.”
That’s confidence:
I’m good at what I’m good at.
I own what I’ll never excel in.
I appreciate other people’s gifts instead of resenting them.
I make room for others to shine where I can’t.
I’m content. At peace.
A few questions to sit with:
What are you gifted at that you didn’t earn — and do you let yourself take that in, or brush past it?
Where have you spent years trying to get better at something that was never going to be your strength?
Who’s covering for your weak spots right now — and have you ever thanked them for it?
If you stopped trying to be good at everything, what would you actually get to be great at?
Speaking of Owning What You’re Not Good At...
Confidence has many dimensions, not one. I only told you about Integration because it made the best story. The other three parts of the Townsend Growth Model — Attachment, Separation, Adulthood — were running the whole dynamic in the background the entire time.
If you want to know where you stand in the four areas, you can take the TPRAT yourself for $25. It comes with a full report that walks you through your own results, no decoder ring required. John wrote a book based on this growth model, People Fuel: Fill Your Tank for Life, Love and Leadership.
I’m TPRAT-certified, so if you take it and want help making sense of what you find, that’s a conversation I’m equipped to have.
Paid subscribers get a full breakdown, below, of the four areas and how they impact your life and leadership.
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