Ep 144: Stop Waiting to Feel Confident: Why Courage Comes First

Confidence isn’t something you need before you take action. It’s something you build along the way.

In this episode, I share a powerful story from climbing the Half Dome cables in Yosemite and explains why confidence almost never comes first. Instead, confidence grows through courage, action, and small moments of bravery.

If you’ve ever found yourself waiting to feel “ready” before pursuing a goal, starting a new habit, speaking up, or making a life change, this episode will help you shift your perspective and take the first step.

You’ll learn why fear is often a signal that you’re on the edge of growth and how small acts of courage can gradually reshape how you see yourself.

Remember: confidence isn’t the starting point...it’s the result of taking action.

Key Takeaways

• Why confidence usually comes after action, not before
• The real sequence: Fear → Courage → Action → Confidence
• How fear often signals you’re on the edge of growth
• Why confidence is built through small acts of courage
• How courageous actions slowly reshape your identity and self-belief
• A simple 3-step practice to start building confidence today

Resources

** Work with Me: The Wellness Wakeup **
For just $99, you get a 60-minute lifestyle audit session where we find the "trouble spots" that are keeping you from living the you want. We'll come up with a short-term action plan reaching your goals and getting consistent with habits is a no-brainer.  Click HERE for more info.'

Transcript

Welcome and Topic Description

0:51

Hello friends and welcome back to Real, brave and Unstoppable. I am your host, Kortney Rivard, and welcome to episode 144. Today we're gonna talk about something that almost everyone struggles with at some point in their life, confidence. I have a story to share with you before we dive in. And I talked more about this in episode number 117, which was my story about Half Dome and doing it scared. I remember standing at the base of Half Dome a couple of years ago. Half Dome is in Yosemite National Park, if you're not familiar. And there are these cables that are kind of like railings that you can use to help yourself climb up. But it is not for the faint of heart at all. But I remember having this thought in my head as I was standing there. This is way too effing scary. There's no way in hell I do not wanna die today. So if you've ever climbed the half dome cables or thought about it and not done it because it's scary, you know exactly what I'm talking about. I remember looking around and thinking that everyone else looked unafraid. They looked confident, prepared, like they just had this all figured out. And in my head I was thinking things like. What if I can't do it? What if I fall? What if I completely embarrass myself? Which I kind of did at one point, but you can listen to episode 117 for that story. Another thought was, what if I die? Or I don't wanna die today. I really thought about just turning around and skipping half Dome that day. That would've definitely been the easier option, but I stayed. I did give myself permission that I could turn around if once I started, I just wasn't feeling it, or if I was too terrified, but that moment, standing there feeling completely unsure of myself, that adrenaline rush ended up teaching me something really important about confidence that I didn't know that I fully understood at the time, or I might have kind of understood it, but I hadn't really thought a lot about it. This is something I now see play out in almost every area of my life. And that is that confidence almost never comes first. You know what comes first? Courage. And that's what I wanna talk about today. You hear this all the time. People say things like, I wish I just had more confidence. Or once I feel more confident, then I'll do that. So it might be starting to exercise again, or maybe it's putting yourself out there in some way. It could be speaking up more or changing careers, setting boundaries, or trying something that feels intimidating. There is this belief that confidence is something we're supposed to have before we do something hard. Like confidence is the prerequisite. But the more I've worked with people and the more I've reflected on my own life, the more I've realized something really important is that belief is backwards. Confidence is almost never the starting point. Confidence is usually the result, and the thing that actually comes first is courage. Courage does not always look the way we imagine it. When we hear the word courage, we often think of big, dramatic moments, life-changing decisions, huge risks. Courage is a pretty cool word, and it's really admirable, I think, to be courageous. And most of us think that courage should feel good. But most courage in everyday life looks a lot quieter than that, and it really often doesn't feel good at all because it's scary. Courage happens in the moment that you decide to try something, even though you're not sure how it's gonna go. It's the moment that you say that thing that you've been afraid to say or the moment you show up, even though part of you wants to stay really comfy. Courage is when you move forward, will fear is still in the room. And this is an important distinction. Most people assume the sequence goes like this. First you feel confident, then you take action. Then things go well. Ha. Yeah. In reality, the sequence usually looks more like this. First comes fear, then comes courage, which isn't easy. Then comes action, and then eventually confidence starts to grow, and it's not a finite amount that we get. It builds. Yeah, so remember, fear, courage, action, then confidence. And once you see that this pattern, you're gonna start noticing it everywhere. So think about the first time that you ever tried something new. Maybe it was your first workout after a long break and you were kind of nervous to go to the gym. Worried that people were looking at you. Or your first race, or your first time speaking up in a meeting, your first difficult conversation, or the first time trying something that pushed you outside of your comfort zone. You probably didn't feel confident going into that moment. You probably felt nervous. Maybe you felt uncertain, maybe even a little scared, but you did it anyway. And afterwards, something interesting happened. You realize, oh. I survived that. Maybe it wasn't perfect, might've been messy, but you got through it. So what happened there too is that your brain took note of that because confidence is really just evidence. It's the evidence your brain has gathered over time that you can handle things, evidence that you can figure things out, that you can navigate discomfort, and that you can do things even when you're not completely sure how it will go. So here's the trap many people fall into, they think they need confidence before they take action. So they wait and they wait and they wait. They tell themselves, I'll do it when I feel more ready, or I just need to build my confidence first. But the important thing to realize is that confidence doesn't usually grow through just thinking about it. It grows through doing it. So this is where fear starts to play a really interesting role because fear is often the signal that we're standing right on that edge of growth. That doesn't mean every fear needs to be acted on, but here's the thing: is that many of the fears that hold people back are not actually really dangerous. They're uncomfortable. They might involve uncertainty or the possibility of failure, and they might involve the possibility that things might not go perfectly. But discomfort and danger, not the same thing. And our brains often treat them as if they are. I've talked about this a lot on this show, but our brains are wired to keep us safe. They really prefer familiarity and predictability. They really prefer the known over the unknown. That's why we have such a hard time with uncertainty. So when we start considering doing something new, something that stretches us, our brain often responds with resistance. It might say things like, what if you fail? What if people judge you? What if you embarrass yourself? What if this doesn't work? And one of the most interesting things is that people often interpret those thoughts as a signal that they shouldn't proceed. They think the fear means they're not ready, so they listen to those thoughts, those worries. But fear is also often a signal that we're doing something that matters to us, something meaningful, something that has the potential to grow us. And here's where courage becomes the bridge: Courage is the willingness to move forward, even though we're afraid. It is not the absence of fear. It's action in the presence of fear. The more we practice courage, the more confidence naturally starts to grow. Because every time you do something difficult, your brain logs a new data point. I handled that, I survived that. I figured that out. And over time, those data points, they start to accumulate. So remember that confidence is not built in one big moment. It's built through repetition. Through small, brave decisions that are made over and over again. And this is really important because sometimes people think confidence requires these huge leaps. So I wanna talk about something like called"Small acts of courage", and this is where confidence actually grows. So it could be just the act of signing up for something intimidating or speaking up when you would normally stay quiet. Maybe it's setting a boundary, trying a new activity, starting something, even if you're not sure, you'll be good at it. So each one of those moments sends a message to your brain that maybe I'm more capable than I thought. Maybe I can do things that once fell out, felt outta reach. And over time, these small acts of courage start to reshape your identity. Many people carry around beliefs about themselves that aren't helpful. I'm not athletic. I'm not confident. I'm not the type of person that does that. I'm too old to start something new. But here's the important, really important to know. Identities: not fixed. They evolve through experience. Every time you take a courageous action, you create a little crack in the old story. You create evidence that maybe that identity isn't completely true, and slowly a new story begins to form. You create a new identity. Confidence in many ways is simply the result of that new story. The story that says, I can handle hard things or I can learn, I can grow, I can just try again. The people who appear confident are usually not people who never feel fear. They're the people who have practiced courage many times. So these are people who have taken the step, even when they weren't sure, or they've allowed themselves to have a beginner's mind. They've allowed themselves to fail. And learn from it. And they've allowed themselves to be uncomfortable. And through those experiences, like I've been saying, confidence slowly grows. And so if there's something in your life right now that you've been waiting to feel confident enough to do, I would love to invite you to look at it through a slightly different lens. Maybe confidence isn't the prerequisite, maybe it's the reward. Maybe the only thing required right now is a small moment of courage. One step, one action. Not perfection, not certainty. Just a willingness to try it. Once you take that step, something powerful happens. Like I said, you start collecting that evidence, the evidence that you can handle discomfort, that you can figure things out, that you're capable. Maybe even more than you thought you believed, and that evidence becomes the foundation of your confidence. I like to think of confidence as a staircase. Most people think confidence as something you're supposed to have before you take the first step. But as we've been talking about today, that's not how it works. Confidence is what you build as you climb the staircase. So imagine standing at the bottom of the staircase in the dark. You can't see the top. You don't know exactly where it leads, and your brain is saying, Ooh, I don't know what's up there. Maybe we should just stay here where it's safe. But courage is what allows you to take that first step anyway, even though you can't really see a lot, you don't really know what it's gonna be like on that first step, but you step onto it and then something happens. That step holds, it doesn't crumble, you didn't fall, nothing terrible happened. So you get a little comfortable there. So you take another step and then you take another one. And with each step, your brain it starts to realize that, oh, this is actually okay. And so that's where your confidence starts to grow. But look at this: you didn't get confident. And then climb the stairs. You climb the stairs, and that's what built the confidence. And this is exactly how growth works in real life. You don't feel confident before you try something new. You feel confident after you've taken a few steps, and then you realize you can handle it. So confidence is built step by step, not all at once. And sometimes I know we look at people and we think, wow, they're so confident. They're usually people who have climbed a lot of stairs and we also don't know what they're thinking inside or feeling inside. But they maybe have taken a lot of steps and they have practiced courage over and over again, and that's why they're confident. So I can think of so many examples of this in my own life. I didn't start as someone who thought of myself as especially confident. When I first started running. I wasn't some seasoned athlete. I grew up playing sports, but, I remember signing up for my first race, it was just a 5K and I lived in Savannah, Georgia. It was hot to train for it. And I mean, I really wasn't running more than two miles at a time at when I started training for that. But I remember feeling kind of nervous and I didn't, I was like, oh my God, am I gonna be really slow? Am I gonna be able to do this? In the past I had had like knee issues with running. So I don't know. I didn't know how it was gonna go, but I did it anyway. I showed up anyway. There were other people I knew that were doing it and so of course there was the what if I'm really a lot slower than them'cause I'm competitive. But yeah, showed up anyway and that race led to another and another and eventually, I found myself doing triathlons and a marathon and later even half Ironman triathlons. But none of that started with confidence. It started with a small, courageous step of signing up, showing up, and then trying. And each experience built a little more evidence. And along the way, I mean, there were times where I felt like,"Ooh, that was really slow" and I felt, embarrassed or whatever. But I didn't stop trying. I've experienced in a much bigger life transitions too. For a long time. If you've been listening to this show for a while, you know that my career initially was in aerospace engineering, and on paper that looked like a great path. It was stable, it was a respectable, it made sense. But over time I started realizing that it just, it wasn't something that I wanted to do long term. I didn't really feel excited about showing up to sit in a cubicle and talk to other engineers. Although engineers are great people... didn't like sitting behind a computer like kind of to myself all day. It just didn't feel aligned with the kinda life I wanted to build. And recognizing that was one thing, but doing something about it was another. Because changing careers, if you've ever thought about doing that or have done that, is really scary. So there are a lot of questions that come up. What if this doesn't work? What if I make the wrong decision? What if I'm leaving something secure for something uncertain? What if it's worse than where I'm at now? You know, things like that. And if I had waited until I felt completely confident about the decision, I probably would still be waiting.'cause confidence didn't show up first. What showed up first was the realization that I needed to explore something different for me, and then came courage. Courage to start asking questions. The courage to spend some money that was tough to spend to work with a coach to help me figure this out. The courage to consider a different path. The courage to take small steps towards something that felt more meaningful. And just like with races I talked about earlier, confidence didn't appear overnight. It grew through the process. Through learning, through experimenting, I could see that I could navigate uncertainty. And over time that confidence expanded. But it only happened because I was willing to take the first step before I could see the rest of the staircase before I felt ready. And this is something I see with clients all the time. People assume confidence. Is what allows you to change your life, but most of the time it's actually the opposite. You start making the change first and the confidence grows along the way. And there's another layer to this conversation that I think is really important, especially for the women listening to this podcast. Many people believe that confidence is something you're supposed to have figured out earlier in life. Like confidence belongs to younger people. Like if you're in your forties or fifties and you're still feeling unsure about certain things, you somehow missed the window. But in many ways, confidence actually has the potential to grow more during this stage of life. And here's why. When we're younger, we're often more con concerned with approval. We wanna do things the right way. We might worry about what other people think. We're often still trying to prove ourselves and find our way. But as we get older, something interesting starts to happen. Many women start to realize that living entirely based on other people's expectations isn't really all that fulfilling. So we start to ask deeper questions like, what do I want? What actually matters to me? What kind of life do I wanna create going forward? And those questions can actually feel uncomfortable at first because they often lead to changes. In habits, in priorities, sometimes even changes in careers or relationships or how we spend our time, but this stage of life also creates an incredible opportunity. Because once you stop trying to live according to everyone else's expectations, you create space to live more intentionally and with more meaning and purpose. And intentional living requires courage. It requires that we try things that might feel new. It requires stepping outside of roles or identities that we might have carried for a long time. But here's the beautiful part. It's expansive. Every time we take one of those steps, we build the confidence. Not the loud, like performative kind of confidence, but this deeper kind that comes from knowing ourselves. And from having navigated challenges. It's the kind of confidence that says, I may not know exactly how this will go, but I trust myself to figure it out. So confidence also has an element of self-trust to it. That I have my back no matter what happens. And that kind of confidence doesn't come from waiting. It comes from continuing to grow and explore and to take courageous steps towards the life that you wanna create, no matter what life stage you're in. So I wanna invite you to pause for a moment and think about something. Is there an area of your life where you've been waiting to feel more confident? Maybe it's your health. Maybe it's a goal that you've been putting off. Speaking up more or asking for something you need, or maybe it's trying something new that just feels a little outside your comfort zone. Now, ask yourself a different question: What would one small act of courage look like in that situation? Not a big leap just a step. Maybe it's signing up or having a conversation, a small conversation. Maybe it's taking the first small action instead of waiting for the perfect moment. Confidence doesn't come from thinking about doing the thing. It actually comes from doing the thing. And every time you take a step, you collect another piece of evidence that you can handle discomfort, that you can grow, and that you're capable of more than you might've believed. So I'm gonna summarize that in a little three step simple practice. So the first step is notice the thing you're waiting to feel confident about. The second one is identify the smallest, courageous step you could take. And three, take the step before you feel ready. I invite you to do that today. So if there's one idea I hope that you take away from today's episode, it's this. Don't wait until you feel confident. Confident is not the starting point. Courage is. Confidence is what grows after you've taken the step, after you've tried, after you've shown yourself that you can handle more than you thought. So whatever staircase is in front of you right now, you don't need to see the whole thing. You just need to take the first step. That is all I have for you today, my friends. I hope this was really helpful to you. And as always, if you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend. And I always love when people are able to go give me a rating and a review on whatever podcast platform you listen to this on. I appreciate it... It helps people find the show and it just means a lot to me. So thank you for being here, and I will see you next time.