How To Reset Your Confidence in 60 Seconds Before a Big Career Moment

What do you do in the 60 seconds before a meeting when your confidence has dropped, and the room still needs you at your full size?

This episode is for the woman who has done the preparation, knows her material, and still feels herself shrinking right before the moment that matters. Caroline closes the week with a practical reset for those corridor, car park, and loo-cubicle moments when self-trust wobbles and you need something small, fast, and effective to bring you back to yourself.

• You’ll learn a simple 60-second sequence to interrupt the imposter spiral before a high-stakes moment
• You’ll discover how breath, evidence, and one true sentence can calm your nervous system and sharpen your self-trust
• You’ll leave with a practical confidence ritual you can use before presentations, difficult conversations, and important meetings

Play this episode before your next big meeting to reset your nervous system, reconnect to your preparation, and walk in as the version of you who’s ready.

Contact

Connect with me on LinkedIn

Or email me caroline@inspireyourgenius.com with 'Rachel' in the subject line, and I'll send you the full 90-second pre-performance sequence from Friday's episode as a printable card you can keep in your bag. Small enough to fit. Powerful enough to change what happens before your next big moment.

Ready to make your next bold move? Grab the free Bold Move Audit and join the insider crew. 

Stuck, simmering, or onto something juicy? I want to hear it. Drop me a line at caroline@inspireyourgenius.com - I read them all.

Transcript

Caroline Esterson (00:00)
today's Friday, which means only one thing. We've done the story, we've done the science and now we're going to do something about it. Today you're getting a song, an anchor for this week's theme that I want you to carry into your next big moment. Together with three quickfire career moves, so tiny, you can do them in a corridor, a car park.

or a Lou cubicle, we've all been there, haven't we? Before the meeting that needs you at your best. You ready? Let's go.

Caroline Esterson (00:33)
Hello, I'm Caroline Esterson and this is Little Moves Big Careers, helping women in corporate leadership who are constantly second guessing themselves to build the daily habits that compound into unshakable confidence. Yep, that's you.

Caroline Esterson (00:50)
So every Friday, I'm going to give you a song. This isn't background music. This is a neurological anchor, a piece of music specifically chosen because it'll do something to your body before your brain catches up. So this week's song is for Rachel and for

every woman who has ever stood in a corridor and thought about walking into a room as a smaller version of herself. You ready? This week's song is Good As Hell by Lizzo. Why? Because this song isn't about being fearless. It's not about being bulletproof, but it is about doing your hair, holding your head up.

and walking back into your own life. It's warm, it's fierce, and it's specifically about the moment after someone has made you feel small and the decision to refuse that. The chorus is a direct instruction. I do my hair, toss, check my nails, baby, how you feeling? Feeling good as hell. That's not arrogance, it's reclamation.

Rachel so needed reclamation in that corridor and so does every woman who has ever rewritten slides that she believed in.

So here's what I want you to do with this song. Find it on whatever platform you use, add it to a playlist called Little Moves or whatever you want to call it. That's just my suggestion. And the next time you're standing outside a room that needs you at full size, play it.

just once through before you go in.

Let's talk quickly about the science of why this works. Music activates the limbic system, the brain's emotional processing center faster than almost any other stimulus.

A 2013 study by Zetna and Airola

rhythmically strong, energetically positive music directly increases what researchers call felt arousal and positive balance. In plain language, makes you feel more energized and more positive about yourself.

That feels pretty good, doesn't it, to do that? And that is neuroscience. The right song at the right moment

changes your state before you walk through the door.

has said that this song is about self-love being an act of radical resistance. For a woman who's been told...

directly or indirectly that she needs to be a little more careful, a little more accommodating, a little less sure of herself.

This is exactly right. Play it out loud. Dance around your kitchen if you need. I'm not going to tell anyone. So let's move on. Let's end the week with some small, specific, doable actions before your commute ends. These are not strategies. They're not transformations. They are two millimetre moves.

The kind that seem almost too small to matter right up until they compound into something that changes how you show up entirely. So this week's quickfire moves all come from Rachel's corridor. They're for the moment before, the 90 seconds before you walk into the room that matters. Number one, The 30 second evidence raid.

So the move is before your next high stakes moment, whether that be a presentation, a difficult conversation, a meeting where you really need to be heard, spend 30 seconds listing three things that you've done really well in the last seven days. Just your highlights. Not your greatest hits, three things from this week. Small is fine, done is fine, just three. And this works because the imposter spiral runs on selective evidence.

It cherry picks the moments you stumbled and ignores everything else. The evidence raid is a deliberate counter move. You're manually rebalancing the data your brain is working with before you walk in. Rachel's 30 seconds might have sounded something like, well, I prepared this presentation thoroughly, handled a difficult conversation with a team member on Tuesday without flinching, and I found the reading record in 11 seconds flat this morning.

Whoa, check me. That last one counts. Everything counts.

You're building a case for yourself. You're not writing a performance review. Then your second move is the psychological sigh.

Take two breaths. The first is a deep inhale through your nose.

Before you exhale, take a second,

shorter inhale on top of that, topping up the lungs completely, then a long, slow exhale through the mouth.

Do this twice, it takes about 20 seconds. it's a specific pattern called the psychological sigh.

A neuroscientist, Andrew Huberman's research at Stanford identifies it

fastest known way to reduce psychological stress in real time. It works by fully inflating the lungs, air sacs and accelerating the offload of carbon dioxide, which directly reduces

and activates the parasympathetic nervous system. In plain language, it tells your body the danger is over.

before you've even walked in the door. Neat trick, ⁓ You could do this in the corridor, in the lift or in the loo. Nobody will notice. And you'll walk in with a nervous system that has been deliberately reset. And finally, your third move, the one true thing. Before you go in, say one simple sentence out loud, or if that feels too weird in your head,

The sentence just needs to simply, factually, undeniably be true about your preparation or your capability for that specific moment. One sentence, true, specific, just a fact. For Rachel standing outside that boardroom at 158, it might've been, I've spent three weeks preparing this. I know this material better than anyone else in that room. Not, I'm amazing and I've got this.

That's too vague for a threat activated brain to believe. The amygdala is not moved by affirmations. It is moved by specific evidence. One true thing stated painly is more powerful than your motivational speech.

The one true thing is the antidote to Dominic's email title, something to reflect on. It's Rachel's voice talking back.

If you are all three moves together before your next meeting, here's how they stack up. First 30 seconds, the evidence raid. Three things you've done well this week. 30 seconds to 50 seconds, the psychological sigh. Twice, resets your nervous system. And then the next 10 seconds, the one true thing. One sentence specific, factually yours. That is literally...

one minute. That's the whole sequence. And of course, if you can play good as hell beforehand too. These are not big leaps, are they? I really want you to see that lots of little moves can make such a difference to your performance and to the way that you feel. Because remember, little moves made consistently are actually everything.

So next week, we're moving into our second category, the confidence code. Monday's story is going to open somewhere very specific and very recognisable. Nudge, nudge, and quink, I'm going to say no more.

This week, your only homework is this.

it good as hell, add it to the playlist and use the 60 second sequence once before something that matters. That's it, that's the whole ask. Little moves, perfectly doable, right?

So in the meantime, have a brilliant weekend. You've earned it. And you are, just so that we're clear, absolutely good as hell.

See you Monday.