The Confidence Bank

Confidence isn't something you're born with — it's something you build.

In this episode, Sam breaks down his Confidence Bank framework: four deposits every leader can make to show up with real, unshakable confidence every time they speak.

The Four Deposits:

1. What Others See — Who has told you that you're good at something? Don't brush it off. Bank it.

2. What You Bring — Your unique combination of skills and experience earned you the platform.

3. Who You Admire — Study the communicators you respect. Learn what makes them effective and make it your own.

4. Past Wins — Don't forget the victories. And don't forget what you've overcome. Both belong in your bank.

Drawing from years of executive coaching, this episode covers how to stop waiting for confidence to show up and start building it on purpose.

Key Takeaways:

• Confidence is an inside job — it starts with how you see yourself

• The Confidence Audit helps you take inventory of what's already working

• Past wins (and past struggles) are deposits in your Confidence Bank

• We hear praise in a whisper and criticism in a shout — flip that

Part of The Elevated Communicator series on The Sam Linton Show.

Take the confidence audit here ==> samuellinton.com/audit

Transcript

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As soon as the lady walked into the room, it was easy to see that she did not want to be there. She was guarded. She was the last to share. And as week after week went on, because this was a public program that I was leading, as week after week went on, she consistently was the one who I would have to coax to share. I try to be situationally aware of those types of things in Dale Carnegie programs and when I'm working with other clients. But in particular about some of the programs, it requires a lot of you to get up in front of people and to speak. So I was really worried candidly about what it was going to be like for her through some of the sessions. And I knew from the moment that I had interacted with her that she had the biggest problem with confidence. It was confidence. Easy to diagnose. When someone has it, you can tell. When someone is faking it after a while, you can tell. When someone is not operating to their full potential, you can tell. And so with this particular young lady, I felt very uncomfortable that the program was going to help her because of this confidence issue. And over the years of training people, confidence is one of those things that comes up time and time again. I can't tell you how frequently it comes up. Now it doesn't come, nobody comes to me or anybody else that I've worked with and they say, hey, the problem is I need confidence. No. They'll come to me and they'll say a bunch of other qualifying things. They'll say, I freeze up whenever I am in front of a room. They'll say, When I'm about to speak at my meeting, I'm tempted that I don't know my material so well. So what I do is I read every word of a prepared monologue. Or they'll say things like, I stutter. I use filler words. In fact, I cannot speak unless I'm using these verbal crutches to get through. And if you pull the thread out of each of those issues, you'll find a problem with confidence. So when I'm working with clients and when I'm having opportunities to talk to people and dissect what's going on, one of the first things that I diagnose is where they are in relation to confidence. Because we can train a bunch of different techniques. You could go to Claude, ChatGPT, you can go to Grok right now, and it will tell you exactly how to speak perfectly. It's it'll tell you about pausing, it'll tell you about pacing, which we're gonna talk about that as we look continually through the elevated communicator. And we are easily able to access these different tools and tricks at the search on your phone. But one thing that is next to impossible to glean from AI is confidence. Because confidence is solely an inside job. It is. It's an inside job. And you either are functioning at the highest level of your confidence, or you are in the gap. We talked about this last week, that gap, the competence and communication gap. Remember, I said there, the competences, that high level of where you have achieved what you've achieved to get to where you are. It's that level that you were firing on all five, six, seven, how choose whatever car you drive, eight cylinders to be able to land that deal. It's that ability, those talents, those skills that you have to be able to run a successful organization. But then when you have to articulate that level of authority to a group of people, you fall to pieces. It's not an issue of competence, it's an issue of confidence. And today I want to talk to you about one of the tools that I use that's a part of my elevated communicator framework. And that tool is the confidence audit and the accompanying tool, what I call the confidence bank. Now, I've talked about the confidence bank before, and I've reconfigured it because this is one of the most successful tools that I use with clients. I'm going to give it all to you here today. It's a successful tool because it forces them to think through with confidence. And it forces them to do an audit of their lives. And I do a confidence audit quickly because I want to know what I'm working with. So a confidence audit is essentially an assessment. Call it whatever you want. And the questions are irrelevant, but essentially what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to figure out where they are in different areas. So one area, and this is kind of my scoring philosophy, is they are in the lowest tier, which would be your foundational tier. They are able to speak, maybe they have a good job, maybe they've just been promoted. Unfortunately, they aren't feeling comfortable in their own skin. So there's a lot of work to be done. The foundation is there, meaning they know they, they, they're, they're, they're aware of what they're not aware of, but they just need to be given some frameworks and some challenges to break them out of that zone. The lady that I mentioned in the story at the beginning of this was in this zone. She she was good at her job, thought of highly by people at her work. Unfortunately, you put her in a room with other people and you ask her to speak, not so. Now, the second area, what I is what I would call the growth zone. These are people that are pretty good in a room. They're pretty gifted in terms of communication. I mean, they keep everything tight, but they have some opportunities that may be glaring to others, but not aware to them. They might not know that they have these things. These are usually people in middle level or even executive leadership who have come to a certain level. And now what has happened is they are flailing in terms of their level of confidence because it's apparent that they're not really rising to the occasion of how well they speak with or how well they do their job with how well they speak. So I say all that to say that's the area where a lot of participants come to. They're, they're they're good, but they're not really connecting. Last but not least, there's the growth or the command people. This group would be the ones that are really, really polished. They're the ones that everyone wants to speak first. They're the people that typically, when you uh met them, when they were in school, they're the ones that always had their hand up. They're participating, they're firing, they're doing great. And they've established over years what I call the perfect presentation mode. They come in, they say the right things, no filler words, no stammering, they have perfectly timed jokes. The challenge with people that are in this zone often is that there's another level beyond that, which is the level that I aspire to as a communicator, where they are completely comfortable being themselves in front of any size group. That if you run into this person at the coffee shop, they're the same as you saw when they were giving their TED talk. That command, that level of command is really, really hard to find because that level of command involves complete, you guessed it, confidence. They have to feel good enough about who they are that if you bumped into them at Aldi picking up some shrimp at Aldi, by the way, I recommend against buying shrimp from Aldi. I I had some shrimp from Aldi today. I'm afraid later of what that's gonna mean, but there's probably a reason why they were selling it at Aldi. I love Aldi, by the way. It's my third place now. They built one right across from where I live. And I go there probably more than I stay at home. Uh, and I stay out of the aisle of shame. I know that Aldi has the aisle of shame, but shrimp should be in the aisle of shame. It just wasn't the best Aldi. Or might have just been a bad batch. I don't know, but but you might be asking, why am I talking about Aldi? Because it was important to me at the moment. It's important. Now, coming back to this command idea, you run into this person at Aldi and they speak the same way that they would speak doing their TED talk. You run into them at uh church and they're just the same level of comfort as you do when they're in the board, as they have when they're in the boardroom. They are completely commanding wherever they are. That doesn't mean they're overbearing. It means that they're comfortable in their own skin. They've achieved a level of confidence that some of us only aspire to get to. Now, you dip in and out of command zone a lot of times, and we're to talk about the command triangle in a couple of weeks, which is essentially how to posture yourself with confidence. But today I want you to realize there are these zones. So I try to essentially, let's say you and I were talking, I would be trying to gauge, are you in that zone of where you are knowing that you don't know how to speak, you hate it. I have a client that I'm gonna be working with this week, and he told me, I hate this more than anything. I don't like speaking, I don't like communicating, and I have to teach and I have to lead and uh blah. And I could tell that he's definitely in the foundation zone. Then I have other clients that are actors and or CEOs or people that have been on television and they they feel that they're taking command, but it takes a coach or it takes a colleague with enough wherewithal to say, hey, just so you know, you have some of these things going on, and no one's telling you, but I'm telling you, that is the zone where they need to really work to even become better than what they are. But I'm digressing, I'm going into the weeds. So this is what I do when I run through people in these high-stakes moments, and I try to give them an opportunity to assess their confidence. Now, the tool that I use, the framework that I use, and I've introduced this before. I I renamed it, I kind of added some things to it, I kind of broke it out a little bit, is something that I built called the confidence bank. The confidence bank. The confidence bank is something that you can build. I want you to keep this in mind about confidence. Confidence is not something you're born with, it's something you build. Let me say it again for the people in the back. Confidence is not something you're born with, it's something you build. Sometimes people will seemingly have confidence out of thin air. Well, that person's just extremely confident. And you might say they're naturally confident. But if you pull back the layer of their confidence onion, so to speak, you're most likely going to find that that confidence has arrived from a bunch of different building blocks. It didn't happen because they came out of the womb with a buttoned-up shirt and tie, ready to conquer the world and kick butt and take names, but they built it over a set of experiences. And these experiences became foundational to who they actually are. So the thing that's amazing about the confidence bank is that every single person, no matter what area you function in as a leader, every single person has the opportunity to build into their own confidence bank. Every single person has the opportunity to get confidence from other places, other sources. And you need to put these sources around your confidence bank so that you can draw confidence from these sources. And then what happens as your confidence goes up, your bank increases, and you keep pulling from those other sources. But most of us never think of our lives this way. What do we do? We think, oh, I did this, I did this, I did this, I did this. Oh no, I have to speak this weekend. Uh-oh, it's gonna be terrible. I suck at this, I should have never done this, I can't believe I'm doing this. This is terrible, I'm awful, blah, blah, blah. And what we do, inevitably, I hate to say it, is we sabotage ourselves because we don't look where we can draw confidence from. So I'm gonna give you the areas and I'm gonna go over them rather quickly. And they're not in any particular order, though, I'm gonna save the one that every one of us can access immediately for last. That's called marketing language. That's what that is. So stick with me, and I'm gonna give you the one that most people can use immediately and get confidence right away. All right. So, first one is what others see. This is a slippery one, precious. What others see. What do I mean by that is how do other people describe you? How do they look at you? I've said before, I wish I could see myself the way my youngest son has seen me most of his life, the way he looks at me. He looks at me with such admiration that I know that it's only a matter of time before he's gonna get like the older kids and start to realize that I am as flawed as they make them as a father. But sometimes he'll look at me and he just lights up. And I'll see him light up and it just does something to me. And I wonder, what is he seeing in me? And I have a blind spot, I don't know what it is. Is it because I buy him stuff? Maybe. Is it because I feed him? Sure. Is it because I've kept him alive? Maybe. I don't know. But whenever he looks at me, I feel a lot better. There are people that you have in your life that have said things to you, have noticed things about you, and have given you words that have overflowed you like a damn breaking. And this is an aside, and we're not we're talking about executive communication here, but don't hold back from telling people things that you notice about them for heaven's sake. Don't ever do that. If you notice that somebody does something well, or you have a recognition that you want to vocalize to them, oh my goodness, please, please, please, please, please, please tell them. Because what you don't realize is that those people, most of them, most of us, are replaying over and over again negative things that people have said about us. And in that, these negative things that people have said about us, in that, we end up losing sight of these positive things. I don't know what the ratio is. There's some statistic out there on it. You can point to it, but I think it takes like a hundred good things to reinforce and fix something that was said about one negative thing about you. And it's true. You hear everything that somebody says good about you in the form of a whisper. You hear everything that somebody says badly about you in the form of a shout. Again, that's a writable down. That's quite I'm I'm I'm throwing some mad ones down here at night. You hear everything that somebody says good about you in a whisper, you hear all of the bad things in the form of a shout. We'll workshop that and make it come out cleaner, but that's that's that's gold right there, don't you? At night, you're not sitting there thinking, oh, I loved how that lady said my presentation was awesome. No, you're thinking of how the one manager that reports to you every week said that your fly was down during the presentation and it's reliving in your mind. That's why there's memes and gifts and different internet jokes, which they're not really jokes, of how people stay up at night thinking about that moment in middle school that they said uh a wrong word and they tried to correct it and they said an even wrong word, right? Like we live oftentimes reliving shame. Well, we can do that again with confidence. And the way we do that with confidence first is by asking what others see who has said something about you that's amazing? Who has said something about you that is helpful? Um, I had a when I first started working for the church, I was extremely young. And you might say, but Sam, you're young right now. Yes, I am. I'm very young, but I was even younger then. I was really young. And I had just turned 21, full disclosure. And that is a really, really, really rough time to start in the ministry when most people that you're ministering to are at least twice your age. Now, our church has grown a lot, and there's a lot of young people there now, and there's a lot of younger people that are still coming. And I feel like the old person now. But my point is when I started working there, I had somebody come into my office, and this was back to back, and just to give you the power of somebody saying something. I had somebody come into my office and confront me because of my age and my lack of experience. Because you can't fake having a ton of experience when you're 21. You could pull that stuff off when you're in your 40s, not when you're 21. When you're 21, you're like, yeah, I had that raging career in high school, right? You know, I had no experience. None. Not none whatsoever. So somebody came into my office and basically told me that he was concerned about my qualifications. He was concerned about the safety of the church. He was even more concerned about how my longevity would be if I am gonna make it and all of those things. And and he just told me to be careful, watch myself, essentially. And I thanked him, he left, and as a 21-year-old man who is strong in the Lord, I cried. I cried my eyes out in between services. I sat there, felt sorry for myself, and I felt completely out of my depth. Now, dried my tears, straightened up my tie, took my Bible, got ready to go do announcements. I wasn't preaching, I was literally just doing announcements from the platform. Just, this is when the potluck is. Make sure you bring stuff for the rummage sale. That was my whole entire shtick from the center, and everything else was behind the scenes. I was behind the scenes so much more when I first started working for the church. When I came out of my office, there was another man who was on the church's financial board. And that man was standing there. He said, I have to talk to you about something, young man. And he also was a little older, and everybody was older. So I said, sure. And I was like, please, I'm gonna die. I can't handle one more thing. I literally wanted a handler. I was like, give me a handler. That was even popular back then, but I wanted somebody just to block these conversations. So he said, I just want to let you know I was on the board when they voted on bringing you on. And people were throwing around your name and talking about whether or not this was a good idea and your age and everything. And again, my stomach is like sinking. Oh, I'm gonna puke. And he looked at me and he said, I want you to know, I believe there is not one reason on earth that I could think of to say no to allowing you to be a part of the staff of this church. I think that God has put you here for this reason. I think you have the right skill set. I think you're the man for the job. And I want you to know that when you're up there, I want you to know that we as a board in the church believe in you. And then I thanked him, I hugged him, and I went back into my office and I cried again. You have no idea how much people need to hear you saying what you've noticed good about them. Catch someone doing something right. So that's what others see. I'm not gonna spend as much time on the other ones, but that's what others see. All right, let's move on. What you bring, what you bring. You're speaking not because somebody gave you that as a gift. You're speaking because you're bringing something to the table. You're bringing value. What unique combination of skills, traits, Liam Neeson type ninja stuff are you bringing to your organization that merits you having the ability to speak. I mean, think about this. This is essentially why you got your job. What I tell people when people talk to me about, oh, I have to stand up and I have to speak, and I'm so afraid and I don't know how I'm gonna do this, I said, well, why did they hire you? Sounds like they only hire losers there. And they usually laugh. And I'm not um I'm being facetious, of course, because they're acting like they're the There as a favor to somebody. That's almost never the case. Usually you're there because you are rightfully deserved to be there. You absolutely need to be there. You're qualified, you're skilled. You bring a particular set of talents to the table that nobody else can. You have to recognize that. What did you bring? So tell me, what perspective and expertise do you bring? If you're speaking to an audience, let's say a mixed audience, what is it that you are uniquely gifted to help people do? I can make you get out of your head and get into the stage. That's my unique gift. I have other things. I'm good at in front of people. I have a good sense of humor. I'm good with people. You know, I that's pretty much it. I'm I'm funny, and my other coworkers are good in the good looks department. I'll take care of the funny. They're not as funny as me. I'm sorry. They're working on it. They're not that great. It's they got to work on it. Okay, but I bring that to the table. I bring to the table, all joking aside, and I wrote this in my confidence uh bank. I bring to the table that I'm gonna make people think. I bring to the table that I can see what people are experiencing and I can challenge them. I bring to the table my ability to speak to you in a comforting way while also giving you a little kick in the tukas or the butt, whichever you prefer. I bring that to the table. So I'm not just there because I'm punching a clock because I'm somebody just gave me the favor. I'm there because I have a right to be there. One of Dale Carnegie's greatest principles, not from not just from the uh How to Win Friends book, but on a book that was lesser known, his uh book on effective speaking, is the idea that when you get up to speak, you have to recognize that you have earned the right. You've earned the right to be there, or else you won't be there. And this is where imposter syndrome comes from. Nobody who has imposter syndrome is an imposter. So what do you bring? What are you bringing to your organization? What is it that you're, what is it that they brought you there for? Because if you realize that you're there for a function and you're there to help and you're actually doing the thing, you deserve to be there. That's uh what you bring. This next one, one of my favorites, models to borrow from. We all have communicators that we admire, maybe athletes that we admire, perhaps a mentor that we've had over the years. We all have those types of people in our lives. And the people that have communicated the best have left a track of memories in our minds about how to communicate well. Well, those people didn't just entertain you for the moment. What they've done is they've given you ammunition for your confidence bank. They've given you some currency for your confidence bank because you won't want to shoot your confidence bank. So it's more like currency. They've given you some currency because what you can do is let's say you feel like crap about speaking, like you're awful, you can't, you feel like you're in your head, you feel like you're not making sense, you feel like the notes you just got to read and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all the things. Well, I got an idea. Think about the person that you admire most as a communicator and model what they do. You're like, well, Tony Robbins like jumps up and down and screams and shouts, and I can't do that. Well, I'm not saying to model exactly what they do, but really analyze. Look at it as a student and not as a person who is afraid to speak. Just go, what is it about him? Okay, what is he doing? He's using body language. Okay. So he's not holding a paper, he's actually engaged and fully present. So use your body language, you know, be more expressive openly. Okay, what else? You see somebody else. Let's say you look at a comedian. Comedians are, again, I've talked about comedians before. And when I talk about uh buckets, I've talked about the comedian methodology. We're gonna talk about that when we talk about messaging as a part of this series. Um we talk about how they are able to be in the moment, how they know their material, how they take their time, how sometimes they will mirror the energy of the audience. And you see people with crowd work, and there's comedians. I don't like recommending certain comedians because I know some, you know, they they say inappropriate things. But what you can learn from watching a comedian is how they handle when the crowd does something. Because a comedian can take a moment that was unplanned and literally build an entire set from that. Well, that takes being in the moment. So maybe you might say, Oh, I want to be more in the moment. I don't want to be in my head. I want to be in that room. So if something like that happens, I can be like, ooh, this is cool, and you jump in. All right. So that's a model to borrow from. You don't want to, if you're not used to communicating, you don't have to create a communicating persona from scratch. You can use some of the currency that's been left from others and put it into your confidence bank. When I see this, it makes me excited about what is possible for me. And when I work with clients, I try to get them to think about somebody that they saw for the first time that made them really excited to listen. Maybe it was a teacher, maybe it was a friend. Heck, maybe it might be your spouse. Somebody that really has what you would say the gift of gab. That is the model to borrow from. Okay. So we got that. That's another bank. Now, last and most certainly not least, and you picture the bank, okay, just to get an idea, the bank is in the center, and then these other deposits are coming into the bank. The last one is the best one, in my opinion. The past wins. The past wins. What a remarkable thing we get to do is you get to, when you are speaking, you get to borrow from your past successes. You don't have to reinvent being successful as a speaker because that's what I've seen a lot of people do. I have seen, and I am not joking, I have seen men and women who have spoken in front of literally presidents and spoken in front of hundreds of people who have a reputation in front of people that people, when they hear their name, they light up. They're like, this person's amazing. And when they get up to speak, they forget all of that and they act as if they haven't been investing into civilization their entire lives. It is the most criminal thing that I see as a communicator is how could you forget what you have brought into the world? You built a massive business, you've trained thousands of employees, you've saved a bunch of jobs, you have created revenue and helped people, you have given a lot of money to charity, you've done so much. Don't forget about that when you get up to go on stage. Or on the flip side, don't forget about the horrible things that you've overcome. Don't forget about the pain that you've experienced that you've gotten to the other side of. Those are past wins, too. Just because somebody doesn't know that it happened doesn't mean that you can't recall it and drop a bad boy, drop that bad boy into your confidence bank. I look at people with this and I think of how much we're leaving on the table when it comes to confidence before we get up to speak. When I was struggling with panic attacks, I would write in a journal things that were true of myself. And I I found as a practice, I would just jot some things down that God had permitted me to overcome. There were some pretty gnarly things in there, things that I hadn't really shared with many people. But you know what? I relived those things. Not in a bad way of um reliving trauma, but I relived what it was like to come through that tunnel. And then I thought, this isn't as bad as that. And then you put that into your bank. And it gave me the opportunity to speak one more time, to get up one more time, to stand in front of people and declare that yes, I belong here. Yes, God wants me to be here. Yes, I am here, yes, I'm a mess. But the truth is I have value for you. I'm bringing unique things. That's how you use the confidence audit. I'm here because I deserve to be here. I'm here because others have seen that I am fit to help this organization. I'm here because I can channel my inner Tony Robbins and let a primal yell out if I wanted to. I'm here because uniquely I'm qualified to be here. I have skills, I have giftedness that I'm bringing to the organization. And also I'm here because this isn't the hardest thing I've had to overcome. You forget what you've overcome. Maybe you need to go back to your confidence bank. I told you about the lady who came into that class, and she was she was just a wallflower for the first couple weeks. And then there was a week where we were doing a session where we had to relive using action a past memory. Now, I had already gotten the impression that this lady had lived through some pretty hellacious stuff. And we didn't probe, we didn't pry, I didn't poke. It's not never my job to do that. I will take whatever anyone offers to. I'm not a counselor, I'm not in that context to be their pastor. I'm there to help them and get the job done. So when she got up to present, she was one of the last ones to present. Everybody was excited because they were all sharing their stories. There was a lot of people that were really funny, gift of gab. And she got up and I could see there was something in her eyes. She was really, really locked in in that moment. And she was ready to get up and share. So she told the story with action about her house catching on fire. And she said, one time my house caught on fire and she was so excited, and she started running around the room. And nobody had ever seen her be so animated. So everyone just slowly started chuckling. And the chuckles built like a symphony. They just kind of were like waves. And I was laughing, but I was really curious of what was going on. And she said, and yeah, and the house came, and I saw the house was on fire, and I ran out and she was running from corner to corner and she was demonstrating how fast she was. And she was, I was really quick, and I knew that I was in trouble. And so somebody said, Well, what made your house go on fire? And she said, Well, because my mom had some problems with substances. And my mom would occasionally fall asleep with the oven on, a cigarette lit, and a glass of alcohol next to her. And one night, it was the mixture of the three that caused the house to go into an explosion. And when I was a little girl, I woke up and I heard the explosion, and I knew I had to get me and my mom out of there. And I knew the only way I could do it is if I was really, really, really fast. And some of you that are listening to this, your stomach is tightening and you're feeling sick. But I want you to know when I saw her tell this story, she was alive, like I had never seen her. She was lit up like New York City on New Year's Eve. And her eyes were brighter than I had ever known her for the previous weeks. And when she told the story, she wasn't telling it from a place of feel sorry for me. She was telling it from a place of her past victory. And when she finished and she demonstrated how she got her mom out of the house and she got out of the house, she's like, and I got it, and we got out of there. And then the firemen were like, How did you get out there? And I was like, I heard my house. And everyone was, everyone was there. And I could tell the silence at Sedden because nobody had heard a story like this. And then when she finished, the whole entire venue where we were heard the applause of her peers. And it just brought me to such a place of appreciation for transformation. You want to know why I do what I do? It's that. I'll chase that dragon for the rest of my days. You are leaving too much off the table when you get up to speak. You have been through more than anyone, including myself, will ever know. And you are uniquely qualified to stand, run that meeting, tell that team what needs to be done, stand up and deliver that keynote. Show people that you are the person who is equipped to be there, earn the right to be there, and given a gift by God to unleash a gift to those people of value that only you are uniquely equipped to bring. But before you go, fill up your confidence bank. Because once it's filled, once you start filling it, you're going to want to make repeated investments over and over again. With that said, thank you for tuning into the Sam Linton Show. And we will continue on our series about the elevated communicator. This was part two. Part three is next week. And part three, whew, oh man. We are going to talk about what happens when you learn how to fuel up and bring a message that you can actually remember and that actually matters. We'll talk soon.