Confidence Is Not Something You Are Born With

Here is the advice you have probably heard a hundred times: fake it till you make it. Show up confident even when you are not, project certainty, act as if, and eventually the feeling will follow the behavior.

I get why that advice exists. And I do not think it is entirely wrong. But after talking with Christy Meaux in the full episode, I think it is missing something pretty important, and that missing piece is probably why a lot of capable people stay stuck longer than they need to.

The thing nobody tells you about rebuilding

Christy did not rebuild once. She rebuilt multiple times in a very short window. She lost her mom to pancreatic cancer. She left a six-year career in mortgage. She launched her LLC, Cohesive Confidence. She moved to a new city. Then an eight-year relationship ended suddenly, and she found herself moving in with her dad at 49 with a business she was not sure she could keep running.

At that point, faking it was not really an option. Her confidence was, by her own description, broken. So she did something that actually takes more courage than projecting certainty: she gave herself two months off, set March 1st as her return date, and committed to not working until she was ready to show up fully.

That is not weakness. That is exactly what I would call a maintenance period. Same as in the gym, right? You do not keep loading the bar when the structure underneath is compromised. You back off, you let it recover, and you come back stronger. Skipping that step does not make the damage disappear. It just means you are building on top of something that has not healed.

What cohesive confidence actually means

One of my favorite moments in the conversation was when Christy described the networking prompt that gave her the name for her entire brand. The prompt was simple: tell us who you are and what you do. But here is the catch. No job title. No company name.

Her answer was, "My name is Christy Meaux and I create cohesive confidence."

That is it. The result. Not the deliverable, not the methodology, not the niche. The result. And she said something that I think is worth sitting with: "No matter what I do, my service can change tomorrow, but I guarantee you the result my clients are going to get is they are walking away with their cohesive confidence."

So much of the identity struggle I see with service providers five to ten years in comes down to this exact thing. They have tied who they are to what they do today, so when the work shifts, or the business pivots, or a season of life forces a change, they feel like they have lost themselves. Christy figured out how to anchor identity to the result she creates, not the container she delivers it in. That is a much more resilient place to stand.

The permission letter

Here is where the faking-it advice breaks down. Christy did not project confidence she did not have. She gave herself permission to build it, one intentional yes at a time.

At 48, she made a decision to stop serving other people's expectations for what her life should look like and start setting her own. She wrote herself a permission letter. And she started saying yes to rooms, opportunities, and relationships that genuinely felt right, while saying no to the things that did not serve the vision she was building.

That is not fake it till you make it. That is a completely different mechanism. It is awareness first, then action. Notice what aligns, say yes to that, close the door on the rest, and pay attention to what works for you. Over time, the yeses stack up, the evidence builds, and the confidence follows from something real.

She bought her first house. She celebrated her 50th birthday in Paris. None of it came from projecting certainty she did not have. It came from giving herself permission to go after what she actually wanted.

Grieve the transition first

This might be the most practical and most overlooked piece of the whole conversation. Christy said you can grieve a job change. You can grieve a move, even if it is just three streets over. You can grieve the end of a friendship. And until you acknowledge it, accept it, and actually feel it, you are not moving through the rebuild. You are just walking around it.

Most people skip the grief and wonder why the new chapter feels thin. The reason it feels thin is because they are trying to build on ground that has not been cleared yet.

Grief is not the obstacle to rebuilding. It is the first stage of it.

The daily practice that ties it together

Christy uses a journaling formula that she teaches to clients and will email to anyone who requests it at CohesiveConfidence.com. The formula includes three gratitudes, three manifestations, things you are calling in, things you are releasing, and a focus or theme for the day.

She made one point about the sequencing that I thought was sharp. She starts with gratitude on purpose, before manifestation, because if you try to call in what you want before you are in a grateful state of mind, you are more likely to hit the thought that you do not deserve it or that it is too much to ask for. Gratitude gets the brain moving in the right direction first. Then the vision has somewhere to land.

I will say this too: I have gone through cycles with gratitude journaling myself, stretches where I am consistent and stretches where I fall off. And I can tell the difference. When I am in it, things seem to fall into place more. I feel luckier. The right people and the right conversations seem to show up. That is not magic. That is the reticular activating system at work. You are training your brain to notice what is already there.

Your next step

If this conversation resonated with you, I want to point you toward the free 4-day training at primepperformance.co/training. It is built around the same foundation Christy is talking about here: getting clear on who you are, what you actually want, and what has been quietly holding you back from it. It is a good place to start, especially if you are in a season that feels more like a rebuild than a momentum run.

You do not have to fake confidence you do not have. You just have to give yourself permission to build it.

Pay attention to what works for you.