Confidence Is Not a Feeling You Wait For

An invitation was delivered on Tuesday, and for once you didn’t say no.

You read it twice. A Saturday afternoon, somebody’s garden, nothing enormous. You could picture the gate, and the trestle table with the cling film over it, and the person who’d have been pleased to see you walk in.

So you typed back that you’d love to, and that you’d let them know nearer the time.

You meant both halves of that. You weren’t being slippery and you weren’t stalling for the sake of it. There was something you wanted to have happen first, before you’d commit to a Saturday, and if somebody had pushed you on what it was you’d have got there in the end.

You were waiting to feel like a woman who’d just go.

The thing you are waiting for

Have a proper look at it, because you’ve probably never had to put it into words.

It’s a feeling, somewhere between willingness and ease. You want to be able to think about Saturday afternoon and feel mostly all right about it. Not thrilled. You’re not asking for thrilled. Just the absence of that drag under your ribs when you picture arriving on your own and looking for somebody you know.

And you’ve assumed, the way anybody sensible would, that the feeling turns up by itself if you leave it long enough. That it’s weather. That one morning you’ll wake up and it’ll have come back, and then you’ll answer the message, and then you’ll go.

You’ve been waiting for that morning for about four years.

It actually works the other way round

The thing I most often have to say out loud, sitting with a woman in York who has been waiting in exactly this way, is that what she’s waiting for is a receipt.

It’s what you get handed afterwards, for having done the thing. It’s made out of the afternoon itself: the gate, the first ten minutes, the bit where somebody moved up on the bench and you sat down and it was fine. You can’t be issued it in advance, because in advance there’s nothing yet to issue it for.

Nobody gives you the receipt on the way in.

So when you wait for that feeling before you’ll answer a message, you’re standing at the wrong end of the whole business. The feeling is made in one place only, and that place is the far side of the Saturday you haven’t agreed to yet.

Which is why the waiting has no end to it. Not because you’re waiting badly, or without enough discipline, or with the wrong attitude about it. Nothing is coming, because you’re standing where it doesn’t get delivered.

Three different doors, one identical arrangement

I want to set you beside two other women, because you’ll read the paragraph that isn’t about you and decide it’s a different subject altogether.

If it’s your body, what you’re waiting for is a run of days good enough to make Saturday a reasonable bet, and you’ll answer once you’ve had one.

If it’s the room, you’re waiting to feel like somebody who can walk into a place on her own, and you’ll book the thing once you do.

If it’s being seen, you’re waiting to feel able to stand having your name on it, or your face in the photograph, and you’ll say yes when that turns up.

Now put the three of you side by side and look at the shape instead of the subject. Each of you has named a feeling. Each of you has made that feeling the price of admission. And in all three cases the feeling is built out of evidence that only exists on the far side of the door you’re standing at, waiting.

It’s the same arrangement three times over. What differs is the reason each of you gives, and the reason was never the part doing the damage.

You have already done this the right way round, many times

Think about the first week of a job, years ago. A lanyard, a corridor you didn’t know, a kitchen with somebody else’s mug in it.

You weren’t confident on that first Monday. Nobody is. You went anyway, because a job starts on a Monday whether you’re ready for it or not, and by about the third week the feeling of being more comfortable has arrived, made out of the first two.

Nobody asked you how you felt about it beforehand. That’s the only reason it worked.

Somewhere between then and now, the asking crept in. Things stopped being fixtures and started being decisions, and every decision got put to a vote of one, and the vote is always taken on how you feel about it today. Today, at the kitchen table, with the kettle going and Saturday still a fortnight off, you feel no particular enthusiasm at all. So you wait.

What the waiting looks like from the other side

Here’s the difficult bit, and it follows straight on from the invitations that slowed down.

Nobody can see you waiting. There’s no outward sign of it. What they get is a message that says you’d love to and you’ll let them know, and a fortnight of nothing, and then either a yes at the last minute or a very kind no.

Filed, that reads as a maybe. And a maybe is filed next to a no, because it can’t be planned around either.

You’ve got two names written on the back of a piece of paper from last week. Neither of them ever saw you waiting. They only saw how it came out.

This week

There’ll be something sitting unanswered. A message, a date somebody floated, an invitation you’ve been carrying about in your head rather than in the diary.

Answer it today. Properly, with a yes, while nothing whatsoever has changed about how you feel.

That’s the whole exercise, and the point of it is the order. You’re not going to feel ready first. You’re going to go, and then, somewhere around the second glass of squash and a conversation about somebody’s decking, you’ll get the thing you’ve been waiting four years for, and it will be so undramatic that you’ll nearly miss it.

Put the date in the diary in pen.

Next Sunday I’ll ask you to write down the last ten things you said no to. Not to feel bad about a single one of them. To see them together, in one place, for the first time.

When you are ready to step into the after, book a Reset Session at HypnoGirl.

If you want something to listen to before the next hard thing you’ve got coming up, sign up for Confidence Connection the email and get Twelve Minutes Before You Walk In along with your welcome email. Twelve minutes, for the bit before you go in.