119. Courage Before Confidence: How to Take Action Before You Feel Ready

Holly Toscanini: Last week we talked about the 80% start, the small, honest action you take before perfectionism has given you permission to begin. And I'm sure a lot of you noticed something happened after you listened to that episode. I bet something shifted. Something that had been sitting in your draft folder maybe started to feel possible. Or that email you hadn't sent, or that thing you hadn't posted, or that conversation that you'd been getting ready to have for the last six months. And then for many of you, I bet another voice showed up. The one that says, but I'm still not sure. I don't feel confident enough. Well, that voice isn't a new problem. It's actually the final stage of what I call the conditional living loop. And it sounds very reasonable because it says, I'll move when I feel confident. So today we're gonna dismantle that sentence. Not because confidence doesn't matter. It absolutely does. But because you have the sequence backwards. And getting it backwards is one of the most reliable ways to stay stuck exactly where you are. Welcome back to How to Lose the WAIT. ⁓ I'm Holly Toscanini, and we are in week two of the initiate phase of the WAIT Framework ⁓ Now, I want to start by naming what we're doing across this 12-episode series the architecture of matters and you really do deserve to see the big picture. ⁓ The conditional living loop is the pattern. That keeps women waiting. And it moves through five stages. First, a condition you set on taking any action, then a delay while you wait for the condition to be met, and then a disconnection from your original desire, and self doubt that starts to look like evidence you can't succeed. And then the final stage more waiting. Specifically, waiting for confidence before you take any action. Each one of these episodes in the initiate phase interrupts a stage in that loop. Now, last week, the 80% start interrupted the delay stage, the perfectionism that keeps you preparing forever instead of beginning. This week, the courage-confidence sequence interrupts the final stage, the belief that confidence has to arrive before taking action is possible. Because here's the truth that really changes everything. Confidence isn't the beginning of the process. It's actually what grows after you already have proof, and proof only comes from moving or taking action. So let's Build that sequence out today. I'm going to walk you through the conditional living loop one more time because seeing the whole picture is what makes this episode so important. The loop begins with a condition. I'll do it when it's perfect. I'll start when I feel ready. I'll be visible when I can do it perfectly. The condition sounds reasonable. It sounds like exactly the kind of thoughtful, responsible behavior that gets good girls rewarded. Then comes the delay. You prepare, you research, you revise, you wait for that condition to be met. Then comes disconnection. You lose touch with the original desire because you've been managing the risk of doing it for so long that the desire itself starts to feel remote and abstract, maybe even not that important anymore. Then comes self-doubt. The delay starts to look like evidence. Maybe I'm not the kind of woman who follows through. Maybe I don't really want it. Maybe I was never capable of achieving it in the first place. The waiting, which was supposed to be preparation, has quietly become proof of your inadequacy. And then comes the final stage. More waiting. This time with a very specific reason. I'll move when I feel confident. And it sounds like the most logical thing in the world. Of course you should feel confident before you take action. Of course you should wait until you're sure. Of course, readiness should come before movement. Except that's not how confidence actually works. The confidence isn't a feeling that shows up before evidence exists. It's a conclusion your nervous system draws after you've acted, survived, adjusted, and acted again. It's built from receipts, from the accumulated record of times you moved before you were certain and found out you could handle it. See, waiting for confidence before you act is like waiting for the light to turn green on a road with a stop sign. That green light is never coming. You have to decide to go first. And the action or the decision to go first before the feeling arrives, before certainty is guaranteed, before the outcome is known, that decision isn't confidence. That's courage. Here's the actual order of operations. Not the one most women assume, but the one that actually produces confidence. It begins with courage. Courage is the first self-trusting move you make before confidence has any evidence to stand on. It's not the absence of fear, it's the decision to act in spite of the fear, before the reassurance of a track record even exists. Courage doesn't feel bold. It often feels quiet and a little terrifying. It feels like sending the email before you've convinced yourself it's perfectly worded, like posting the thing before you know it's going to land. 100%. Like having that conversation before you can guarantee you know the outcome. Courage is the 80% start in action. It's the moment you take the imperfect, honest action, and then find out what happens. Then comes action. Not the idea of action, not the plan for action, the actual thing, the specific, concrete, real-world move that puts something of you out into contact with reality. This is the stage where most women spend years preparing for without ever quite reaching, because the preparation loop is so comfortable and the action stage can feel so exposed. But action is where the information lives. You can't get the information from inside the preparation. You can only get it by doing. Then comes evidence. This is what the action produces. Not necessarily a perfect result. The action at 80% is not always going to land exactly as you hoped. But it is evidence that you moved. Evidence that you survived. Evidence that the thing you were afraid of at the scale you were afraid of it didn't materialize the way your inner critic promised it would. Evidence that you are someone who acts on what she knows even when the guarantee hasn't arrived yet. Then comes self trust. Now, self trust isn't confidence yet, it's something that comes before confidence and makes confidence possible. Self-trust is that growing sense that your judgment can be relied on. That when you decide something is ready enough, it is. That when you know something needs to change, it does. That when you commit to a move, you follow through. You see, self-trust builds through the evidence. One kept promise to yourself at a time. And then, finally at last, as the result of everything that came before it. comes confidence. Confidence is the settled feeling that you can handle this. Not because nothing's gonna go wrong, but because you have accumulated enough evidence that you can navigate whatever comes your way. You have been seen imperfectly and you survived. You moved before you were certain and found out you were capable all along. You have kept enough promises to yourself that you now have a solid track record. See, confidence isn't the ticket that gets you into the room. It's the receipt you get after you walk in. Courage, action, evidence, self-trust, then confidence. That's the sequence. That is the actual order of operations. And once you see it clearly, you understand it immediately. And you get why waiting for confidence before you act is the one move that guarantees you're never gonna move forward. So here's where I want to make this a little more concrete because the sequence is only useful if you can actually apply it to your life right now. The most common question I get when I teach the courage-confidence sequence is this: How do I know if what I'm feeling is courage or just recklessness? How do I know I'm ready for the 80% action and not just jumping before I've done the necessary work? And it's a good question. And the answer lives In this signals versus spirals filter we covered in episode 116. See, a courageous action has a a signal underneath it, a knowing that your intuition provides. It's the thing you keep returning to that that keeps coming back with the same quiet consistency that you've been knowing for some time, even if you've been kind of talking yourself out of it. It might make you nervous, but it doesn't feel like a spiral. It doesn't loop, it doesn't catastrophize, it doesn't generate a hundred more questions every time you answer one. Recklessness, on the other hand, tends to come from a spiral. It has a sense of urgency and panic to it. It's reactive rather than responsive. It wants to move fast to escape any discomfort rather than honor a genuine, intuitive knowing. The courageous action asks for one on a step. A reactive action wants to blow everything up. So The practice for this episode kind of has two parts. Now, the first is identifying your create courageous action. Not the grand gesture, mind you, the smallest move that's true to the signal or the intuitive hit you've been getting or hearing. The one thing that if you did it this week would be a real move rather than preparation. Now, for some of you, this is sending something. The email maybe. For some, it's stay it's saying something. For some, it's stopping something. It's different for everybody, whatever it is. It has an intuitive signal underneath it that you have been managing rather than answering. Now the second part is noticing the evidence after you take action. And this is the piece most people skip, but honestly, it is the most important. After you take that courageous action, something's gonna happen. The response you receive, the feeling in your body afterward, the fact of having done the thing at all, these are evidence. So write them down. Even one sentence, a few words, because your inner critic is really good at erasing evidence. It's going to tell you that the action didn't count, that you got lucky, that the next one's going to be so much harder. Your job is to write down what actually happened so that when the inner critic starts arguing with feelings, you got the receipts to point to. That record is how self-trust builds. Not through one dramatic action that changes everything, through the steady accumulation of small, honest moves you followed through on well, and then took note of. That's how the conditional living loop finally breaks. Not with a thunderbolt, with evidence. Now the last stage of the conditional living loop is the most, I don't know, seductive maybe, because it sounds so reasonable. I'll move when I feel confident. And of course you will. Of course that's sensible. In the meantime, the years keep ticking by. See, confidence doesn't come first. Courage does. Courage is the first self-trusting move you make before confidence has anything to stand on. It is imperfect. And it might make you a little nervous. But it doesn't feel like what you imagined confidence would feel like. And it's exactly the thing that makes confidence possible. Your practice this week is the courage-confidence sequence in one small application. Find the courageous action, the signal that you've been managing instead of answering, the one that's been sort of circling around in your head. Take it, not imperfectly, or not perfectly, imperfectly, honestly, at 80%, and then write down what happened afterwards. It could be a couple of words. It could be one sentence, one piece of evidence that you moved and survived, and that the thing that you were afraid of was. at some scale handleable. That receipt is yours. Your inner critic can't take it back. If you want support in identifying the specific courageous action that interrupts your version of the conditional living loop and turning it into one clear, doable move, the Intuitive Pivot Planner is a free resource built for exactly this task. It's a short practical guide that helps you move from knowing what you've wanted to do to actually doing something with that knowing. And it does it in a way that your nervous system can manage. You can download it for free. Just head to my website, hollytoscanini.com, and the link will be in the show notes below. Next week, we're going to stay in the initiate phase with episode 120, the micro pivot, the small honest move that changes everything. Because here's what I would really love for you to sit with between now and next week. You don't need to make a dramatic leap to break the conditional living loop cycle. You need the smallest. Honest action, your nervous system can survive. Not impressive, not life-altering, just survivable and real. The micro pivot is how you make change sustainable instead of spectacular. Next week, we're going to show you exactly what that looks like. Until next time, I'll see you then, and bye for now.