As a systems expert, Nicole would go into businesses and set up systems for every single aspect of a business from lead gen, to hiring, to content creation, legal and everything in between.

The problem was Nicole wasn’t super confident.
She knew the work was amazing, she just didn’t believe SHE did it amazing.

She didn’t trust her own decisions, felt like she’d never be able to live up to client expectations. She didn’t believe in herself.

This meant that when she was guiding clients, she’d make soft suggestions versus telling them what they really needed to hear.
Or she’d sell herself short on sales calls.


Needless to say, this pattern wasn’t helping her business growth or her sense of self.

Nicole was leaving money on the table because she couldn't charge what she was worth. How could she charge premium rates when she couldn't even state her recommendations with conviction?

But the worst part was how she felt about herself. Every time she hesitated, and it didn’t land well a little voice would say, "See? You're not actually that smart. You don’t really know what you’re doing.”

Nicole had been in therapy for years. And while it helped with many aspects, it didn’t help with her confidence.


Truthfully, Nicole didn’t come to because of confidence. She joined Optimize Your ADHD Brain for struggles related to focus.
But on that first call, I told Nicole, I wanted to help her with confidence, also. No guarantees but it hurt me so much to see her struggle like this.

I knew that as we improved her underlying thinking skills, she’ll feel better about the work she’s doing and her confidence will go up.

When thinking skills are weak, you end up doing subpar work, which shows your brain you’re not really good at this, which reduces your confidence and only ends up affecting your thinking skills more.
If we can improve your thinking skills, we can make the cycle go the other way around.


Real confidence comes from your brain trusting you’ll be able to figure it out. It’s not about having all answers. It’s knowing that whatever happens you’ll be able to deal with it.


Thing is, when your thinking skills are weak, your brain doesn’t believe it will be able to figure it out. Because, right now, in the moment it can’t.
This is why affirmations for confidence don't work. You can’t convince yourself you have a skill if you don’t have it. You can learn the skill and then your confidence will go up

It made sense Nicole didn’t have the confidence. Her brain was just remembering all the times she messed up and seeing that it doesn’t have the skills to do what she wanted to do.

When she’d give a suggestion to a client, her brain would tell her “Your suggestions aren’t good” because it would think about the time she didn’t gather all the right information and ended up giving a bad suggestion.

Really, all it was a weak thinking skill of gathering precise data. Once that skill is improved, her suggestions were on target.


Another way it show up was in constantly second-guessing her decisions in her personal life because of all the bad decisions she made previously. Bad decisions tend to come from a weak thinking skill of comparing. Once comparing improved, she started making better decisions and so her confidence in decision-making went up.


I’ve seen this dramatically in my own life.

As a kid I was super shy. Like super, super shy. Didn’t have friends and was embarrassed to go over to people.
In 5th grade, I started working on my thinking skills and guess what? My confidence went up. I started speaking more assertively.
I believed in my thoughts and opinions. I started coming out of my shell and eventually made friends.
Because now my brain had the skills.


Here’s the cool part,
It ends up becoming a vicious cycle.

You build skills, your confidence goes up, so you have an even better mindset to build skills and your confidence goes up even more.

If you’re someone who's not as confident as you want to be or is often second-guessing yourself, here’s what I’d suggest:

1. Get clear on where you really are. Don’t lie to yourself and say you’re better than where you are, and don’t put yourself down and say you’re worse than where you are.

2. Identify which of the thinking skills you need to improve. The easiest way to do this is to take the assessment at lifepixuniversity.com/cf

3. Spend 10 minutes a day working on the skill. If you’re not sure how to improve it, use this podcast! Each episode explains a different thinking skill with ways to get better at it.

If you’re still unsure, DM me on LinkedIn @ST Rappaport with the thinking skill you want to improve and I’ll share with you some exercises you can do.

4. Watch the way you talk about it yourself. Instead of saying “I’m bad at making decisions” change it to “I’m working on getting better at making decisions”
The words we use have an incredible impact on the actions we end up taking.



If you’re thinking: "But I've always struggled with confidence. This is just who I am." I’d like to remind you that that’s a fixed mindset thought process.


My favorite part of Nicole’s story was when in middle of a sales call, the potential client interrupted her said "We need this. When can you start?"

And she signed that 6-figure deal. (She was still in Optimize Your ADHD Brain at that time!)

It happened simply because she was confident, real confident and showed up to the sales call differently.


Cheers to Peak Brain Performance!