Do You Feel Like A Fraud?

Hey there, it’s Graham again here from The Confident Man Project, and today I’m coming at you live from my beautiful backyard here. As you can see, my backyard looks out over this beautiful bush land, and it’s way too nice a day to be stuck in the office this morning so, yeah, I’m here in my backyard. And today I want to talk about feeling like a fraud, and I have a confession to take and the confession is that sometimes I feel like a fraud.

Now, feeling like a fraud is very common so it’s quite possible that you might be able to relate to this. And often I’ve heard a lot of famous people, movie stars, celebrities, people in the spotlight, often talk about how they feel like a fraud. They feel as though they haven’t deserved their fame or they haven’t deserved what they’ve got or they feel as though there’s some kind of let’s call it incongruity perhaps between what they’ve got or how they’re perceived by other people and how they actually feel inside.

Now, I can definitely relate to this, and I’ll tell you what: if you want to feel like a fraud when it comes to being confident, then I recommend that you go and write a book on the subject because I wrote a book about confidence and I did that for two reasons.

The first reason was that I wanted to be able to help other people with something that I had really struggled with. The second reason was I didn’t feel as confident as I wanted to feel all the time, and I figured that the way to really nail that and to totally get on top of the problem would be to go and research, discover and write a book about the subject of confidence.

Now that works and it’s a good strategy, but the side effect of that is that now whenever I’m in a situation where I don’t feel completely confident, I really notice because I know I’ve written a book on the subject and I put myself out there as this guy who helps other people become confident.

Confidence is not necessarily about a feeling. Being confident isn’t just about feeling confident all the time, like feeling at ease all the time. That’s certainly part of confidence, but really confidence is the ability to take action in the face of ours fears and to be able to do what we want regardless of whether we’re feeling fantastically confident or whether we’re feeling totally on top of things but to be in a situation where we don’t feel held back by a lack of confidence

So don’t confuse confidence, the attribute of being able to do what it is that you want in the world, with confidence, the feeling of always feeling content and at ease.

If you always felt content and at ease, your life would get really boring. We’re naturally drawn to situations that expand our comfort zones, expand our horizons and expose us to new experiences. And whenever we’re exposed to new and unfamiliar experiences, we’re going to feel a little lack of confidence. And if we go out there saying that we’re really confident into situations where we don’t actually feel that, we may end up feeling like a fraud.

Now, it’s not really because we’re not confident or because we’re lacking anything; it’s simply because there’s a bit of catching up to do and a bit of a disparity between where we’d really like to be and where we actually are.

If you find yourself feeling like a fraud, don’t tell yourself that it needs to hold you back from going after what you want. You can go for what you want in life, and you don’t have to be held back by this feeling that you’re not good enough or you’re inadequate or whatever. In fact, the way to get the confidence that you want and the sense of ease is to go after what you want, even when you’re feeling nervous.