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Hello Reader,

This week on the podcast I spoke with Vicki Landers, one of our coaches at Transforming Healthcare Coaching®. Vicki spent eighteen years as a clinician inside a single health system before moving into coaching, and she now works with healthcare professionals through career transitions. The question we took on was a simple one: where does confidence actually come from?

We started with the definition, because that is where most of us get stuck. Somewhere in our training, confidence gets quietly redefined as certainty. Knowing the diagnosis, knowing the dose, knowing how it ends. Vicki's definition is different. Confidence is the belief that you have the capacity to meet whatever is coming at you, whether or not you already know the answer. Under the first definition, every uncertain moment feels like failure. Under the second, uncertainty is just the condition you work in.

That shift matters because confidence is built through action, including the action that doesn't work. Vicki made the point that learning how to learn is itself a skill, and that people who treat failure as information build something people who avoid failure never do.

She also named what sits underneath imposter syndrome, and this was the part I keep coming back to. A child is worthy of love no matter what. At some point we quietly attach conditions to our own worth. When we stop believing we are worthy, we stop being able to focus on process, because we need the outcome to prove something. She hears the same discounting from accomplished people all the time: if I could do it, it must not have been a big deal.

Her practical work runs through three places:

living in congruence with your values,

noticing what and who derails you, and

choosing the people you spend time around.

She observed that the most confident leaders she works with tend to be surrounded by other confident leaders. Not arrogance. Understated steadiness that turns out to be contagious.

Here is the teaching point I'd hold onto:

And the practice, for the moment before a hard shift or a difficult conversation: ask yourself, how did I get here? The answer is evidence you already have.

My question for you this week: what did it actually take to get where you are, and when did you last let yourself acknowledge it?

You can learn more about working with Vicki and our coaching team at transforminghealthcarecoaching.com.​

Join us for Clear & Caring Communication​

If you've ever left a conversation thinking "I should have said something" — or said something and immediately wished you hadn't — this is for you.

Clear & Caring Communication is a live event for healthcare professionals who want to stop winging the hardest conversations of their careers.

🎧 Listen to the podcast sneak peek episode below and listen to the full episode on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, Podbean, or Amazon Music.

Stay mindful and keep leading,
Lillian
Founder & CEO

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