The case for existential Confidence – and why your attachment history is running the show.
You’ve felt it. That moment when you knew – with your whole body – exactly what you wanted to do. Move to the city that’s been pulling at you for years. Launch the business idea that lights you up every time you think about it. Pivot your career. Ask someone out. End the relationship that has quietly been costing you pieces of yourself.
You felt aligned. You felt ready. And still… you waited.
For more time. More money. When the circumstances are better, when the stars align, when some future version of yourself finally has it more together. And it’s not because you don’t understand the steps, or lack the knowledge, the talent, the skill. It’s because something in you doesn’t fully trust the risk of moving forward. So you overthought it. Researched a little more. Quietly told yourself: that’s great for someone else, but I couldn’t do that.
And then you called it ‘realism’.
What if the Confidence you see in people who make those moves isn’t what you think it is? What if Confidence isn’t believing you’ll get it right – but believing you can recover if you don’t?
What Confidence actually is (and isn’t)
Confidence is not certainty. It’s not charisma, fearlessness, or being the loudest person in the room. It’s not bravado, and it is definitely not what you see when someone posts their “unbothered” highlight reel.
True Confidence is an existential capacity – a nervous system’s ability to move through the world while figuring it out, without falling short feeling like a threat to your entire sense of self. In my framework, it lives in what I call the SoulSet District: the inner architecture governing your sense of direction, meaning, and orientation. Confidence is what makes that inner direction usable. It’s your spirit made operational.
It’s the capacity to feel a pull toward something because it carries meaning for you – because it aligns with your gifts, your purpose – and then to move toward it. Not because you have a guarantee. But because you trust yourself enough to navigate whatever happens next.
“True Confidence is not believing ‘I won’t fail.’ It’s believing: if I do, I’ll adjust. I’ll recover. My sense of self won’t collapse.”
This is where people get it wrong. They think they lack belief in their ability. Often, they don’t. What they actually lack is belief in their recoverability – the embodied sense that they can be wrong, get it wrong, and still be safe. Still belong. Still be worthy of love and connection.
They don’t have the embodied experience of being down and still safe. Of taking up space in their true shape and not being rejected for it. So risk doesn’t just feel uncomfortable. It feels existentially threatening. And that is attachment-based patterning.
Confidence is not the absence of feeling risk – just like courage isn’t the absence of fear. It’s a reprioritization. The confident person still feels the risk; their system simply knows it will survive the outcome. As a business owner, I see this constantly when hiring. I can bring on someone extraordinarily capable – intelligent, skilled, strategic – and they will spend hours building spreadsheets we’ll never use, preparing to perform, polishing, refining. And never actually moving. This isn’t incompetence. It’s a nervous system that has learned to equate necessary risk with imminent threat.
Wayne Gretzky – a hockey legend, for the non-Canadians among us – is credited with one of sport’s great axioms: you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. He later admitted it was his father’s line, a recurring theme growing up. Take the shot. If you don’t try, you absolutely will fail. That’s the kind of early environment that lets a legend blossom – not the absence of fear, but the deeply embodied knowledge that trying is worth it.
The nervous system behind the hesitation
So where does Confidence actually come from? Not adulthood. Not your first promotion, not high school. Much, much earlier.
British psychotherapist and neuroscientific researcher Sue Gerhardt wrote extensively about how early attachment literally shapes the developing brain. The infant brain’s regulatory systems – the stress system, the reward system, the circuits responsible for resilience and impulse control – are not fully organized at birth. They wire up through attuned caregiving.
A baby is born with a natural drive to explore. To reach, to move, to orient toward novelty. That drive is biological. But it only continues if it feels safe. When a baby crawls away, looks back, and sees a calm and available caregiver, the nervous system receives two signals at once: I can move outward. And I can return. That return is everything.
Secure attachment loop
Explore → Stress response → Caregiver soothes → Return to baseline → Explore again
When the loop is disrupted
Explore → Stress response → No repair / overreaction / withdrawal
Gerhardt’s research shows that when distress is consistently met with calm repair, the stress system becomes balanced and regulated. When it’s met with unpredictability, dismissal, or anxiety, the stress system becomes sensitized – developing a threat detection bias. The brain starts scanning more aggressively for potential loss of connection. Risk becomes flagged as danger more quickly.
This is where we see the two classic adaptations. Some children become hyperactivated – they over-monitor, over-prepare, seek reassurance constantly, scan for approval before moving. Others lean toward shutdown – they stop reaching, mute desire, avoid trying altogether. Both are adaptations to the same core problem: their inner signals weren’t mirrored and responded to appropriately.
And before you think this requires dramatic or abusive parenting – it doesn’t. For at least a couple of generations, experts advised parents to let babies cry it out, to avoid picking them up for fear of spoiling them. You don’t need an overwhelmed or chaotic home to come away with the early imprint that exploration doesn’t feel reliably safe. The bar for disrupting that loop is lower than most people realize.
Bring all of this forward into adulthood. When you consider moving cities, quitting your job, launching the business, ending the relationship – your body isn’t just evaluating logistics. It’s evaluating: What happens if I get this wrong? Will I recover? Will I still belong? If your early nervous system learned smooth repair, risk feels activating but manageable. If it didn’t, risk feels existential. That’s not drama. That’s developmental neuroscience.
Dents, deficits, and the shape you were moulded into
Through attachment – through your earliest experiences – you are shaped. Like a key cut to fit a specific lock, that shape determines what feels possible for you, what feels like “too much,” how you move through the world, where you feel it’s prudent to stall, what kind of rooms you end up in, what kind of relationships you cultivate and tolerate.
If nothing interfered, your natural shape would be curious, reaching, expressive, willing to try and fail and try again – like a baby who falls down seven times and stands up eight. But life does interfere. When your natural impulses are shamed, ignored, overridden, mocked, or simply not mirrored back to you, that’s what I call a dent.
One dent, one moment? Your system can repair that. We’re built resilient. But when the same interruption happens again and again – especially early, especially from the people you love and depend on most – that dent becomes self-maintaining. Your nervous system, your neurology, your instincts uphold the pressure that created it. That’s what I call a deficit: an Intuitive IQ deficit, or IIQ-d.
Your inner compass is still there – energy and soul can’t actually be damaged – but your nervous system has been trained to distrust it. Brené Brown’s research found that the only differentiator between people who have a sense of belonging and those who don’t is that the former believe they are worthy of belonging. That belief is part of what secure attachment builds. And Confidence is part of that belief.
You probably don’t think of yourself as ‘under-confident’
Most people don’t. Their inner monologue runs more like: given who I am and what’s happened, my level of self-belief is accurate. They point to the failed launch, the job they didn’t get, the relationship that fell apart – and read those as proof that their caution is realistic.
But zoom out in developmental time and it’s almost always the other way around. The lack of Confidence came first. Long before high school marks, popularity, or career trajectory, the nervous system had already learned: reaching is risky. Taking up space is a liability. The adult “evidence” just organized itself around that pre-existing shape.
One of the most common patterns I see in high-capacity people is what I call Disillusionment Despite Direction. You know exactly what you want. You’re not confused or lost or directionless. You’re disillusioned – by your own dream. You can journal about it, vision-board it, talk about it beautifully in therapy. But when it comes to going after it full-throttle, something feels off. You could explain it eloquently to someone else but can’t seem to execute it for yourself.
“Not lack of ambition. Not lack of intelligence. Not lack of courage. A nervous system that learned: if I move and it goes wrong, I might not be brought back.”
The gap between knowing and moving? That’s attachment. That’s stress circuitry. That’s early patterning. It’s not a to-do list problem. It’s a SoulSet problem – and it requires a different kind of solution.
What high Confidence actually looks like
When the Personal Power of Confidence is intact, decisions land. You don’t spin. You don’t crowdsource your identity every time something matters to you. You don’t need unanimous agreement to move. When critics throw stones from the stands while you’re in the ring, you brush it off for what it is – a perspective so far from where you’re going that it’s simply not worthy of your attention.
Confidence doesn’t require you to be absolutely sure of what comes next. It requires you to know what is yours to do. And then you begin – not recklessly, not impulsively, but cleanly. Aligned. Coherent. Inspired by inner direction, free from anxious urgency. You’re allowed to move. You’re allowed to experiment. You’re allowed to get it wrong. You’re allowed to evolve publicly, because your worth is not on trial.
This is not a personality trait. It’s a developed SoulSet. And if it isn’t your experience yet, that doesn’t mean you lack courage. It means something shaped how you interpret your inner signal – and that shaping almost always begins in early attachment.
This is where Part Two begins
In the next instalment, I’ll break down exactly how Disillusionment Despite Direction forms – how attachment shapes it, why it creates paralysis in capable people (or a hamster wheel that looks like success but feels like quiet dread), and how to actually heal it.
Because until you understand this pattern, you’ll keep mistaking hesitation for realism. And that is costing you more than you realize.
Explore Further
If you would like to explore this work further, these resources may be helpful: