This weekend I watched my 8-year-old take the stage — a relatively large stage in a 1000+ seat auditorium, packed full of parents and supporters. This was C.C.’s third academy ballet performance (her fourth if you ask her, since she did a stage show in pre-K). And as she fluttered through her dance routine in her turquoise sequined dress with a dozen other girls, she reveled in the spotlight. More than once I caught her beaming from ear to ear.
The next day we fought the sleepies at the crack of dawn to gear her up and drive her across town to her first ever swim meet. She had just begun taking swim lessons this time last year. Despite a small bit of nerves about being disqualified since she was still a diver-in-progress, she was eager and excited to get in the water. She had been asking to try out for the swim team for months. There we were watching C.C. compete, barely an ounce of fear in her young bones.
I, on the other hand, strongly dislike being on stage. Or in the spotlight. Presenting to a crowd? Giving a speech? Double “no, thank you!” I don’t like to dance in private let alone with everyone watching.
And swimming? I had four years of it in high school. In my all-girl, private Catholic academy in cold, snowy western New York, we’d walk through an underground tunnel to go from our main school building to our athletic center. There I did manage to learn sculling1. But that was about it. I spent a lot of time back then cheering on our swim team, and I love watching the swim events in the Summer Olympics. But I can barely doggy paddle.
It’s not rare for kids to be interested in or have skills in something completely different from their parents. Inexplainable maybe, and definitely notable. To watch C.C. so confidently navigate new experiences with new people is humbling and leaves me curious.
Why is she not intimidated by dancing or singing in front of an audience, while she lets herself be intimidated by math exercises she has proven to be successful at?
Why do kids take on things most adults shy away from? Why and how do we learn to have fears?
Why do I keep outsourcing the bunning of C.C.’s hair for ballet performances, when I end up disappointed with the final results and snobbishly, frustratedly think, The one I did the other day was better….?
Why do I cling to the sinking feeling in my stomach that claims I can’t do that whenever client-based writing is proposed? Or when I feel an expectation that I need to posture and “show up” a certain way?
Why am I buzzing like a bee and tossing procrastination to the wayside to start a new newsletter with my friend and accountability partner,
, when I took a several-month Substack writing hiatus to flail around in skittishness and self-doubt?
I’m only the armchair version of a psychologist, and my less confident me wants to quip I’m barely even that. Curious, thought-meandering me thinks confidence is contextual. It comes out full-force with its war face on, or flees for the shadows, depending on the circumstances.
I didn’t do ballet as a child. And while I have great respect for the artform and the dedication and endurance it requires, it’s not really my thing. My cousin’s wife and I throw our hands up at the irony that she got the hockey-playing daughter, and I got the ballet-dancing one. I’m also all thumbs when it comes to doing hair. Being “girly” isn’t really my thing either. So I suspect my hesitance to take on bun hair has roots in decades of previous experience. Yet, I’ve made hair buns on C.C.’s head a handful of times now and pleasantly surprise myself with the results. And still feel the need to outsource it.
Newsletters? Love them. Freaking LOVE making magazines and newsletters, whether digital or old-school (is the best school) print. I love designing the layouts, scheming themes, researching and writing the content of course, and also managing and executing the end-to-end publication process. It’s likely the ONLY thing I like to manage. And I hate managing as much or more than public speaking.
So when I look back at my career, especially the last few years at the professional services firm, I see all the magazine and newsletter work I did. The newsletters deemed professionally “extracurricular” to my day job and official role. Across departments, I volunteered to contribute to them, lead them, and create them from scratch. I had bosses who equally encouraged and scolded me for wanting to spend so much time on making newsletters.
I took to the newsletter stage. I dove in not always knowing what I was in for. I was confident.
And I find myself confident again brewing up this soon-to-be-live newsletter with Kate.
But it’s not just that it’s a newsletter. By my stride is a newsletter…
…that I mostly confidently launched last year and still feel strong about, but sometimes get inside my own head of who cares what I have to say?
Curio Road will be a newsletter on a more focused topic than stride, about collecting and curating, novelties and nostalgia, hunting and gathering, with some history and science thrown in. It’ll capture things I naturally get excited about, things I quickly learned Kate got excited about too, and when she and I got excited together as we simultaneously, desperately sought a non-client-based type of writing work, we saw and felt this newsletter magically unfold, taking shape organically, rapidly. We confidently ran with the idea, decided on a name, claimed some internet real estate, and plan to launch before month’s end.
My reflections this week lead me to (confidently?) believe confidence is connected to context and circumstances, and also to strengths. Not what-you’re-good-at-strengths, but rather what-fills-your-tank strengths. Life requires us to “show up” to make it through the day, to take on what it dishes out, most importantly to show up for and to ourselves. As I told C.C. on the way to theater camp this morning, you show up by giving it your best. When the tank is full, or at least filling up, I find the energy to be confident. I find the energy to want to give it my best.
The integrator in me — the introverted, people-person that likes to connect and collaborate with a partner — gets energized by both the content and the collaboration. The volley of ideas. The satisfaction of not just the end product and its potential success, but the immediate successes, the small wins, of solving and building, with a partner, in real time. Collaborative confidence is contagious — a self-feeding momentum accelerator. By my stride fills my tank, when I let it. Curio Road with Kate is like hyper-fuel — invigorating pedal-to-the-metal motivation I’ve been craving the last couple years.
But I also think confidence is circumstantial. Did I sleep ok? Am I sick or run down? Am I overloaded with tank-draining activities? A war face, no matter how strong, can easily get dinged and dented, and eventually dismantled if not careful.
I’ve been accused of lacking confidence by an array of people across the last 30+ years of adulthood. And I’d always get miffed by that, countering verbally or internally that I’m extremely confident. Just also realistic. And cynical. Maybe the “context” of confidence2 is just a nice way to justify my excuses. I’m clearly not confident in this conclusion.
I’ll close with a telling excerpt from my job interview for the professional services firm IT gig I ended up holding for 11 years:
Interviewer: “Are you assertive?”
Me: “I think so.”
Shameless plug for my husband’s confident podcast.