The Courage of Your Talent

SHOW NOTES: I've been consulting, coaching, advising and otherwise helping people to achieve success, personally and professionally, for over half a century. Those clients include CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, top governmental elected officials, executive directors on nonprofits, solo entrepreneurs, entertainers, athletes, and lawyers, accountants, designers, architects, and a myriad of employees. Until the 21st Century kicked in, this was standard work on skills, behaviors, attitudes, and self-confidence. Then things became a bit weird, which was exciting for me, being a resource for people, but scary for them (and, I admit, a bit baffling to me). However, prior to the covid epidemic, it became clear there was a subliminal crisis of confidence brewing which, during and post-covid, burst into the open and became its own pandemic. Many might say the causes were obvious: conflicting medical opinions, tainted political agendas, paranoid conspiracy theories, and all of this inflamed by social media random misinformation and speculation. Yet as I watched the confusion, uncertainty, and vacillation, I realized the actual causes were an unprecedented feeling of powerlessness, an unsatisfied need to receive some kind of "permission" to act, and a profound loss of self-esteem and self-worth. "Self-esteem," for simplicity's sake for the moment, is a confidence in one's abilities to achieve desired results, and an ongoing self-respect irrespective of whether the individual is successful. It's not about ongoing "victories" or "wins," but it is about a permanent sense of "worth." For many people, that has been lost. Like athletes in a "slump" in terms of performance, especially under pressure, people are becoming more afraid, more uncertain, as the turmoil and disruptive nature of our times continue and will not abate.