The Secret to Confidence, All the Time, Everywhere

The Power of What Your Mind Learns to Notice

Meera had just finished presenting to the board.

A colleague in the same room called it one of the best board sessions of the year. She remembered Meera’s convincing answers and the interest in the room. 

Meera left the boardroom with the chair’s thanks, but by the time she reached her desk, she was beginning to think the presentation had been a failure. She couldn’t get one moment out of her mind. Halfway through her third slide, the finance director started looking at his phone.

And that’s all Meera remembered. Had she lost him? Was there something wrong with the numbers? By evening, she had convinced herself the whole presentation had gone badly.

In 2017, Google researchers published a paper called Attention Is All You Need. They were trying to understand how machines could make sense of language and meaning.

Their breakthrough was learning how to weigh information: what mattered, what didn’t, and where attention should go.

The same idea helps explain what happened to Meera:

Confidence doesn’t come from the available information, but from which information our minds learn to notice.

For some, in tough situations, their attention finds evidence that they’re capable. For others, like Meera, it locks onto whatever might go wrong.

Some of what Meera had lived through as a child had trained her attention to interpret ambiguous situations as signs of threat. 

A neutral expression became disapproval. A distracted reply became evidence that she wasn’t respected. A pause before an answer meant she had said something wrong.

The 7 Skills to impress™ framework calls this pattern Attention Direction. It is the filter, shaped first by the people and experiences around us and later by our own Identity, that answers one question: 

“what should I pay attention to here?”

Our Identity is continually assessing whether we are safe, wanted, respected and good enough. Where we sit on the IDQ scale reflects the answers we learned in childhood.

When someone has a lower IDQ, their attention is more likely to look for evidence that Safety is uncertain, Belonging is fragile or Capability may fail them. 

Meera’s Identity had become very good at Sifting and Sorting this way. The finance director’s glance at his phone supplied the evidence for something she already feared.

This was Meera’s Edited Reality: her confidence had been shaped by the one signal her attention selected, while almost everything else in the meeting had been filtered out.

This process is immediate. By the time Meera had noticed the glance, her filter had already marked it as the most important event in the room.

A higher IDQ gives more weight to signals carrying a positive meaning:

“He’s easily distracted. He’s got an important message. Everyone is responding well.”

The finance director still checks his phone. What changes is the meaning Meera gives it, and therefore how she feels and responds.

This is why ability alone doesn’t determine your confidence. Meera could perform well, yet still feel she had failed because her Attention Direction was always looking for evidence that she wasn’t good enough.

Understanding this intellectually was one thing.
Changing a filter that had been operating for years was another.

I shared the AI paper with Meera before one of our coaching meetings, and the idea made sense to her. She had spent years fighting anxious thoughts. Now she became curious about the filter selecting them in the first place.

After meetings, when she felt the familiar disappointment, she began asking a more useful question: 

“Did the evidence match my Edited Reality?”

Usually, the evidence did not support it.

Understanding the pattern helped, but a filter embedded in childhood, which had shaped her thinking for years, would take time and repetition to change. So we began using Review and Preview, and that was the start of Meera’s transformation.

In Review, we looked back over her previous fortnight and identified the Strengths, Qualities and Attributes, or SQAs, she had shown in her work. Like most low IDQ people her attention was practised at finding her shortcomings rather than recognising her strengths.

With some prompting she got the idea, and as her list of SQAs grew she began to catch the old interpretations earlier. Then, in Preview, she looked ahead to difficult situations and rehearsed how those qualities would help her handle them. Repetition built this into a habit.

There were still weeks when the old pattern came back. A meeting would go well and she would spend the journey home fretting over one awkward answer. The difference was that she could now see what her attention was doing.

Sometimes she interrupted the emotional response before it took hold. Sometimes she noticed a positive signal that she would once have missed. These were modest changes, but they gave us something useful to build upon.

The real test came when her firm brought in consultants to assess the senior leadership team. There would be interviews, written assessments and a presentation to the partners. Roles might change and some posts might be disestablished.

Within days, Meera was overanalysing exchanges with colleagues and reading tension into ordinary meetings. By the third week, she was sleeping badly and dreading work.

We met the day before her presentation. I asked her to write down what she feared.

Then we did Preview. Meera formed her Outcome, chose the SQAs from her list that would help her achieve it and, once she was relaxed, walked herself through the presentation, bringing her preparation, knowledge and qualities into each stage.

The two accounts looked remarkably different. Her fears came from an imagined future created by her Sacred Flaws: conversations she might have mishandled, judgements the consultants might make and changes the partners might impose. 

None of it had happened. 

Her Preview contained all the solid preparation she had done, knowledge she could rely on and qualities her work had demonstrated repeatedly.

Seeing them together helped her compose herself and refocus. It gave her a way to manage her anxiety and concentrate on the Outcome she wanted to create.

The next day went well, and this time she could appreciate it for herself. 

She noticed the chair nod at a key point. A partner she often found difficult to read asked a follow-up question that showed she had been listening closely. The finance director was there too. He checked his phone several times. Meera told me:

“He’s got an attention problem.” 

That line told me how much had changed. She was no longer allowing one detail to overrule all the good evidence.

She continued with Review and Preview for about six months. At first, she could acknowledge her SQAs because the evidence was there in front of her, although she didn’t fully believe those qualities belonged to her. 

As time went on and she gathered more evidence, she moved gradually from noting her SQAs to believing in them. She even became aware of them in real time pressure moments.

After about six months, the change was becoming established. Her SQAs were influencing how she thought of herself. Her Attention Direction focused on her strengths more readily, and her IDQ score was moving up towards the High IDQ range.

That is how confidence becomes consistent.

The paper Attention Is All You Need demonstrated a simple principle: a machine becomes more effective when it learns which information matters for the task and gives it the right weight.

Meera’s attention had learned to give imagined threats more weight than evidence of her Capability. Review and Preview retrained that pattern. Review repeatedly directed her back to the SQAs she had demonstrated, while Preview helped her envisage using those strengths in the challenges ahead.

Six months later, one glance at a phone could no longer outweigh an entire successful presentation. Her SQAs had become part of her Identity, her Edited Reality had changed and her IDQ had risen into the High range. 

Pressure and uncertainty remained part of her work, but her Attention Direction now found the evidence of Capability and Safety that made confidence and resilience available wherever and whenever she needed them.

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What happens when pressure gets in the way?

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What does your attention find when you’re under pressure?

Do you notice the evidence that you’re capable, or does your mind behave more like Meera’s and find the one thing that might be going wrong?

I’d genuinely like to hear your experience in the comments.

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Sources

The 7 Skills to impress™ Book, Parts 1 and 2. Source for the framework concepts used in this article, including Attention Direction, Identity, IDQ, Edited Reality, Sacred Flaws, Outcome, SQAs, and Review and Preview.

Vaswani, Ashish, et al. “Attention Is All You Need.” Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30, 2017.