Outsourcing Confidence

We call it being careful. Most of the time it's something else.

I think a lot of us are outsourcing our confidence right now without ever calling it that. We call it being careful. We call it wanting to make a smart decision instead of an emotional one. We pull up the data, or we ask around, or we wait to see what the numbers say before we let ourselves believe something is working, and it feels responsible every time we do it. But I’m not sure it always is.

I love data. I’ve built a business on paying attention to what the numbers say and I’ll defend that instinct all day. But I’m in a stretch right now where I’m working on new projects in new to me spaces, and I’ve noticed how fast I reach for a data point the moment my own instinct to second guess myself gets loud, because I want something outside myself to tell me I’m allowed to keep going.

Often what we’re outsourcing to isn’t data at all. It’s people. And it’s not always people whose judgment we’ve earned the right to lean on, either. I’ll catch myself weighing a decision against what someone I’ve never met or haven’t talked to in years might think, someone who has no real stake in my life, and by the time I notice, that opinion has more say in whether I feel confident than my own read does. There’s no shortage of opinions or someone further along who makes your own progress look thin by comparison, and when you’re already inclined to be hard on yourself, more input doesn’t make you more sure. It gives you more voices to weigh against your own, most of which never asked to be in the room.

I notice the same instinct when I’m driving my kids and their friends in the car, listening to them chat about their position in a routine or who started in a game. Someone wasn’t the fastest in the mile. They’re checking their worth against a scoreboard and against what their friends think, both at once, and the mama bear in me wants to scream about how none of that matters and none of it determines their self-worth, all while realizing we are still doing this to ourselves as adults and certainly as business owners.

The tools we’ve built have only made it easier to continue outsourcing our confidence. ChatGPT will hand you back something that sounds like confidence even when what you gave it was a half formed thought, because it’s built to agree with you, not to be honest with you. A like on a post or the absence of it isn’t information about whether the thing you posted was valuable. It’s a small hit of a feeling one way or another, and it’s easy to let the feeling stand in for the verdict.

None of this means data doesn’t matter, or that other people’s judgment should never count. Some of it has earned its place. But there’s a difference between using information to make a decision and using it to ask for permission to do something we already want to do, or already knew in our gut we should do.

Data is a tool in the toolbox, not a source of permission. At some point we have to build our own confidence instead of outsourcing it, a little at a time, to whatever number or opinion happens to be closest.