Take the Leap: Confidence Coach Kate James on How to Stop Holding Yourself Back and Start Living Authentically

It's one of the great paradoxes: We're yearning to make a change. We feel inspiration or maybe discomfort. Something calls us to jump in, jump out, pivot, and stretch. But when it comes to taking the plunge, an obstacle looms: ourselves.

“That is the most common problem,” says Kate James. “We typically get in our own way.” 

Kate, a Melbourne-based confidence coach and author who consults people all over the world on how to find clarity and self-belief, explores how women find ways to hold themselves back. Women come to her when they feel “a little niggle that something needs to change,” and they seek counsel to untangle what that yearning is, she says. “And then we get to what is it that stops you from moving.”

We asked Kate to walk us through what lies beneath this inclination. Because we understand the roots of our obstacles, we’re more apt to move beyond them and onto what is truly calling us.

Chatting with Kate James

When people come to see you, what are they often seeking?

Typically, when people come to see me, they've started to feel a misalignment somewhere. It feels like I'm doing these things or being this person but deep within me, something's not quite right. That could show up in so many ways: It might be your role at work, a relationship or a series of relationships, or simply the way you're being in the world. It could also be external things, perhaps the career you've chosen or even the way that you dress. They often find that they've been doing many things to fit into what society tells them they need to be or what they've been told in their own worlds. Then they see, I'm not sure this energizes me anymore.

How and why do we get in our way? 

We can have the awareness and not act on it. When we consider making a change, it is scary because the unknown is wide open. We don't know what it's going to involve. And as human beings, we are wired to seek safety and security. So the unknown—or any uncertainty—will always be unsettling. We might hear that call, but whether we act on it or not is entirely up to us. 

You write about perfectionism and how it causes us to delay and hold back. Why are women so inclined to be "good"?

Perfectionism is a common problem for women. From a young age, we get this validation about being good and perfect. 

There's interesting research from psychologist Carol Dweck, who writes about a growth mindset. In her studies of young children in school, she found that little girls are slightly more mature socially. They are better at sitting on the mat with their hands in their laps while the boys might tear around the classroom. The inclination has always been to say, 'Well, the boys have a lot of energy, and that's okay.' I've observed this with my grandson playing: He may elbow a friend out of the way, and I'll think he's just being a boy. Yet if my daughter had done that, I might have said to her, 'Be gentle!' So we start with these rules: We excuse the boys' behavior and reward the girls when they sit neatly and quietly. Women are praised for being good, and because we're praised for that through school, we do more of that throughout life, and it sets us up to want to be perfect and to please other people. Then there are other emotions and behaviors that we feel are off limits because they're not supposedly within the paradigm of what it means to be female.

There's also interesting research from Richard Schwartz who developed a form of therapy called internal family systems. He talks about how that perfectionist is closely related to our inner critic, that voice inside saying, You better not do that, or You didn't do that very well. So we have an inner critic and a perfectionist both standing in the foreground to try to protect the vulnerable little girl in us— the part of us that doesn't want to get hurt, that doesn't want to get it wrong, that wants to keep people pleasing, and that wants to be loved. So this perfectionism and inner critic are ways of protecting ourselves. 

How can we start to push back against our inner critic and stop getting in our way? Where do we start? 

For all of us, we start by learning more about ourselves. I did this through meditation. I knew I needed to get in touch with something deeply inside me. I learned how to meditate and later began teaching it. The beauty of meditation is it cultivates a greater sense of self-awareness. 

We can learn about ourselves through another contemplative practice, like exercising, preferably in nature, where you're not listening to headphones or watching a TV screen. Journaling is really helpful. When we write our life story, it can give us a sense of the influences that have brought us to this point. Other creative practices are helpful, such as painting, drawing, making music, and dancing. Anything that gets you back in touch with yourself.

We need to create space to be with ourselves. This will help us understand who we are and how we got here. To do this, we need to have less noise. You won't find it on social media. You'll find it in the stillness by yourself.

You can learn more about Kate and her practice and order her books, at totalbalance.au.

Interview by Stacey Lindsay exclusively for Liberty Road. Parts of this conversation have been edited and condensed for clarity.