Building Confidence Through Repetition, Curiosity and Small Steps

Are you getting ready to get ready?

Cat Corchado started her business late. Not "later than she planned" late — genuinely late, at an age when most people are being told the building phase is behind them. She had to learn every single tool from scratch, and her method was not elegant.

She pushed buttons until something worked.

That's the whole strategy. She'll tell you she used to be terrible at Canva. Then she wasn't. Nothing happened in between except repetition and a refusal to decide she was too old to figure it out.

This week on Salty Sisters we're talking about where confidence actually comes from, because most of us have the order backwards. We think confidence shows up first and permits us to begin. It doesn't work that way. Confidence is the receipt. It's not the ticket that gets you in.

Cat's stair step. A baby takes one step and lands on her diaper. Then two. Then five. Then she's walking across the room like she's been doing it for years. Somewhere in adulthood we forget that this is the only way anything gets learned, and we start expecting to be good at things immediately.

The "getting ready to get ready" trap. The right microphone. The better laptop. One more course. Cat has a name for this and very little patience for it, and if you've been assembling equipment for something you haven't started yet, this part is going to sting a little.

Why eleven minutes and not ten. Cat built her free fitness challenge around a number she pulled out of a study on high-intensity interval training — then flipped what it was for. The point isn't intensity. The point is showing up, five days running, with modifications so nobody gets stranded. What it's really closing is the gap between what you want to do and where you actually are right now. We ended up calling it the confidence gap.

Play as a courage muscle. Babies aren't working out when they pull themselves up to walk. They're curious and they're testing limits, and the walking is a byproduct. Lion cubs wrestling aren't training to hunt. Play is how competence gets built when nobody's grading you, and it doesn't stop being true at fifty.

The permission slip nobody hands you. You're allowed to try something, decide you hate it, and be finished with it. That's not failure. That's information you didn't have before, and now you don't have to carry the should I, would I, could I around anymore.

Somewhere in the middle of all this we accidentally named what could be a recurring segment. It involves diapers. It's apparently happening from now on... tune in to see where it goes. 

One question before you go: what's the thing you'd cross an ocean for, but won't start from your own kitchen table?