After almost a decade of coaching thousands of women all over the world, I can tell you that what we all want boils down to one thing: self-actualization. We want to fulfill our potential. We want to flourish. We want to experience everything we are capable of. This is an innate desire. The reason we don’t experience self-actualization is not a lack of desire or a lack of character, even, or willpower or discipline.

And it’s not because of our circumstances, either. It’s not our parenting, our finances, our job, the political situation, or anything else. Those things have impacts on us, of course, but they don’t determine our possibilities. We aren’t self-actualized because we don’t have the skill of acting on possibility rather than certainty or even probability. So that’s what I want to teach you how to do today. Let’s get into it.

Welcome to UnF*ck Your Brain. I’m your host, Kara Loewentheil, Master Certified Coach and founder of The School of New Feminist Thought. I’m here to help you turn down your anxiety, turn up your confidence, and create a life on your own terms, one that you’re truly excited to live. Let’s go.

So, there are a million different kinds of coaches out there. At a recent mastermind, I was seated with a coach who helps people speak English fluently and get over accent anxiety, a coach who helps families get scholarships for college, a business coach who helps new moms balance motherhood and entrepreneurship, a coach who helps people learn how to design and produce stickers. All of these coaches made 7 figures or more. So sounds like a huge difference in niche, right? And it is, and it’s such a good example of how there’s room for so many different kinds of coaches.

But at the core of what any coach does is help their client self-actualize. People want to accomplish their goals and create their dream lives. And what blocks them is a lack of self-actualization. They don’t know how to translate those desires and dreams into the action that would produce those outcomes. They want to feel more brave speaking a non-native language, but don’t know how to get that courage. They want to go to college but don’t believe they’re special enough to get a scholarship or that they’re smart enough to figure out the whole process of getting one. They want to have a business and be a mom, but don’t believe they can figure out how to do both. Or they want to channel their artistic talent into a sticker design business, but don’t believe in their own art or promotional abilities or that you can make a living that way.

From the obvious, like business coaching, to the coaching you’d never have thought of, like stickers, it’s all about self-actualization. What we all want fundamentally is the ability to become the person we want to be. That’s it. That’s the heart of it. And we’re all capable of becoming self-actualizing. We have the innate ability to go after our dreams. That’s why we have them. I truly believe we don’t dream of things we’re incapable of creating. I can’t even draw a stick figure, but you know what? I’ve never dreamed of being an artist. But I did dream of being a writer and with a lot of effort, I am one.

What we don’t have is an innate ability to self-actualize. And that’s because self-actualization is a skill that you have to learn. Self-actualization is the fourth step of the confidence compass because it’s where self-awareness, self-compassion, and self-belief all come together to produce new actions. A lot of confidence is created in the mind and body, and that is where it has to be created. But you cannot create self-actualization without acting differently. So the fourth step of self-actualization is where the rubber really meets the road.

I believe we have the inherent ability to figure out challenges and take next steps. If you’ve ever met a little kid, they delight in trying to figure out puzzles and do the next big kid thing ahead of them. They’re willing to try all sorts of crazy things to figure out what will work or get approval or succeed. Lots of their ideas are terrible. A few are good, and they manage to grow up that way.

What gets in our way as adults is a couple of thought patterns or cognitive errors that prevent self-actualization. So that first assumption that we need to reframe is the thought error that we need evidence before we can do something. Right? We need evidence that we can do it before we can take action to try. And I call this wanting to act on probability. We will all say we know the right answer is that we don’t have to be certain to take action. But we secretly want or assume that we should be able to at least know that it’s probable that we’ll succeed.

Our brains are set by default for most of us to think that we have to have evidence that we can succeed in order to start. And so we want to know that it’s at least 51% likely, right? At least more likely to be successful than not in order to get going. Our adult brains do not like to take risks with trying things that they aren’t sure will work.

But the problem is you can almost never be sure something will work if it’s more than maybe 10% different from what you’re already doing. If you already run 3 miles a week, you can be pretty sure that you can run 3.3 miles a week. Right? 10%. At 10% or less, it’s not a lot of belief work required to get there. But if you run 3 miles a week and you want to run 6 miles, or you run 3 miles a week and now you want to swim 3 miles, that is going to activate the objecting part of your brain.

And the problem is that we’re using a biased brain that pretends it’s objective. So when we have a big audacious goal or dream, our brain acts like it’s just an independent agency doing an objective evaluation of feasibility. Right? Like your brain is like, “Well, ma’am, we surveyed the terrain and we did the structural engineering and you just can’t build a building on this plot of land.”

But your brain is much closer to a novelist than a structural engineer. Even if you are a structural engineer, this is true when we’re talking about your personal life and your thoughts. Your brain is always creating a story and your brain is cherry-picking the data to fit that story. So you can spend a lot of time trying to argue with your brain to convince it that success is probable, but that just doesn’t usually work because you can’t know that for sure if you’re trying to do anything that’s really different.

In fact, you have to believe you can try and start in order to create the evidence that you want. You have to believe in order to create the evidence that you will succeed. So you have to believe first. And this goes against everything we’ve been taught, right? We’ve been taught it’s prudent and responsible to not try anything that seems far-fetched or too daring or too risky.

And that isn’t just for big investments or switching careers because we end up bringing that same risk aversion to things like trying to change our own habits. Our brains just default to wanting to stay the same and telling us that we just need to believe it will work before we can take action. Right? Our brains are like, “Listen, just prove to me it’ll work and then I’m totally happy to do it.” But if you wait for that, you’ll never start. You have to be willing to start before you know something will work.

You do need a tiny bit of belief to get going, right? That’s why thought work is so important. If you think you 100% can’t do something, you will not try. I do not believe at all that I can fly, so I don’t jump out of windows. But I also would not have accomplished anything I have in my life if I wasn’t willing to believe first and then take action to prove my new thought true.

So after this quick break, I want to give you a powerful hack for getting yourself to be more willing to take action. And I’m going to address the biggest subconscious, or possibly conscious, objection that your brain may be having.

Okay. So, we now understand that we need to believe first before we actually have evidence for our belief, right? Because if we are waiting to believe something we haven’t done yet is going to work, we’re going to be waiting forever. If we wait for evidence to show up, we’d never be able to do anything new or change our lives.

But how do we make it easier to take action in the absence of that evidence? How do we make it easier to act when we’re working on creating our belief? What you have to do is switch your threshold for taking action from probable to possible. Let me say that again. You have to switch your threshold for taking action from probable to possible. There’s still thought work involved because your brain may not even agree it’s possible. So you may need to coach yourself and practice thoughts into believing that it’s possible.

But you need to replace your default subconscious assumption that you shouldn’t try something until you know success is probable or likely with the conscious choice that you’re willing to try something as long as it’s even minutely possible that it could work. If you decide that your threshold is just some possibility, no matter how small, it takes out a lot of the back and forth about whether it’s a good idea or probable or likely enough or you feel sure enough about it. It just lets you skip a lot of that drama.

So you’re not trying to believe I can definitely find a partner or I can definitely have an awesome relationship with my sister, or I can definitely found a successful company. You’re not even trying to get to, “I probably can do those things” or “It’s likely I can do those things” before you act. You’re just trying to believe it’s possible I might be able to do that. Because if you’ve built the identity of being someone who’s willing to take action as long as something is potentially possible, then all you need to believe is that it’s possible in order for it to be worth trying.

And adopting this identity also helps short-circuit our brain’s biggest subconscious, or potentially conscious, objection to trying something new, which is the fear of failure. We don’t want to fail because we’re afraid of what we will say to ourselves if we do. And we often project that onto other people’s thoughts. So we think we’re worried about what other people will think of us, sometimes specific people in our lives, sometimes more generally.

Right? The fear of failure in public is a fear of the loss of status in your community, essentially. But it only has a hold on us because we see a loss of status in our own eyes. We would lose some respect for ourselves. And the reason we would is because of an underlying subconscious belief that if you try something, you’re supposed to succeed at it. This is almost hard to articulate and grasp because it’s such a fundamental premise in our minds that it’s almost hard to understand questioning it. Right? Like why would you do something if you weren’t going to be able to do it?

Like we assume that the reason we do things is to succeed at doing them. But that is the thought that keeps us only being willing to believe in something when we already have evidence that it’s probable, and only willing to take action if we believe that we’re at least likely to succeed. You actually get to decide whether succeeding is the reason you do things.

Let me say that again. You get to decide whether succeeding is actually the reason that you do things or the reason that you would try to do something. You could decide that you try things because you’re a person who tries things, because you’re a person who wants to grow and evolve and learn and adapt and find out what you’re capable of, what you enjoy, what you can create, whether or not you absolutely succeed at the original goal. If those are the goals of trying something, then failing is not such a big deal. Because the goal was not to definitely succeed. It was to try something, to stretch yourself, to see what happens. And if you did that, then you did succeed. See what I did there? I changed the definition of success.

People who are willing to try, willing to take risks, willing to put themselves out there, those are the people who are self-actualized. Because being self-actualized is not about knowing that you can absolutely do exactly what you set your mind to with no problem. Confidence isn’t created by knowing for sure you will succeed. Confidence is created by knowing you are someone who will try, who will keep trying, who will support themselves in the process and give it their all.

Confidence is a secure relationship with yourself that allows you to take risks, try new things, and have a safe place to return to. It’s just like secure attachment in children to their caregivers. That’s what allows them to try out new things as they grow, right? Even down to like being a toddler who goes to play with toys in a new room at daycare, right? They grow with a safe base of support to return to and to help them through challenges or comfort them when things go wrong. And not all of us were lucky enough to grow up that way, but you can be that safe home base for yourself.

And that’s what allows you to be self-actualized. This is how all the pieces of the confidence compass connect because this is like self-compassion comes into this, right? Self-actualized people have a relationship with themselves where they are secure with themselves. They have their own secure support. So they don’t need to wait to be sure they can do something before they try, because there’s no recrimination or humiliation or embarrassment that’s going to happen if they don’t succeed.

They know that it’s through trying that they will create the evidence that they can do something new or become someone new, and that the more they do it, the more likely they are to actually succeed in the end. They do the belief work required to believe something is at least possible, and then they start to move. They don’t wait to feel certain, sure, or even like it’s probably going to work.

Self-actualized people understand how belief, evidence, and growth work. So they take responsibility for creating their own belief and acting on it to produce reinforcing evidence. They are not waiting around for evidence to call. They’re not at the mercy of their brain’s confirmation bias. They don’t sit around hoping that their brain might start to believe in them sometime soon.

This is one of the most important skills you can have in life and that’s why it’s the culmination of the Confidence Compass. Over the past 4 weeks, we’ve explored each element of the confidence compass: self-awareness, self-compassion, self-belief, and self-actualization. And now I want to invite you to take the next step and join me for a short but powerful pop-up coaching program that I’m hosting December 8th through 10th. It’s called Create More Confidence. And in this training, we’re going to be building on this podcast series and using a set of evidence-based assessments to explore where your skills are for each element of the confidence compass.

And then we’re going to envision your dream life, especially for 2026, and we’re going to connect those goals up to the confidence compass skills. So that you know at the end of it exactly what you need to work on to get to where you need and want to go.

I’m going to be teaching this program live. We will have replays available, of course, for registrants. And we’re going to have a pop-up community as well for discussion. And there’s a VIP tier for live Q&A and coaching calls with me.

The bottom line is that the world is always going to be a crazy place, but you can focus on your own locus of control no matter what else is happening. And whether you spend 2026 feeling put upon and nervous and skittish and hunkered down and hiding, or whether you spend it feeling driven and focused and accomplished comes down to your confidence in yourself and your ability to thrive even when things are uncertain.

We all have places we are naturally more confident and places we struggle more. And this pop-up coaching program is going to give you a clear view of where you are and what has to happen to get you to where you want to be in 2026 and beyond.

So you can join us by going to unfuckyourbrain.com/confident or texting your email to +1-347-997-1784, code word confident. That’s unfuckyourbrain.com/confident or text your email to +1-347-997-1784 and when you’re prompted for the code word, it is confident. I’ll see you there.