Hey, it's Rachel Cook, your modern mentor. I'm the founder of Lead Above Noise, where we help

leaders activate performance and engagement without burning out. Whether it's boot camps,

keynotes, or pulse checks, we help teams achieve meaningful change. Just let us know what you need.

So speaking of things you might need, how's your confidence these

days? I'm asking because it's something that's coming up a lot lately. Like people around me,

varying ages, varying amounts of tenure, different industries, they just seem to be struggling.

And while I get it, no judgment, I also think we deserve better. We deserve to feel

great about the work that we're doing and the impacts that we're making, even when we know we're

imperfect. So my client, Dave, recently had one of those kind of epic moments at work a few months ago.

Dave's the kind of guy who usually has it all together.

He's sharp, proactive, you name it. But he was giving a big presentation on a project he'd

been working on for months. It was high stakes and he felt pretty prepared. But on game day,

things got a little clunky. His slides looked kind of wonky when they loaded, and he stumbled

over his words, and in the Q&A, he couldn't answer a few critical questions that came up from

senior leaders. When the meeting ended, one of his colleagues even pulled him aside and said,

next time, make sure you do your homework. Dave left that meeting feeling pretty rough. And here's what we

worked through together to help him recover, five steps that I think anyone could use to help turn

a confidence hit into a comeback. First, start with a clear-eyed review. Like what actually happened?

When confidence takes a hit, we tend to focus on how

awful it felt rather than on what actually happened. But the reality is feelings don't tell the

full story. So the first step is to pull back from the emotion and get a clear view of just the facts.

Write down exactly what happened, play by play, without any embellishment or

...