Lessons in Creative Confidence

Writing a book isn’t that hard. 

On the other hand, releasing a book and exposing it to others’ judgment is downright terrifying. 

When I write Monday Musings, the main header is “An Idea for Consideration.” That is, This could be useful—or not. Either way, it’s fine.  

With a book, things feel much more serious. The implicit header is: 

These ideas are 100% right, and you’ll have guaranteed success if you use them. 

Sincerely, 

The ego, professional reputation, and family name of Charles Moore.

For context, I’m haunted by having had a typo in my senior thesis…in the fourth word. I don’t know if the typo was always there or somehow added in the final edits, but it made me wary of looking dumb when writing. 

Strategic FUEL for Nonprofits has professional editors, but working with them reminded me that I should have paid closer attention to grammar lessons in 4th grade. 

The point is — there are lots of ways to look and feel like an idiot. 

My coach gave me the words to describe this: creative confidence. All my worries about the manuscript before hitting send were related to that. 

Luckily, the writing process helped me synthesize several lessons about creative confidence. 

The first lesson was inspired by agile product development strategies. Long before the book was a “book,” it was a series of ideas. And I could test those ideas with experts before writing. That didn’t stop me from making several last-minute Does this make sense? requests, but having people whose opinions I trust validate the book’s core concepts made the process much easier. 

It reminded me of my product development days when I felt anxious sharing initial sketches with customers. But because we tested the product at every stage of development, there was no high-stakes moment of judgment at launch.

That lesson is relevant to many leaders. In my conversations with people with imposter feelings, I usually ask them to identify the moments when they experience the imposter feelings most acutely. Many describe situations in which they or their ideas will be judged but where they have no prior information about what those judgments will be. Ironically, the fear of others’ judgments causes them to avoid sharing their ideas early, which prevents them from getting the critical feedback they would need to feel confident in those fear-inducing high-stakes moments. 

The second lesson from the writing process is the power of accepting the deadline and its implications. 

Once I signed the publishing contract, the manuscript deadline put a restrictor plate on second-guessing and forced acceptance that, at some point, the manuscript was as good as it could be. (Also, on the final day, I set a rule that I could not eat lunch until sending in the manuscript, which meant that the pain of hunger eventually overtook the pain of letting go.)

When explaining to a friend why the book launch process is somewhat embarrassing, I mentioned that if you’re constantly learning and refining your skills, any work you publish is both (a) the best you could have done by the deadline and (b) well below your present skill level by the time others experience it. The gap between what the work is and what you know it could be is what drives needless self-criticism since, of course, you cannot go back to the past. 

Alison Fragale makes a great point about accepting the gap in her book Likeable Badass: “Imposter syndrome doesn’t come from our accomplishments; it comes from the gap between our achievements and our aspirations. This is why I say that the only people who never feel like imposters are the imposters. [I]f you set your expectations low enough, you’re guaranteed to exceed them. You won’t achieve as much, but you’ll feel great about it.”

The final piece of acceptance is realizing that opening yourself up to the judgment of others is the price to pay for the impact you want to make. My friend and economics professor Paul Niehaus offered this advice: “Once the rate at which [your work is] improving drops below the rate at which it could be doing good in the world, [it’s] time to ship.”