Last year, I worked with an amazing and outspoken woman who came to me in the wake of a divorce from the only person she’d ever had sex with. Using my Confidence Type system I’d say she was truly a power player in the world, but she was incredibly insecure when it came to men—almost to the point of being a Wallflower, because she’d had so little experience with sex and relationships. By doing work on herself and identifying the confidence she needed in the area of sex to match her confidence elsewhere in the world, she was able to attract an amazing mate. She also learned to soften some of her Power Player intensity and turn up her Warm Connector vibe. After consciously doing that, she was able to secure the business deals she wanted and indeed, she had started two new businesses and brokered a book and television show deal by the end of our work. From the outside, people saw her as truly confident, but inside, she had been shaky and unsure of who she was as a sexual person.
I have been there too; I wasn’t always as confident as I am now. Like most people, I grew into my voice and my own personal power. When I was younger, I remember not being able to utter a word during sex, not being able to answer questions about what I liked or what I desired or what my fantasies were. I would practically go mute—that’s how shy I was, because I was so conditioned NOT to talk about sex and desire. Who would have thought I’d end up talking about sex for a living?
The truth is, you never know what’s going on under the surface for other people. That charismatic, confident all-star whom you so admire at work might go totally mute in personal conversations about sex and relationships. The people you look up to and see as infallible role models probably had to do serious work to get there—but you rarely get to peek behind the curtain and understand what it really took, so it can be easier to distance yourself and believe that you just don’t have the confidence, the talent, the resources or whatever magical tools they got.
I believe that whenever you have a really strong desire for something, the way to achieve it must also be present in your life. And here’s what I’ve observed in almost two decades of helping people with their sexual lives: we all need confidence, we all fear we don’t have enough of it, and most people fail to see where they’ve already got it. If you can recognize your own confidence style, you’ll have more confidence already and you can build that up to work better for you in varying situations where confidence comes in handy.
But a Wallflower in the sheets?
The truth is that it’s very hard, if not impossible, to create the relationship of your dreams from a place of insecurity. It’s hard to build a really successful business or career from that place—same goes for asking for the money you deserve. And it definitely makes it hard to get the sex and the sexual satisfaction you want and deserve! And that insecurity can be very insidious—I find that many people who are powerful in other areas of their lives, particularly women, just lack the ability to get their needs met in the bedroom and feel really small there. Or depending on their Confidence Type, they make their partner feel small so neither of them can get what they want!
The truth is we all have blind spots, especially when it comes to our conditioning around relationships—and I think a lot of the way we learn to be confident comes from watching other people in our lives and seeing how they modeled it for us. Either way, confidence is a skill set—just like sex. We all have varying strengths and vulnerabilities, and you can learn to take advantage of your Type’s assets—and how to navigate its shadow more skillfully.
