Episode 312

Bravery, Grit, and Confidence: The Leadership Energy Model

The Leadership Energy Model: High Performance Leadership Runs on Three Fuels

High performance leadership is usually talked about as a set of skills, and skills matter. But today I want to talk about something underneath the skills, the thing that determines whether you can actually use them when it counts. Energy. Specifically, three kinds of it: bravery, grit, and confidence.

Let me start with a moment I think you’ll recognize. You see an opportunity. A stretch role opens up. A speaking slot at a conference. A chance to volunteer for the project everyone’s watching. Maybe it’s smaller, one of those hundreds of ideas that scroll past on Instagram where you think, I could do that.

And you let it pass.

Then three weeks later, or three months later, you watch someone else do the thing. Someone no more capable than you. And you’re quietly furious with yourself, because you knew you could have done it, and you didn’t put your hand up.

Here’s what I want you to hear today: that moment was probably not a courage problem, and it definitely wasn’t a capability problem. It was an energy problem. And once you understand the energy system underneath doing hard things, you’ll understand why brave felt impossible that day, why it might feel impossible right now, and exactly what to do about it, for yourself and for your team.

Let’s dive in.

The Three Stages: Bravery Starts It, Grit Sustains It, Confidence Is Earned

The model is simple to say and surprisingly deep once you start using it. Every hard thing you’ve ever done has moved through three stages.

Bravery is what gets you started. It’s the willingness to begin something that feels hard or uncertain, before you know how it will go. Putting your hand up for the project. Saying yes to the promotion. Starting the business, the PhD, the house build. Bravery is the entry fee, and you pay it before you know what you’ve bought.

Grit is what gets you through. Because at some point after you start, reality arrives. It’s harder than you thought. The early momentum is gone, the end isn’t in sight, and you’re in the long middle where the only options are to double down or bug out. That doubling down, the problem-solving, the adapting, the persisting when it’s no longer exciting, that’s grit.

Confidence is what you earn on the other side. Not self-belief conjured out of thin air, and this matters, because we talk about confidence as if it were a leadership trait you either have or don’t. It isn’t a trait. It’s earned certainty, built on evidence: I have done this, so I know I can do it again. And here’s the part that makes the whole model work. Once you have confidence in something, the next time you face it, you need less bravery, because you know what you’re walking into, and less grit, because you’re not problem-solving from scratch. You have a map.

So the three stages aren’t just a sequence. They’re an exchange rate. Every hard thing you complete makes the next hard thing cheaper.

Run your own career through this and you’ll see it immediately. Think about the first time you presented to executives. The bravery it took to walk into that room. The grit it took to keep going when the questions got hard, when your slides got challenged, when someone senior looked bored. And then think about how you present to executives now. If you’ve done it fifty times, it costs you almost nothing, and that’s not because you became a different person. It’s because you banked the confidence, and confidence changed the price.

Now here’s the question that sets up everything else in this episode. If confidence makes hard things cheaper, why do so many capable, experienced women find themselves unable to start the next hard thing? Why does the woman with twenty years of banked evidence freeze in front of an opportunity she is demonstrably qualified for? The answer is almost never the confidence account. It’s the other two currencies, and the fact that nobody ever told us they run out.

Naive Bravery: When Not Knowing Is the Gift

Now, there’s a twist in the bravery stage that I find endlessly fascinating, and it explains a lot about the best decisions you’ve ever made.

The amount of bravery you need to start something depends on how much you know about how hard it will be. Which means naivety and bravery trade off against each other. The less you know, the less bravery you need.

I’ll give you two of mine. When I started my PhD, I had absolutely no idea how hard those years were going to be. If someone had shown me an honest preview, I’m genuinely not sure I’d have signed up. And more recently, my husband and I have taken on a house building project, just the two of us. We’ve only really started, and already everything has been more complicated than we thought. If we’d known at the beginning what we know now, we would not have taken it on. And yet we don’t regret it for a second.

That’s naive bravery. And I see it everywhere in the careers of the women I coach: the promotion accepted without fully understanding the role, the team inherited without knowing what was really inside it, the career change made on a fraction of the information a “sensible” decision would require. Some of the best things in your life exist because you didn’t know better.

But here’s the flip side, and this is where the model starts doing real work for you. The more naive your bravery was at the start, the more grit the middle will demand. The gap between what you expected and what you got has to be paid for somewhere, and it gets paid for in grit. Which is why the moment reality arrives, the “what have I done” moment, is not a sign you made the wrong call. It’s the predictable second stage of every hard thing worth doing. I talked in my episode on everything I’ve changed my mind about about how the zone of genius work that lights you up rarely looks sensible from the outside. This is the same territory. The question is never whether the middle will be hard. It’s whether you’ll have the grit available when it is.

And that word, available, is where we go next.

Is Your Mindset Holding You Back? Or Is Your Tank Just Empty?

Here’s the insight at the center of this whole episode, and if you take one thing away today, make it this one.

Bravery and grit are finite resources. And they’re drawn from one pool that covers your entire life.

You cannot be infinitely brave unless you are infinitely naive. And you cannot be infinitely gritty, full stop. Every hard thing you’re currently sustaining, at work, at home, in your body, in your family, is drawing from the same tank. The house renovation draws from it. The difficult teenager draws from it. The health thing you’re managing draws from it. The re-org you’re surviving at work draws from it.

Which means: if you’re pouring grit into something in your personal life right now, you will have less bravery available at work. And vice versa. This isn’t weakness, it’s arithmetic.

So when you ask yourself, is your mindset holding you back, and it’s a question worth asking, sometimes the honest answer is no. Your mindset is fine. Your tank is empty. The version of you who used to leap at challenges hasn’t gone anywhere, she’s just fully committed elsewhere. I see this constantly in coaching: a woman berating herself for not going for a role, not speaking up, not starting the thing, and when we map where her bravery and grit are actually being spent, the mystery evaporates. She’s not a coward. She’s carrying three hard things already.

This is also why depletion makes you fragile. Think of the phrase “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” The straw was never the problem. The problem was everything already on the camel. When your bravery and grit pool runs close to empty, one small extra demand, a curt email, a minor setback, a request that would normally be nothing, can be the thing that breaks you. If you’ve ever had an outsized reaction to something small and wondered what on earth is wrong with you, nothing is wrong with you. You were running on fumes. This is the territory where burnout lives, and it’s also why boundaries aren’t a luxury: they’re how you protect the pool.

Let me make this concrete with a client story, details changed as always. A director I worked with last year came to me convinced she had lost her edge. Two years earlier she’d been the person who volunteered for everything, the one who put her hand up for the scary projects. Now a genuinely exciting VP role had opened up in her organization, the kind of role she’d been building toward for a decade, and she couldn’t make herself apply. Her words to me were, “I don’t know who I’ve become.”

So we mapped her pool. In the previous eighteen months she had: moved her family across the country, supported her mother through a serious illness, absorbed two rounds of layoffs in her org, each of which meant re-interviewing for her own role, and renovated a house. Any one of those is a major grit commitment. She was carrying all four. The woman who “used to volunteer for everything” had done so from a full tank. The woman who couldn’t apply for the VP role was running the same engine on empty. Nothing about her had changed except the balance.

Once she saw that, everything shifted. Not because the tank magically refilled, but because the story changed from “I’ve lost my nerve” to “my resources are committed, so what do I deliberately wind down before I make the next big draw?” She applied for the role three months later, after the house was done and her mother was stable. She got it. The delay wasn’t cowardice. It was resource management, and I’d argue it’s exactly what high performance leadership looks like from the inside.

And a word on the people who seem infinitely brave, the celebrities, the founders who bet everything, the people whose risk appetite makes you feel timid. Look closely at their resources. Money, teams, safety nets, people to absorb problems. When you can throw resources at a problem, you need less grit to get through it. When you know you’ll be fine whatever happens, the risk is structurally smaller, so the bravery required is smaller too. They’re not braver than you. They’re playing the same game at lower stakes. Stop measuring your courage against theirs.

Self-Awareness and Leadership: Coaching Yourself With the Model

So how do you actually use this? First for yourself, then for your team. This is where self-awareness and leadership stop being abstract and become a practical discipline.

Audit the spend before you commit

Before you take on the next hard thing, do what you’d do with any budget: check what’s already committed. Where is my bravery and grit currently going, across my whole life, not just work? Is there genuinely capacity for this, or am I about to overdraw? Sometimes the strategic answer is not yet, and I want to be clear that “not yet because my tank is committed elsewhere” is a completely different decision from “not ever because I’m scared.” The first is wisdom. Make sure you know which one you’re making.

Three questions make the audit real. What am I currently sustaining that requires grit, everywhere in my life? What’s coming in the next six months that will demand bravery? And what have I recently finished that I haven’t yet banked as confidence? That third one matters more than it looks, because a completed hard thing you never acknowledged is energy you paid for and never collected the return on.

Build confidence in small denominations

The classic mistake, and I see high achievers make it constantly, is the deep-end plunge: take on the enormous thing, white-knuckle through it, and hope confidence arrives at the end. Sometimes it works. Often it drains the pool so completely that even when you succeed, you’ve got nothing left for the next thing, and the “win” leaves you fragile rather than stronger.

The alternative is to build confidence deliberately, through structured small wins. Break the frightening thing into pieces small enough that each one needs only a little bravery and a little grit, and each completion pays confidence back into the account. Speak at the internal meeting before the conference. Coach one person before you commit to leading the program. Run the pilot before the transformation. Every completed step reduces the price of the next one. That’s not playing small. That’s compounding.

And do the accounting on your history, because most of you are sitting on unclaimed confidence. You’ve done genuinely hard things and never banked them, usually because your inner critic filed them under “doesn’t count” or “anyone could have done it.” Write the list. The hard things you have completed. Read it before the next brave moment. That’s not vanity, that’s evidence, and evidence is the antidote to the impostor voice.

Coaching Your Team Through Bravery and Grit: The Leader’s Application

Now widen the lens, because the model gets even more powerful when you point it at your team.

Right now, especially with AI transformation running through almost every tech organization I work with, you are asking your people to be brave and gritty constantly. New tools, new workflows, new definitions of their own value. For many of them, all at once, with no existing confidence to draw on, because nobody has done this before. And they’re paying for it from the same kind of finite pool you are, which also has a mortgage and a family and a life drawing on it.

So as their leader, ask yourself questions most leaders never ask. Where on the bravery-grit-confidence curve is each of my people right now? Am I asking for bravery from someone who’s already three months deep in grit and running low? Am I expecting confident performance from someone still in the naive-bravery stage of something new? When someone “resists change,” is that actually resistance, or is it an empty tank?

I watched this play out with a client leading an AI adoption program across a two-hundred-person engineering org. On paper the rollout was going fine. In reality, her most experienced engineers, the ones whose identity was built on twenty years of hard-won expertise, were quietly stalling. Her first read was resistance, maybe even ego. When we ran it through this model, a different picture emerged. These were people being asked for enormous bravery, to become beginners again in public, while their confidence account in the new world was at zero and their grit was already committed to delivery deadlines that hadn’t moved. They weren’t resisting the technology. They couldn’t afford it.

What she changed was the price, not the people. Protected learning time so adoption stopped competing with delivery for the same grit. Small, visible, low-stakes wins first, so confidence could start accruing before anything important depended on the new tools. And senior engineers paired as learning partners, so nobody had to be a beginner alone. Within a quarter the stalling had gone, and not one conversation about “resistance” was ever needed.

And then do what great leaders do: reduce the price. Build your team’s confidence deliberately, the same way you build your own, through structured small wins, visible milestones, and named progress. Celebrate completions specifically, because every acknowledged win banks confidence that makes the next ask cheaper. Sequence the demands so you’re not asking everyone for maximum bravery in the same quarter you’re asking for maximum grit.

This, by the way, is coaching. Not advice-giving, not cheerleading, but the deliberate practice of helping another person build evidence-based confidence and spend their bravery and grit well. It’s why coaching skills make you a better leader in a way that no amount of domain expertise does. A leader who can coach doesn’t just get through the transformation. She comes out the other side with a team whose pool is fuller than when it started.

Where to Start This Week

Three things, and I want you to actually do them.

First, map your pool. Twenty minutes, whole life, not just work. Where is your bravery and grit currently committed? What’s the biggest drain? Just seeing it on paper changes the story from “what’s wrong with me” to “oh, that’s where it’s all going.”

Second, bank your evidence. Write the list of hard things you’ve completed. Ten minimum. Keep it where you’ll see it before the next brave moment.

Third, pick one small denomination. One structured small win, this week, toward the thing you’ve been circling. Not the plunge. The first step that’s small enough to afford and real enough to count.

A Final Note

If this model has landed for you, here’s something you should know. Building confidence deliberately, in yourself and in others, spending bravery and grit strategically rather than heroically, this is exactly the discipline of coaching. It’s what I do with my clients every week, and it’s what I teach inside Ignite Coach Academy, my coach training program. Doors are open right now for the September cohort, and whether you want to coach your team more powerfully as a leader or you’re curious about coaching as a bigger part of your future, it will give you the structured skillset for everything we’ve talked about today. All the details are at the link in the show notes.

And if you’re not sure whether it’s right for you, let’s just talk. Book a complimentary chat with me at tonicollis.com/lets-chat and we’ll work out together whether this is your next step.

Thank you for listening. And remember, keep leading. Bye for now.