Yesterday, while trekking toward the stunning Wineglass Bay in Tasmania's Freycinet National Park with my daughter and her boyfriend, we came across a small scene that stayed with me far more than the landscape itself.

The climb was not insignificant. I was out of breath. Sweat was running into my eyes. My attention was mostly on one thing: keep going.

But my daughter's boyfriend had enough clarity left to notice something I had completely missed.

He pointed to a huge rock that seemed to be held in place by a tiny twig and said, “René, that’s something for one of your blogs. Believe in yourself.”

And he was right.

This morning, at six o’clock, sitting outside our lodge with a cup of coffee in my hand, watching kangaroos graze in the early light, the image came back to me. The rock. The twig. The absurdity of it. The poetry of it. And slowly the thought behind it began to settle.

How often in life do we feel like the twig?

How often do we look at what is in front of us and quietly conclude that we are too small, too late, too inexperienced, too tired, or too ordinary for what this moment requires?

And yet life keeps showing us something else.

Not that we are all-powerful. Not that believing in yourself removes difficulty. But that the relationship between size and strength is often not what it first appears to be. What looks fragile may carry more than expected. What looks insignificant may matter enormously. And what looks small from the outside may be held together by something surprisingly strong within.

I have seen this in families navigating succession, in leaders stepping into roles they were not sure they deserved, in the next generation finding their voice in a room that has always belonged to someone else. And, if I am honest, I have seen it in myself.

There are moments in life when the external evidence does not yet support your inner belief. You do not have the title yet. You do not have the role yet. You do not have the money, the backing, the certainty, or the clear path. All you have is a sense that you must keep standing where you are standing. That you must not give way. That something in you knows more than your current circumstances are revealing.

That is where believing in yourself begins.

It begins in doubt. It begins in discomfort. It begins in the stretch before proof.

Believing in yourself is not arrogance. Arrogance is loud. It needs witnesses. It needs to be seen. It often needs to be right.

Believing in yourself is steadier than that. It is a form of inner grounding. A private agreement that you will not abandon your deeper knowing simply because the moment is hard. It is the decision to stay in conversation with your own courage.

Many people wait for confidence before they act. But confidence rarely arrives first. More often, it is the result of action taken before you felt ready. It grows because you moved. It strengthens because you stayed. It deepens because you carried something you were not sure you could carry and discovered that, somehow, you could.

That little twig reminded me that strength is not always dramatic. Sometimes strength is simply the willingness to hold. To hold your nerve a little longer than fear would prefer. To hold your values when the room pushes back. To hold your vision when no one else can see it yet.

We tend to admire confidence once it is visible and polished: the speaker on stage, the athlete in form, the leader after the decision worked out. But the more interesting moment comes earlier, when there is no applause yet.

It is the person applying for the role they are not sure they deserve. The founder making one more call after another rejection. The family member finally naming the conversation everyone has avoided. The executive speaking an uncomfortable truth in the room. The human being taking one more step uphill with sweat in the eyes.

That is where self-belief lives. Not in perfection. Not in having no fear. In continuing anyway.

And believing in yourself does not mean pretending you can do everything alone. Some of the strongest people I know are precisely the ones who can ask for help, learn, adjust, and stay open. Self-belief is not rigid. It does not say, “I must already know.” It says, “I am capable of growing into what is needed.”

The world has many ways of shrinking people. Comparison does it. Criticism does it. Family history does it. A few failures, badly interpreted, can do it too. But there is also something in the human spirit that resists being reduced.

That is what I thought about this morning, coffee in hand, with kangaroos grazing nearby and the Tasmanian air carrying that rare kind of stillness that feels almost like respect. Perhaps believing in yourself is less about inflating yourself and more about refusing to collapse. Less about becoming bigger and more about staying connected to what is already solid within you.

The twig was not showing off. It was simply there. Holding.

And maybe that is the quiet truth behind all of it. You do not need to feel like the rock. Some days you will feel much more like the twig. But a twig that holds its ground, in its own particular place, carrying what it carries without fuss or fanfare, is not a small thing. It is, in its own way, a remarkable one.

Believe in yourself. Not because the path is clear. But because you are more capable of holding than you think.

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