How to Build Unshakable Confidence (with Nayshondra Mercer)

What does it take to live and lead with unshakable confidence? In this episode of The Potentialist Podcast, Dr. Lee Koles is joined by Nayshondra Mercer, best-selling author and leadership coach who specializes in helping others live unapologetically. 

Nayshondra shares her roadmap for self-discovery and professional growth, diving  into how she overcame personal challenges to evolve into a magnetic presence onstage.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Why facing the “uncomfortable” parts of your story is the first step toward healing and presenting yourself with integrity
• How to identify your deepest innermost values so you can build your life, brand, and career on a solid foundation
• Practical advice for moving forward when you feel stuck, including why a step forward can sometimes feel like a step back
• Why embracing your unique self is your greatest asset in leadership and life

Your potential is a journey of becoming. Stop waiting for permission and start taking the steps to become the leader you were meant to be.

Transcript

Dr. Lee Koles: Tap into the power of possibility with the Potentialist podcast. I'm Dr. Lee Koles. Whether you're chasing a dream, leading a team, or simply looking for fulfillment, you just found your onestop shop. Each episode is packed with science-backed strategy, practical tools, and the inspiration you need to achieve remarkable things. The world wants what you have, and your next step starts now. Hello everyone. Welcome to the Potentialist podcast. I'm your host Dr. Lee Koles. I'm an industrial organizational psychologist, Gallup Clifton strength coach, and certified life coach. And I am so excited to be here with you today because your potential is my passion. This podcast is all about helping you achieve remarkable things. So when I meet remarkable people, of course, I want to be sure to introduce them to you. I met today's guest at a leadership conference in Washington DC and I'm telling you, she lit up the stage. I have a feeling she's going to light up this podcast as well. I'd like you to meet Nayshondra Mercer, but you can call her Coach Nay. Nayshondra is a coach and a best-selling author whose specialty is helping others live with unshakable confidence. And who couldn't use a dose of that? Coach Nay helps leaders cross the bridge from playing small to living unapologetically. Welcome to the podcast, Nayshondra.

Nayshondra Mercer: Oh, thank you for having me, Lee. I'm so excited for this conversation.

Dr. Lee Koles: I am excited too. And Coach Nay, when I saw you at the conference, both on and off stage, you're giving off this kind of magnetic energy that I couldn't quite define at the time, but now that I know you and your work, I understand that it was the energy of someone who comes from a place of strength and confidence and someone who is unapologetically herself and that is a really attractive thing. So, thank you. Kudos to you. And the first big question, Nayshondra, were you just born this way?

Nayshondra Mercer: Sometimes I think that I was uh I think for all of us there is some level of becoming but there is a level of confidence and strength that I have always had. I can say that but I I can't say that it didn't also take some developing on my own as well.

Dr. Lee Koles: Yeah. So I'd love to hear a little bit more about your story and how you came to this place.

Nayshondra Mercer: Yes. Much like everyone else I allowed life to beat me up and sometimes life is the best lesson that you can actually learn. And so for myself, I just dove straight into just learning what life was all about, the good, the bad, and the ugly. And I learned to learn from my mistakes. And that took time. I had to first be comfortable with facing the things that were mistakes or the dark pieces of myself and the things about myself that I did not love and I didn't want other people to know or to even be able to see in me. And once I was able to face those places and heal them, I was able to then integrate them back into who I am in a way that was healthy and healed, which now allowed for me to embrace both the light and the dark aspects of self. And in that, it just gave me this different kind of confidence that shines from the inside out because I've accepted all the pieces of myself, even the parts that those of us don't love about ourselves.

Dr. Lee Koles: Yeah, there I know that all of us have parts of ourselves that we wish we could change that maybe we're embarrassed by that we don't want other people to know about. How do you get to a place where you can tell yourself that it is okay to not like everything about yourself or not be the perfect self?

Nayshondra Mercer: I think the first step is realizing that there are pieces of yourself that you don't love. It could be really easy to put on this mask or cosplay your way through work and life and relationships and think that you got it all together and that you bootstrapped yourself and that everything is perfect. But when you're doing that, you're just lying to yourself. You can lie to yourself, but you cannot hide from yourself. And it's not until you own the fact that there are things about you that you don't love, then you can finally begin to heal those. and then reintegrate those back into self in a healthy way.

Dr. Lee Koles: And I imagine that that can be a scary thing for some people, just coming face to face with those parts of you that you don't love.

Nayshondra Mercer: Yeah.

Dr. Lee Koles: Tell me about how you get to that place where you are able to face those things you want to change.

Nayshondra Mercer: Oh, for me, I hit rock bottom. And I didn't hit it just once. I've I've been rock bottom a couple of times, three times that come to mind at the moment. And once I got to those places, it's like, "Okay, girl, what's happening here? How did we get here? What did you learn? What could you have done differently? What do you know that you could have done that you chose not to do?" Whether it was consciously or subconsciously, and asking yourself those tough questions and analyzing it. I like to think about it like laundry. You know, sometimes you don't want to deal with the laundry, so you shove it at the back of the closet, but eventually you need to go in there, grab them out, wash them up, you know, dry them, fold them, and put them back where they're supposed to be. Otherwise, you've got all this dirty laundry in the back of your mind or even in your heart. And it takes up more space than you think. And you think that because you can close the door when the neighbors come over for dinner that no one can see it. But even when they leave, you know the laundry is still there. You know it's dirty. It's been there for two months. It's starting to smell and you've not done anything about it. And so you have to make the decision to tackle it.

Dr. Lee Koles: Oh my gosh, I love that analogy so much. I just envisioned my closet overflowing with laundry and you just gave us some gold. I want to go back through. You said, "How did I get there?" What did I do? And then you said, "What have I learned?"

Nayshondra Mercer: Choices. Yeah. What are the choices that I made? And what did I learn from it? So, I remember my first rock bottom. I was in a very, very dark place. I was partaking in too much alcohol and also um I'll be completely honest because that's who I am, cannabis. And I was on the bottom of my uh my I was on my floor at my home and just completely out of my mind and was entertaining a relationship with someone that I should not have been in that I literally compromised every single one of my morals to be with um as far as not loving others the way that you needed to, the way that we treat children, just all the things that I based my own personal values and ethics on. And I compromised those in such a way that I found myself in a space where I was asking myself, how did we get here? How did we get so off track that you're doing things you never did before? You're hanging out with people that you would have never associated yourself with before. And now you're in this place and you don't know how you got here. And what I realized in that moment was I did know how I got there. I made a decision. And that first decision to not do the thing that was true to me that I knew to be true led to another decision that wasn't true to me and what I knew to be true. And then another decision. And then you continue to go down. on this path of darkness. You continue to stray away from the path that is yours and then you find yourself somewhere. You're looking around. It's like you're lost in the woods and the trees are scary and the wind is blowing and you don't know if it's an owl or a monster and you're like, "How did I get here? How do I get out of this? Who's going to come and save me?" And the truth of the matter is what I learned at any time that I have been rock bottom was that I had to pull myself out of it. I got myself there. So, it was going to be up to me to get myself out. And I think that the first step is recognizing the first wrong decision. And I say wrong loosely. And then realizing from there, what are the other decisions that you made that supported that first wrong decision?

Dr. Lee Koles: And I think you pointed out something so important, which is that the wrong decision, if you put that in quotes, was a decision that was not aligned with your true self or your true values.

Nayshondra Mercer: That's absolutely right. Your truth, the things that mean the most to you, your moral compass, the things that make you who you are, that allow for you to be unshakable because no, this is my truth. This is who I am. This is who I am, this is what I know the truth to be. Sun, the moon, and the stars, we can all agree those are capital T truth. They exist. But there's some other truth. that come in line too which is such as how they got there and those things are debatable and I'm not here to debate those things today but there are certain things that are irrefutable truths in the entire world and we have some of those for ourselves as well the things that you built yourself on and you can either choose to walk that path along your truth or you can deviate from it and what I've learned is when you that first deviation allows for the second and allows for the 50th and the 10,000th

Dr. Lee Koles: Right. Right. You keep making a decision to go on a different path, a path further away from who you truly are. Now, I know you work a lot with leaders. What does that look like from a leadership standpoint in terms of making decisions that are aligned with who you are and who you want to be or maybe making decisions that are more aligned with what you think someone might expect of you or some other forces that are pulling you in a different direction.

Nayshondra Mercer: Yeah, I love that question. I think that leaders exercise this choice often in their lives because as a leader, a true natural leader is always evolving and growing. Which means that there may be new truths that you find out about yourself as you continue to evolve. Which means that the path that you once walked, it might change just a little bit. Now, not to the point where it was wrong and that it wasn't in alignment with who you are and now you're walking a completely different path. But you might side step just a little bit to the right or to the left and in that now you're making choices in alignment with that growth and that new truth of who you are. And it could be a value change. It could be something very simple that you have a new perspective of now because you've been able to grow and get more information. And in that you'll begin to now exercise what it looks like to make decisions walking along that new path. And so for leaders, I think it's important for them to recognize that that's just a natural part of leadership, that the call to continue to grow means that their choices may look different as they continue to evolve. And I think that's okay.

Dr. Lee Koles: Yeah. And I think you struck on a really important topic, which is that even in leadership positions, you are going to grow and learn and evolve. You do not have to know everything. You do not have to have all the answers. Even if people are looking towards you for leadership, you know, when people feel like they need to know everything, that's when they don't because we don't. We just don't know everything, that's when we start making decisions that aren't aligned with who we really are. It's aligned with who we think we should be for other people.

Nayshondra Mercer: Absolutely. And that's where the pressure of being in leadership is because you've been called to lead. Uh and so that means that sometimes you might need to make decisions that other people may or may not understand. And that may just be because they're not the leader in that particular situation. And that's okay, you know. Um, and I think that as long as they realize that that's just a natural part of the evolution of their growth, then they'll be able to handle that well.

Dr. Lee Koles: Right. Okay. I want to bring up my favorite Coach Nay quote. You said this at the leadership conference and I just loved it. You said, "Do you. Everyone else is already taken."

Nayshondra Mercer: Yeah.

Dr. Lee Koles: So, Coach Nay, what is the first step so that our listeners can go ahead and embrace that? Do you?

Nayshondra Mercer: The first question and one that I ask my clients is who are you? You have to first know who you are. And a lot of my clients come to me because they have not yet been able to figure out who they are because they are so deeply buried underneath the systems of this world or pollution or trauma, um, hurt, pain, guilt, shame, all of the things. They're not able to access their truth because they're so muddied down by the way that the world has beat them up. And so the first question is, who are you? And being okay with wanting to take the journey to seek yourself, which is what I encourage my clients to do inside of I am seeking myself, which is my signature group coaching program. And that's the journey to seeking oneself, to seeking one's deepest, innermost values so that you can then build yourself, your life, your brand, your business, your family, your everything upon what you know is your true truth in who you are and that's solid.

Dr. Lee Koles: So step one is really identifying who you are and that involves figuring out your values which then helps you build your life and just brand your own life. Decide who you are and who you're going to be.

Nayshondra Mercer: Yeah.

Dr. Lee Koles: What happens next?

Nayshondra Mercer: So this is the fun part. Once you seek yourself and you know who you are, you have to walk that out. I talk to my clients about this. I call this the call. All of us have a call that has been put on our lives that we are to enact or to achieve while we're here on this earth. And some of us hear the call and some of us answer and some of us hear the call and some of us don't. But for those who have chosen to answer the call, they now have to walk in it. And that's what I call the walk. And the walk looks like the decisions that you make that are based on the values that you have established. It looks like not doing the things that you used to do that were detrimental to you. Whether that was overeating, drinking too much, if it was overgiving in your relationships, if it was a lack of boundaries, um if it was perpetuating generational curses in your families and and things like, you know, health disorders, you know, and choosing to walk out the new way.

Dr. Lee Koles: What about those people who just say, Coach Nay, I don't know what my call is. Like, I'm listening. I have my hand to my ear. I just don't know what it is. What do I do?

Nayshondra Mercer: I love that. Those are the clients who I have identified are in that place called the level up. And like when you're getting ready to uplevel and you're trying to figure out how you're going to be able to embrace your full self, it's usually when you the call is a little staticky like you know that you got it, you answered the phone, but they're breaking up on the other side or they sound like a robot and you know you heard it, but you're not sure what you heard. That's the moment where you know that it's time to level up in your life. And usually it has symptoms such as you're really uncomfortable in your job. Everything that your boss and your co-worker says just starts to really just irk your nerves. You don't want to be there anymore. You've already quietly quit. You're at work and you're looking for a new job. That's how you know you're ready for a level up. If you've been in a relationship for a long time and you start looking at your partner like you don't know who they are, it's time for you're probably ready to level up. It's like wearing shoes that are too small. Eventually, you're going to get bunions and corns and all kinds of things. You can continue to wear a shoe that no longer fits you or you can decide to grow and get one that does. And so, when you're in that place of getting ready to to uplevel to that new you that you are becoming because we are all becoming all the time. That's when you'll begin to see all of the discomfort that you have in your life. And you'll begin to feel like a caterpillar that's trying to break out of the cocoon. Everything just feels tight.

Dr. Lee Koles: Feels tight. Feels uncomfortable. You know that you're meant for something more. How do you burst out of that cocoon? Or get yourself a new pair of shoes.

Nayshondra Mercer: You got to take one step. That's it. And that one step is going to be different for everyone. But you just you have to take a step forward because when you're in that discomfort, it's because you're stuck. Your feet are planted. You haven't moved. The world feels like it's happening to you and that you can't do anything. But you can. You just have to take a new position and move from where you are. Which means you have to take one step. It might be put in the res It could be ending that relationship. It could be no longer overgiving in your work environment. There's so many other things that we can do that will let you know that you've made a shift. You started the podcast. You opened the LLC. You know, take one step.

Dr. Lee Koles: I love the examples you gave because one step forward may sometimes feel like a step back. Like for example, you know, handing in the resignation, you know, that might feel like a step back. Well, great. Now I don't have a job, but actually it is a step forward towards finishing that portion of your life and starting something new or same as ending a relationship that isn't working out for you. You know, you can look at it as, well, now I'm back to, you know, square one, but in actuality it's now you're free to uplevel.

Nayshondra Mercer: Mhm. Absolutely. Because you've left the old thing. behind and you've stepped into something new. Now, that new thing is exactly that. It's going to feel like you started from the from the beginning and that's because you have it's new and a lot of clients can get really uncomfortable in that place. That's where they start to this is where they start to freak out like okay I left and and now I like you said I don't have a job. I don't have anything to catch me. But that's the reason why it's you have to have the faith to just walk it out one step at a time.

Dr. Lee Koles: So, Coach Nay tell me how can my listen listeners get to a place where they're walking with their head held high, feeling confident in themselves like you do when you walk into a room. And I know that, you know, none of us feel completely secure in every single aspect of ourselves, but there's still a level that we can get to where we feel like we can be confidently ourselves.

Nayshondra Mercer: Yes. I would say start with what you know. Confidence is knowing that you can do a thing because you've done it before. and you've done it enough that you know that you can replicate it. So if given an opportunity, you know you could do it again. If I'm my family and I, we go bowling all the time. I know that when I bowl with my family, I'm bowling most of the strikes and I have that confidence because I've done it over and over and over again. So if I find myself in a new environment or a new space or I've taken that first step and nothing looks like anything else that I've ever experienced in my life, double down on what you do know to be true. If I'm getting ready to bowl with folks I've never bowled with before, I know I can bowl a strike and so I'll bowl a strike. If I know that it's time for me to give a presentation at a new job and they've never seen me do it before, I know that I've done this before. So, I start with what I know and I do what I've always done. And when you show up in that way, in the confidence of who you are and what you know your abilities are, you'll continue to amplify and grow. more of that confidence and then you can take that and apply that to other areas in your life where you maybe are not as confident.

Dr. Lee Koles: Yeah, it all comes back to who are you like how do I do me? You know, how do I want to show up? What decisions can I make that are aligned with my values and stay on that path so that I can grow and learn and get unstuck, do the laundry, and get a new pair of shoes if I need them.

Nayshondra Mercer: Yeah. Yeah, you got to do that. New pair of shoes are fun. Why wouldn't you want a new pair of shoes?

Dr. Lee Koles: I know. I know. Well, listen, I am a connector as I think you figured out meeting me at the conference. I just love to meet new interesting people. So, Nayshondra, how can my listeners connect with you and get to know you more?

Nayshondra Mercer: Absolutely. Online, you can find me on my website. That's my first and last name, nandramer.com. And that's n a y s h o n d r a mercer m er c e r n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n nandre mercer.com. So you can find everything Coach Nay over there with my coaching practice, my best-selling book, my podcast as well. And you can find me on Instagram. I'm there underscore actually it's a coach nay double_ and you can come and talk to me there. I love to hear from folks. my DMs and yeah, let's chat, let's connect.

Dr. Lee Koles: Excellent. And Coach Nay, if you could leave our listeners with one takeaway from this discussion, what would it be?

Nayshondra Mercer: One takeaway would be to keep seeking. And one of my favorite quotes is from Roomie because Roomie says that what you're seeking is seeking you and it is all in the search. And when you Ask and when you seek and when you knock, what's for you will come to you.

Dr. Lee Koles: I love that. Well, thank you, Nayshondra, and thank you everyone for joining us on the Potentialist podcast, and I look forward to getting together again soon. But until then, be good to yourself and know that I've got your back. Thanks for joining me at the Potentialist podcast. When I'm not behind the mic, I'm speaking on stages, leading transformative workshops, and coaching clients to unlock their strengths and achieve remarkable results. Curious about working together or having me at your next event? Head over to drleekoles.com. That's l e k o l e s. If today's episode sparks something in you, I'd love to hear about it. And don't forget to follow, rate, and leave a review. It helps others discover the power of possibility, too. Until next time, remember the world wants what you have and your next step starts now.