There’s a version of you that’s been waiting.
Waiting to feel ready, to feel sure, to feel confident enough.
Maybe it’s the internship you haven’t applied to because you don’t tick every box on the list. Maybe it’s a conversation you’ve been rehearsing in your head for two weeks. Maybe it’s just sending an email.
I used to think confidence was a prerequisite, something you had to possess before you showed up.
Turns out, it’s the opposite.
Mikayla Flake has embraced an action-oriented mindset throughout her career as a Vector sales rep and district manager. Even though she had shaky confidence and plenty of fear starting out, she kept moving forward.
Her results prove that you don’t need to know everything or feel “ready.” Because the doing itself actually builds confidence. Here’s how Mikayla did it scared (and how you can too).
Excerpts from this article were originally recorded in the “No Base Pay” podcast.
Confidence comes after the action, not before it
When you’re contemplating taking a leap, it’s easy to get hung up on the preparation: studying, building the skill(s), waiting until you feel sure of yourself.
Of course I’m not knocking training and preparation, but sometimes we hide behind them to a fault. Things like overthinking and perfectionism can feed into hesitation, too.
Luckily, Mikayla didn’t let uncertainty hold her back.
She asked for a promotion she wasn’t sure she wanted.
She opened an office she didn’t know how to run.
She moved to a state where she’d never sold a single product.
In every case, she committed to the decision before she had the skill or the confidence. Instead, she built both on the job, under real pressure.
That may seem backwards, but it actually lines up with one of the most cited frameworks in psychology. Albert Bandura’s self-efficacy theory identifies what he calls “mastery experiences” as the single biggest driver of self-belief.
According to the American Psychological Association, a mastery experience is simply the act of doing something and succeeding at it—or even just surviving it. Your brain files that away as evidence: I’ve done hard things before. I can do them again.
No amount of positive self-talk or visualization produces that evidence. Only doing the thing does.
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You don’t need permission to ask for more
A year into teaching high school Spanish and selling Cutco on the side, Mikayla started thinking about management.
Nobody recruited her into the role. She just asked for it: “If I wanted to be a district manager, what would I do?”
At the time, she didn’t even know the difference between opening a smaller satellite office and running a full district.
Two days later, she was on a call with her division manager, learning what the role would require. She spent the rest of the school year training for a job nobody had officially offered her yet, teaching virtual classes in the morning and running recruiting interviews at night.
She let her curiosity lead. If she had waited until she was fully confident to ask, she wouldn’t have landed the role (at least not that early). Besides her new-found belief in herself, diving in and getting started also brought her a great deal of clarity:
@vectormarketing.official Like many students, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do after college. I thought I was supposed to take the safe path: Graduate. Get a real job. Follow in my parents’ footsteps. So I did. I moved back home. Took a teaching job. It was stable. Safe. Expected. But deep down, I knew I was settling. Then I got a letter in the mail for Vector Marketing student jobs. It wasn’t part of my plan, but the idea of running my own business, developing leadership skills, and working on my own terms intrigued me. I took the risk. Started my own Vector Marketing virtual office. And for the first time, I had control over my career. Because of my experience selling Cutco knives, today I run my own business. I help people grow. I make an impact beyond what I ever imagined. At first, my parents were skeptical… “Is Vector Marketing legit? Will this even work?” But now? They’ve seen firsthand how I’ve built something I love. I get it. I had those same questions. But I can tell you this: the vector opportunity is real. And it’s life-changing.. if you’re willing to work for it. #collegegrad #betOnYourself#BetOnYourselfialMindset #buildyourdreamlife #postgradlife #vectorMarketingExplained#VectorMarketingExplainedok #CapCut ♬ original sound – Vector Marketing
The confidence didn’t arrive on schedule
By her own account: “After I started selling, I was really not good.” Her fast start brought in a total of $700 to $800. She tried to quit more than once. Her manager talked her out of it each time, and something in her decided to keep betting on herself.
It wasn’t exactly smooth sailing for Mikayla when she started her management journey. She didn’t run her own interview until three months before opening her first office. Before that, the only skills she had were messaging people on Instagram and scheduling appointments.
She pushed through feelings of self-doubt and thoughts of quitting—both of which are more common than most people admit (especially when taking on a new challenge). There’s a reason so many people stall out at exactly that stage.
A 2023 study published in the Journal of Rational-Emotive & Cognitive-Behavior Therapy, which tracked participants aged 18 to 90, found that fear of failure is what drives procrastination—and that it hits younger adults hardest.
The researchers noted that fear of failure “strongly influences younger adults to postpone the start or delay of intended actions.” Mikayla was 21 at the time, squarely in the group statistically most likely to quietly let it go.
But she didn’t—even though she was working out of a virtual office in a town where she knew no one, away from her family for the first time. At the end of that summer, she called her mom and said out loud: “I just don’t know if I want to do this. I don’t know if this is going to work out.”
The confidence needed to run that office showed up years later, after she’d already been on the ground, after she’d struggled to gain her footing. That’s the mastery-experience loop doing its work. And it’s the same reason a new Vector rep’s tenth appointment feels nothing like the first one.
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She proved it to herself with her own two feet
Work wasn’t the only place where Mikayla applied this action-first approach.
In April 2024, after a rough professional stretch, Mikayla decided to run a marathon. She hadn’t trained for it. There was no race, no course, and no finish line waiting for her. She ran a two-mile loop in a local park over and over, until the distance added up to 26.2 miles.
In her own words:
I decided I wanted to run a marathon one day, just to remind myself that I could do hard things, that I was capable, and that that could translate.
Around mile 25, she took a break, sitting in her car for fifteen minutes and seriously considered finishing the last mile another day. She got out and walked it instead.
That run didn’t accomplish anything measurable on paper, but it gave her proof she could push through hard things.
She started from scratch and got to work
Mikayla Flake (left), and Vector conference attendees pose for a photo at SLC in Denver.
After nearly four years running a successful office in Athens, Georgia, Mikayla moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas, to be with her now-fiancé. Though this was the right move, it also presented a new challenge that caused her anxiety: She had never sold a single product in that state before.
She described the move honestly, “It’s scary because I not only am opening a new business, but neither of us really know anyone here.” At the same time, she felt it was “really exciting to have just kind of a blank slate.”
Trying new things usually sparks conflicting feelings like that, whether it’s a new state or a new anything.
Starting completely over, she admitted, functioned as a kind of test: “People always say it’s not the territory, it’s the manager. But I think in a scenario like this, this is proof.”
Nobody assigned her that pressure; she put it on herself. And instead of letting it overwhelm her, she went straight to work.
Six weeks into recruiting there, she’d already brought more than fifteen people onto her new team.
She credits that to reaching out to people in the area months before she’d packed a single box. Using her recruitment knowledge and experience in Athens, she followed local students on social media well before the move. After arriving, she showed up to a regional student business conference and offered to speak instead of asking for a favor. She couldn’t know for certain what would work, but she was willing to experiment and take some risks.
Fall in love with the work
On a region call that fall, before the move, Mikayla heard division manager Danielle Kalil say something that stuck with her: You have to fall in love with recruiting. Not tolerate it or go through the motions. You have to actually care about the work before there’s any proof it will pay off.
That’s the thread running through Mikayla’s whole story.
Confidence was never the thing standing between her and the next step.
Confidence was what she BUILT, decision by decision, through trial and error, by making her next move before she felt ready.
If you’re standing on the edge of something right now—a promotion, a move, a difficult conversation—the feeling of readiness doesn’t always come. Stop waiting for it.
Ask for the thing, run (or walk!) the mile you don’t think you have left in you, fall in love with the work before you know how it ends, and let the confidence catch up on its own schedule. It always does.
➡️ Ready to take action and give sales a try? Request an interview.
To hear Makayla tell her story, listen to her full episode on the No Base Pay Podcast.
