It all started by throwing a stick on the ground

Have you ever been in a situation where you felt totally underqualified for what was being asked of you? Where fear and self-doubt seemed to drown out everything else? Most of us have. The interesting thing is that the people we admire from history often started in exactly the same place. They didn't begin with confidence. They began with terror, and acted anyway.

There's even a name for the feeling now. Imposter syndrome. The persistent sense of inadequacy, self-doubt, or fraudulence that follows some people around regardless of how much they've actually accomplished. The voice that whispers, even at the height of success, "you're going to be found out."

It's more common than people admit, particularly among the kind of people who go on to do meaningful things. The interesting question isn't whether you'll feel it. It's what you do with it when it shows up.

Moses at the burning bush

In Exodus 4, Moses is having one of the most extraordinary conversations in the Bible. God has just appeared to him in a burning bush and commissioned him to go and lead the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt. It's the assignment of a lifetime.

Moses doesn't say yes. He starts listing reasons why God has picked the wrong man.

He's not a public speaker. He's not a leader. The Israelites won't believe him. The Egyptians won't listen to him. Pharaoh won't release anyone. The whole thing is, in his honest view, a bad idea looking for a different volunteer.

It's textbook imposter syndrome.

God's response is patient and specific. He gives Moses two simple signs to demonstrate that he's actually been sent. The first one is so ordinary that it's easy to miss the genius of it.

"What is that in your hand?" God asks.

A staff. A walking stick. Just a piece of wood Moses had been using to herd sheep.

"Throw it on the ground."

Moses does. The staff becomes a snake. Moses, predictably, runs from it.

"Reach out your hand and take it by the tail."

Moses does. The snake becomes a staff again.

The whole interaction takes maybe thirty seconds. But something significant has just happened. God has taken the most ordinary thing in Moses's life, the thing he'd been carrying around without noticing it for years, and shown that it could become something extraordinary in his hand.

Moses didn't need to acquire new equipment for the calling. He needed to throw down what he already had and pick it back up trusting it would be enough.

What happens when you throw the stick down

Moses goes on, eventually, to do the things God said he would. Confronting Pharaoh repeatedly. Watching the ten plagues unfold across Egypt. Leading the Israelites out across the parted Red Sea. Receiving the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai. Guiding the people through forty years in the wilderness. Settling disputes. Standing in the gap between God and an often ungrateful nation.

He's now considered one of the most important leaders in three world religions. The man at the burning bush, listing all the reasons it couldn't work, ended up shaping civilisation.

It's worth pausing on the gap between those two pictures. The Moses at the start of the conversation and the Moses at the end of his life are almost different people. The journey from one to the other started with a single decision. Throw the stick down. Trust that what you already have, in the hand of God, can become more than you thought.

Three things worth borrowing from Moses

If you're standing at your own version of the burning bush right now, with your own version of imposter syndrome whispering in your ear, three lessons from Moses are worth holding onto.

• Be strong. Moses confronted one of the most powerful men in the world despite being terrified. Courage isn't the absence of fear. It's doing the thing the fear is telling you not to. Real leadership rarely feels brave from the inside. It just looks brave from the outside, after the fact.
• Be strategic. Most of Moses's perseverance came from a deeper conviction that he was working on something bigger than himself. Without that, he'd have given up in any of the first ten chapters. Leaders who last are the ones whose work is anchored in something larger than their own ambition.
• Be selfless. Despite carrying enormous authority, Moses was fundamentally a servant-leader. He took the complaints. He mediated the disputes. He stood between God and the people, often advocating for the people when they didn't deserve it. True leadership is sacrifice for the sake of those you're leading, not power for its own sake.

He wasn't perfect. He had a temper. He had moments of disobedience that cost him dearly. But the qualities he kept coming back to, humility, courage, perseverance and faithfulness, allowed him to lead a difficult people through a forty-year journey that would have broken most of us in the first six months.

What's in your hand?

Most of us spend a lot of energy worrying about what we don't have. The qualifications we lack. The connections we don't possess. The track record we haven't built yet. The confidence we wish we had more of.

The question God put to Moses is the more useful one. Not "what do you wish you had?" but "what's actually in your hand right now?"

Whatever's there, it's almost certainly more than you think. The challenge is being willing to throw it down, trust that it can become something else, and pick it up again ready to use it for what you were called to do.

So if you stopped fixating on what you lack and looked honestly at what you already have, what is the stick in your hand right now, and what would change if you finally threw it on the ground?