Episode 80 - Self-Confidence
Episode 80 - Self-Confidence
Hello, friends!
Welcome to the Seasons of Joy Podcast.
I am so happy you are here.
Before I get started, I wanted to remind you about an amazing free resource that I have available for you as we are approaching the holidays. Many of us will be gathering with family and friends to celebrate. For some of us, this can be a challenge. When we are struggling in our relationships, the holidays can be difficult. Some of those relationships could even be with our own adult children.
I have put together what I call Mending The Rift: Repairing Relationships with Your Adult Children. In this resource, I share with you 7 tips to help you navigate those relationships that seem challenging to you. It is geared towards our relationships with our adult children but the tips I share are applicable to any relationship. You can find the link in the show notes. If you will apply each of these tips, I promise you, you will be better able to enjoy the holidays with those you love.
Now, on to today’s episode.
On my last podcast, episode 79, I spoke about self-love and I shared 5 ways to increase your love of self. If you haven’t had a chance to listen to that episode, I encourage you to do so. It fits really well with this week’s topic of self-confidence.
Up until a few years ago, I didn’t really understand the difference between confidence and self-confidence. I thought they were one and the same. However, once I learned the difference, my life changed.
On one hand, confidence is a feeling of trust in one's abilities, qualities, and judgments. It can help us in achieving specific goals we have. Confidence is often based on past experiences and accomplishments. For example, a person who has successfully completed several projects at work may feel confident in their abilities to handle new tasks.
On the other hand, self-confidence is a deeper sense of trust in oneself that is not necessarily tied to external factors. It is essential for our overall well-being and happiness. Self-confidence is knowing that you can experience any emotion, including fear, without being harmed. It is about accepting yourself fully and embracing your strengths and weaknesses. Self-confidence is an inner strength and belief in your worth and value as a person.
Trusting yourself means believing that you will follow through on your commitments, take care of your own needs and do what is best for yourself, even when it may be difficult. It involves having confidence in yourself and your abilities to make responsible choices and take action towards achieving your goals. So, essentially, trusting yourself is all about keeping your word to yourself and staying committed to your own well-being.
Creating a plan and hoping you will follow through on it is not the same as taking action. When you only rely on hope to accomplish something, you leave yourself vulnerable to self-doubt, which is the opposite of self-confidence. When you can't trust yourself to follow through, you may feel insecure and flakey, rather than in control and self-confident. Self trust develops as you consistently follow through on your word to yourself.
For example, I may decide that I want to run a marathon. If I haven’t ever done this before, I can’t base my success on past experience of running a marathon. I am going to have to trust myself to follow the training plan that I have decided to follow. No amount of hoping is going to help me complete that goal if I don’t follow it up with honoring my plan even when it is hard or uncomfortable. This is self-confidence.
Another example is this podcast. When I decided I wanted to do a podcast, I didn’t even know how to do it. I had no past experience in doing anything like this. I just decided that I was going to learn and that it was going to be fun. I knew that there would be a learning curve and I would make mistakes. However, I decided I would just show up and enjoy the process of learning and creating no matter what it looked like. And here I am at almost 55 years old recording my 80th podcast episode.
Is my podcast perfect? Heavens no. It may not even be that good to some people but I honestly don’t care. Has it been hard and even uncomfortable? Totally. But has it been fun? Definitely. I am so glad I have done it. I had to tap in the feeling of self-confidence while at the same time feeling scared through the process. Those two emotions are not mutually exclusive. I think that fear often comes along for the ride.
I believed that I could handle whatever emotion came up for me during the process. Now, over a year and a half later, I can say I have developed more confidence in the skills that I have developed through the process of creating this podcast.
The worst thing that can ever happen is an emotion. Our emotions are what make life bad. Most people spend so much time worrying and doubting themselves because they don’t know if they can handle anything that comes along in their life. But the truth is, there is no emotion that will permanently harm us if we allow ourselves to feel it and fully process it. When we are willing to experience any emotion, while knowing it is the worst thing that can happen, self-confidence will grow. The ability to feel fuels action and allows us to become who we want to be. This ability takes away the risk of living and creating our life.
What could you accomplish if you really believed that you could handle any emotion?
The truth is, the thoughts and opinions that you have about yourself are what either take away or add to your self-confidence. Self-confidence is an emotion. Our emotions are created by our thoughts and beliefs. A person that feels self-confident is going to believe that they are capable, valuable, and worthy. They are going to think that they are competent, strong, and up for the challenge. These beliefs create self-confidence which fuels the actions that will help them progress, even imperfectly, towards the results they want in their life.
I think that sometimes in our religious culture, we worry about being prideful or arrogant. I believe most of us desire to be humble and kind. We are striving to be more like the Savior. But what often happens is self-confidence is confused with arrogance, so we end up belittling ourselves in an effort to not be arrogant.
However, arrogance is believing that you are better than someone else and making sure you prove it. It is a counterfeit to self-confidence. Arrogance includes comparing and putting others down in order to raise your opinion of yourself. It is based in fear–a fear of not being enough. Arrogance fuels behaviors such as lying, puffing oneself up, finding fault with others, and exaggerating abilities in order to avoid rejection. Arrogance is the opposite of self-confidence.
Self-confidence is understanding that all human beings are amazing, incredible, and capable. It doesn’t require putting others down. In fact, self-confidence is about valuing everyone, including ourselves.
If you were to grade yourself on how self-confident you are between 1 and 10, what would you be? Why?
Many of us struggle feeling self-confident because we don’t trust ourselves. We don’t know how to manage our minds or emotions. We can feel out of control in our lives. This leads us to not follow through on our word to ourselves which undermines the trust we have in ourselves. It makes it harder to live in alignment with what we truly value.
We are also afraid of feeling our emotions. We don’t want to feel negative emotions, so we avoid them. Then we find ourselves afraid to do anything that we might fail at.
This causes us to continually question our abilities because we believe we need to do things perfectly in order to avoid feeling negative emotion. We view ourselves through a dark lens and we don’t spend time focusing on the good in ourselves. The human brain is designed to look for what is wrong, and it is always doing its job. It finds negative thoughts that create negative emotions. This is also the opposite of self-confidence.
Self-confidence doesn’t rely on anyone else’s opinion of you. No one can take away your self-confidence because it is an emotion that is created by your beliefs. Your beliefs create your states of being. A belief is a thought that you think over and over. Thinking thoughts that create self-confidence and then believing them is a skill that you can develop but it does take practice.
However, many of us have recycled beliefs that create anxiety, self-doubt, and shame. We don’t even realize it though because we have always thought this way. Our brain offers these thoughts to us because they are familiar. Sometimes, familiarity feels better to us than the discomfort of thinking something new, even if it doesn’t serve us.
So what are some of the recycled thoughts you may have?
Here are a few examples:
“I don’t know how.”
“I have never done it before.”
“I’m not talented or experienced enough.”
“I’m not good enough.”
“It’s too hard for me.”
“Failure is weakness.”
“Others are different, special, privileged, and lucky.”
“Rejection is the worst thing that can happen.”
“Other people’s opinions define me.”
“The less risk I take, the better.”
“Confidence is something you either have or you don’t.”
“Looks, money upbringing, or intelligence determine my confidence.”
“I am a victim and broken.”
“Fear means you aren’t confident.”
“Confident people are comfortable and don’t feel afraid.”
Do any of these recycled thoughts hit home for you?
These thoughts are not facts and they are totally optional.
What if you could start letting go of your recycled thoughts and begin thinking something different when it comes to self-confidence?
You don’t have to know it all or be bossy or outgoing to be self-confident. Being a self-confident person means not worrying about admitting when you make a mistake, that you don’t have the answer, or that you don’t know something. You aren’t afraid of failing because you understand it is an opportunity for growth and increased self-confidence.
When you have more self-confidence, you will set more goals, talk to more people, take more action, take more risks, achieve more, believe in your future capability and capacity, and be a creator of your future.
We each have 3 things working against us when it comes to creating more self-confidence.
1. Our humanness. The human brain is designed to look for and focus on what is wrong.
2. our programming. The way we were raised and the culture we grew up in.
3. Our beliefs and our thinking. The thoughts we have thought over and over create our beliefs.
So, in order to create greater self-confidence, we have to deliberately train our brains to create it because it doesn’t come naturally.
So, how can we cultivate self-confidence?
I want to share with you 5 ways to do that.
Change your thoughts about yourself. Self-confidence is a daily practice of self belief and an embracing of your amazingness.
Consider the possibility of what you can create in the future. Opening yourself to the possibilities will move you closer toward them.
Focus on what you do well. Identify and celebrate your strengths.
Be willing to feel uncomfortable knowing it will not harm you. Growth happens outside of your comfort zone. Don’t rely on your ability but rely on your belief that you can handle anything because everything is just an emotion and you understand where they come from.
Practice self-compassion. This means treating yourself with kindness and understanding, even when you fall short or make mistakes.
When you step into self-confidence by applying these concepts, it blesses not only yourself but those around you. When you aren’t afraid to put yourself out there, you can put more good in the world. You create an energy of abundance and it influences the people around you.
So what are some thoughts that you could use to create more self-confidence?
Here are some examples:
”Everything is figure-out-able.”
“I was made for this.”
“I am capable.”
“I am here for me.”
“The worst that can happen is I will experience a negative emotion.”
“What others think about me is 100% about them.”
“I believe in myself unconditionally.”
“I love and accept myself unconditionally, right now in this moment.”
“Worry only pretends to be necessary.”
“The better I fail, the more confident I am.”
What thoughts can you come up with that create self-confidence for you?
Maybe you can’t totally believe your new thoughts yet. In that case, I invite you to use what is called a bridge thought. It is a thought that bridges the gap between a belief you currently have and the belief you desire.
One of my favorite bridge thoughts is “it’s possible….”
“It’s possible that worry isn’t necessary.”
“It’s possible that failure will help me learn to be more confident.”
“It’s possible that I could believe in myself unconditionally.”
“It’s possible I was made for this.”
You get the idea.
The more action you take doing those things that scare you, the more your confidence will grow. The more you allow yourself to feel uncomfortable, the more your confidence will grow. The more you make decisions and honor them, the more your confidence will grow. The more you seek your own approval instead of the approval of other people, the more your confidence will grow. The more you learn by doing, the more your confidence will grow. The more you don’t compare yourself to others, the more your confidence will grow. The more you don't let yourself get offended, the more your confidence will grow. The more you let people be wrong about you, the more your confidence will grow.
So remember to increase your self-confidence:
Change your thoughts about you.
Consider the possibilities.
Focus on what you do well.
Be willing to feel uncomfortable.
Practice self-compassion.
Self-confidence is not about being perfect or never making mistakes. It's about trusting ourselves and our abilities, even in the face of challenges and setbacks. By cultivating self-confidence, we can live more fulfilling lives and pursue our goals with courage and determination.
The truth is that in the end, we all only have one life here on earth. So, why not live it to the fullest?
That is all I have for you today. Thank you for being here and have a joyful day!
FREE PDF - Mending the Rift: Repairing Relationships with Adult Children
If you are ready to take these concepts and apply them to your circumstances, I would love to be your coach.
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