Killer Self-Confidence

Self confidence is one of those things that determines whether we’re going to be highly successful in our goals or not.

So, where does self-confidence come from and what can we do to increase it?

On this episode of The Joyful You  podcast, I answer these questions.

WHAT YOU WILL DISCOVER

• The difference between confidence and self-confidence
• What it truly means to be self-confident.
• Where self-confidence comes from.
• 3 steps you can take to increase your self-confidence.
• And much more!

FEATURED ON THE SHOW

• Joyful Breakthrough Call with Rachael

CONNECT

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• I’d love to hear from you with any questions or insights. Leave me a message on Instagram @ajoyfulyou
• If you like what you learn on the podcast, I’d like to invite you to take this work further by hopping on a complimentary call with me. I’d love to answer any questions you have and/or help you break through what’s really holding you back. Let’s chat! Click Here 

 

TRANSCRIPT:

This is The Joyful You Podcast, episode 88, Killer Self-Confidence.

Welcome to The Joyful You Podcast.

On this show, I talk all about the tools you need to build faith in yourself, cultivate a healthy relationship with food, your mind, and your life.

I’m your host, Rachael Collins.

As a certified life coach, it is my mission to show you how to work with your body, manage your mind, process your emotions, improve your relationships, and create supportive habits so you can live well, feel well, and become your strongest, healthiest, happiest, most amazing self, a joyful you.

Hey, welcome to the podcast.

Last week’s episode, we talked about sabotaging self-doubt.

And today, I want to talk about killer self-confidence.

Killer, obviously, in this case, being slang for powerful.

A lot of my clients come to me and they will say things like, I’m just not good at anything.

I’m really not.

I see all these other people who are so good at all these things, and I’m just not good at anything.

Or they’ll say, I tried it and it just didn’t work for me.

I’m just not capable.

This is a good example of sabotaging self-doubt that is just creeping in.

And what we want on the other side of self-doubt is confidence.

And a lot of people think confidence is just something that some people are born with, and some people just aren’t so lucky, and they weren’t born with that.

But confidence isn’t something you’re either born with or you’re not.

Confidence is something we actually create.

When we do something right, we gain confidence that we can do it again.

And if we look at confidence this way, there are probably hundreds of things that you’re very confident about.

We just aren’t paying attention or even thinking about it.

We’re not realizing these things.

So for example, I bet if I said to you, Hey, can you please tie your shoes?

I bet that you would confidently be able to tie your shoes.

How about brushing your teeth?

Are you pretty confident that you can brush your teeth?

How about pouring water from a pitcher into a glass?

Could you confidently pour me a glass of water?

I bet you could.

How about making your bed?

You pretty confident you can make your own bed?

Okay, how about something a little more difficult?

How about driving a car?

My 15 year old daughter is currently learning how to drive, and it’s hard for her.

And she has little confidence in this.

She’s unsure.

She’s even scared sometimes to get behind the wheel or to drive on certain roads or drive certain places.

Right now she can’t even have the radio on because she can’t listen to music and think about all the things that she needs to do in order to drive at the same time.

Now to us, who have been driving for a long time, driving seems really simple.

We don’t have to think it through anymore.

We’re not thinking, okay, I get in the car, I put on my seatbelt, now I need to, wait, what was that?

Oh yes, press the brake, and then I start the engine, and then I need to put the car in drive, and then I press the gas, and I need to check my mirrors, and I need to watch my speed.

We don’t have to think about all that stuff anymore.

We just do it because we’re so confident.

And if by chance we’re driving somewhere, and we have to stop at a red light, or maybe even a car pulls out in front of us, we are not freaking out thinking, oh no, maybe I’m not a good driver after all.

I’m such a failure.

You would just know that having to stop at a red light, or a stop sign, or go over a speed bump, or having crazy drivers pull out in front of you is just a normal part of the journey.

You don’t let that stop you.

You are confident that you can figure it out and that you can handle it.

That’s confidence comes from the things that we’ve done in the past.

But what about the things that we haven’t done before?

What about all the things that you want to be able to do, all the things that you wish that you were confident in, but you haven’t done them yet?

Or maybe you’ve tried doing them and you failed.

What about those things?

This is where self-confidence comes in.

Where confidence is, I already know I can do it because I’ve done it successfully in the past.

Self-confidence is a belief in yourself before you do it.

It’s a belief in your ability to take action.

It’s a belief in your ability to learn and to figure it out.

So when it comes to the goals that we haven’t accomplished yet, what we use to accomplish them is self-confidence, because self-confidence is the way that we get to confidence.

So how do we do this?

Today, I’m going to share with you just three steps to creating self-confidence.

So step one is to have your own back.

What you think about yourself is what generates or depletes self-confidence.

Because self-confidence is just simply a feeling about yourself.

So what do your thoughts about yourself look like?

Are you being the cheerleader, or are you being the mean girl?

What does your self-talk like?

Are you telling yourself that you’ve got this, or are you tearing yourself down?

A lot of us are being the mean girl, and we are depleting our self-confidence.

Somewhere along the way, we conditioned ourselves to believe that if we are mean and if we beat ourselves up, that somehow motivates us to get our button gear.

But it actually does the opposite.

Negative thoughts and negative self-talk generate negative feelings that drive negative actions, not positive ones.

When I think about this, I always think about when my husband and I bought our very first house, and it came with this old crappy yellow refrigerator, and I hated this thing.

I hated it, and I wished that we had a new one.

And because I hated it, I didn’t take care of it.

I would slam the door shut with the door still open.

I rarely wiped it down.

And no matter how much I abused it, no matter how mean I was to it, it didn’t make the fridge any better.

It actually made it worse.

The doors were broken, and things started getting wonky in it.

This is how it is with us.

We want a slimmer body.

Maybe we want to be a more patient mom.

We want to feel better.

Or whatever it is for you.

So then what do we do?

We go around slamming the door on ourselves with the door still open, so to speak, thinking that that’s somehow going to motivate us to change.

But all it ends up doing is just hurting us and making things worse.

We are both the villain and the victim.

We are hurting and we are being hurt.

Both at the same time, both by us.

If we want self-confidence, we really need to watch our inner talk.

Don’t let your mind run wild with thoughts of failure, or being a failure, or this is so hard for you because…

fill in the blank, whatever it is for you.

We all have this voice.

We all know this voice.

Our inner mean girl voice is what I call it.

And I found it really helpful to give my inner mean girl voice a name.

I call her Piper because she likes to pipe up a lot.

Being able to recognize, wait a second, this is Piper talking, and I don’t have to listen to Piper.

It has been really helpful for me.

We also have another voice inside of us.

This voice is what I call our true voice.

Our true voice is kind of quiet, she’s shy, she’s someone intimidated by our inner mean girl, of course.

When we have our own back, it looks like choosing to listen to what our true voice is telling us and ignoring our inner mean girl.

I cannot stress how important it is to have your own back.

Ourself talk and the thoughts that we think about ourselves are just habits, which is really good news because since we learned the habit, it means we can unlearn this habit.

And this just takes retraining our brain.

Remember, our brain wants to be efficient, and it likes to automatically keep thinking the same things that it’s always thought.

It thinks it’s being really useful, right?

So if you are used to thinking these self-loathing mean girl thoughts, you’ll continue to think them because your brain is just going to keep bringing them up.

And the way that you stop is to train your brain to think differently.

This is where coaching comes in really handy, because not only can I, as a coach, help you be more aware of all of these thoughts, I can also teach you how to retrain your brain and how to build faith in yourself so that you can become your own best friend.

Okay, that’s step number one.

Step number two is to trust yourself, and keep going, and don’t be afraid of failure.

Trusting yourself comes down to knowing you will do what you have said you will do.

You follow through on your plan, and you take care of yourself even when you don’t feel like it, because you promised yourself you would.

So it’s keeping your promises to yourself.

Consistently following through on your word is how you are going to gain trust and confidence in yourself.

So keep showing up even when things don’t turn out exactly right.

Keep practicing, keep figuring things out, and don’t let failure stop you.

Because actually the only time we fail is when we quit.

I like to tell my clients that failure is your best asset.

I’m serious.

It’s the best thing that can happen to you because in the fail is where all the learning happens.

When we choose to just keep swimming through the hard, like we talked about last week, that’s when we get stronger because we’re learning how to figure things out and how to have our own back.

And how to trust ourselves and how to keep going through the hard.

So that’s step two.

Now the last step, step three, is to be willing to experience any emotion.

So hear me out on this.

The worst thing that can happen to you is a feeling.

Feelings are why we do or don’t do every single thing.

Remember, our feelings drive all of our actions and all of our inactions.

So many of us spend our lives trying to avoid all the uncomfortable feelings.

We just want the happy positive ones, none of the uncomfortable ones, none of the growing pains, as I like to call them.

But part of being a human is that we are going to have storms.

We are going to have uncomfortable things happen.

We just are.

We’re going to have these hard, challenging, stormy times.

This is completely normal.

Often what happens when we have these storms coming is we try to ignore them, we avoid them, we run away from them.

This looks like maybe we bury our head in our work, or we try to eat our weight in ice cream, or we endlessly scroll TikTok, getting lost in someone else’s life, rather than facing our own life.

But these things don’t actually get rid of the storm.

The storm is still there.

We think that we can avoid the negative feelings, and maybe if we keep ignoring them, or avoiding them, or resisting them long enough, they’ll go away, but they don’t go away.

What actually ends up happening is we end up making the negative even bigger, because now we’re piling negative on top of negative on top of negative, and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

Something that I recently learned that I find very fascinating is that when a storm comes, most animals will run away from the storm.

But the bison, or maybe you’ll call them buffalo, whatever you want to call them, they run toward the storm.

They instinctually know that by running into the storm, the storm will pass them and they will get through it faster.

Fascinating, right?

So when the storms of life come, be a bison, be a buffalo.

Turn around and face that storm head on.

Run through it.

Feel the emotions, and you will get through that discomfort and achieve your goal so much faster.

So self-confidence says, I will do it with any emotion.

I can feel any emotion, any amount of discomfort, and keep going.

Self-confidence also is what’s going to convince you to keep trying, to keep showing up, to keep facing all the storms until you figure it out and eventually reach your goal.

Okay, so let’s just wrap all this up.

Self-confidence is having your own back and not beating yourself up when you make a mistake.

And it’s also not trying to hate and bully yourself into changing.

It’s learning to trust yourself.

It’s keeping your word to yourself and believing that you have what it takes.

You have the ability to figure it out.

Self-confidence is also your willingness to feel anything, including failure and not being afraid to fail.

We are supposed to make mistakes.

It’s part of God’s plan.

God didn’t send us here and say, okay, every one of you is going to be perfect.

That wasn’t God’s plan.

That was Satan’s plan, right?

God’s plan was, we’re going to send them to earth so that they learn, so that they progress.

And part of that is making mistakes.

And when we make mistakes, we learn from the mistakes.

So mistakes are part of the plan.

So don’t be afraid of failure.

Don’t be afraid of mistakes.

Again, failure is really your best asset.

It really is because it’s where all the learning happens.

When I lost 50 pounds, I had lots and lots and lots of failures.

I would eat off the plan.

I would eat something that I knew wasn’t going to get me closer to my goal.

I would emotionally eat.

Or I would try a way of eating that I thought would work, but ultimately it didn’t.

I’d have nights where I would stay up too late.

My sleep would be wonk.

Days where I didn’t drink my water.

Days where I sat all day and did not move my body once.

And then times when I didn’t manage my storms, when I didn’t manage my stress, my emotions very well.

Losing weight for me was all about learning by failing.

I had to keep experimenting, and I had to keep failing, and trying another way, and experimenting over and over and over again, and over and over again until I learned what worked and what didn’t work for me and for my body.

The times that I overate or ate off plan, or the scale didn’t go down, I had a choice to make.

I had to choose to start having my own back.

I had to choose to stop beating myself up, to learn to be my own best friend.

I had to decide that I was going to be willing to experience any emotion, especially those uncomfortable ones.

This is killer self-confidence.

This is what it’s all about.

This is how we are going to get rid of the sabotage and achieve our goals.

Okay, before I let you go, if you like what you’ve learned on this podcast, I would like to invite you to take this work further by hopping on a complimentary call with me.

I would love to answer any questions that you have, or help you break through your own storms, help you break through what’s holding you back.

So if you are interested in that, you can reach out to me, you can DM me on social media, or I will put a link to my calendar in the show notes, and you can sign up there.

Okay friends, that’s it.

I will see you next time.

Have a great week.

Thank you for listening to The Joyful You Podcast.

If you’d like additional support, click the link in the show notes, and let’s chat about how we can work together to get you to your goal.

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If you want to hang out on social media, you can find me on Instagram, at A Joyful You, or on my website, ajoyfulyou.com.

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