Self-Confidence: How to Believe in Yourself
Self-confidence is this funny thing. It can seem like some people are just born with it and some of us, well, just aren’t. Some of us may come off as quite gregarious on the outside, but inside may spend our lives second- guessing, doubting, questioning ourselves.
My love, no one’s just born being self-confident. Self-confidence is taught to us. It’s a thought, it’s a decision, a belief, and it’s something that you can grow in your own life for your own life. And sure, society and our culture privileges certain humans and ways of being and tells certain people they’re better than and so much more to be confident about than others, but it’s just not true.
Each of us is perfect and amazing and equally perfect and amazing to every other one of us.
And you have the power to be wildly confident about your own amazingness. To be decisive and to go for your dreams on the inside and the outside.
So for a long time, I looked to others who were just going for it, just living their lives on their own terms, just being bold and brave and decisive.
What was always challenging for me wasn’t making the decision and taking the action. At the end of the day, it was the indecision after I’d made the decision. Like the second-guessing. The like, oh gosh, did I make a mistake?
I never would have realized that I was low self-confidence until a friend pointed out like, “Do you ever just make a decision? Do you ever just let those stories about what you can’t do go and just go for it?”
The sort of energy that often comes with this desire to be more confident is this thinking that it has to be bestowed upon you, that it’s something you have to get or obtain, that you have to be born with or taught as a child.
And for me, at the bottom of all this was perfectionism, self-doubt, low self- regard, not trusting myself, and of course, the codependency that kept me feeling stuck. Because I’d spent my life judging myself by other people’s reactions to me, or rather, what I imagined they were thinking of me because we never know what someone else is actually thinking.
So I had this story that if other people didn’t like me or my choices, what I produced in the world, then I couldn’t like myself or my work or my thoughts or anything. And of course, I wasn’t sitting there like, oh shucks, I guess I can’t like me. It was so much more subtle than that.
It was the second-guessing, the holding myself back, the doubting, the asking for a million opinions, the indecision. That’s, again, how my low self-confidence showed up. So I was always trying to get other people’s approval for my life. Subconsciously thinking that then I could have confidence in myself.
All that externalization was so deeply tied to my sense of value and my worth and of course, left me feeling less than.
And oh my goodness, did I roll around in the old compare and despair.
Especially when the basis of comparison is these external accomplishments, which we could also call the C line, the circumstances of someone’s life or your life. Whether you’re married, have kids, got the degree, got the grant, got the promotion, whatever it is, because remember my darling love, no matter what happens on the outside, if you’re judging your insides, you’ll always hold onto those base thoughts that you’re less than.
And you’ll never be able to shift your thoughts at the level of your beliefs, which we know in this family are the thoughts that you’ve thought over and over again on repeat. That old cassette tape in your brain.
So when we look outside of ourselves, especially as folks with codependent thinking, to get approval from someone else, for someone else to validate our insecurity, which can often sound like, “Oh, do I look cute in this?” Or, “Oh, is the dinner I made yummy?” Then you’re looking to that other person to give you that yes you want that you think will make you feel better, that you think will make you feel confident in your looks, your cooking, your spreadsheet, whatever.
But my darling, it never really does. External validation never really fills your cup up. I mean sure, it gives you that dopamine hit that feels amazing for just a tiny bit of time, and actually, the half-life of dopamine is rather short, so it’s really, we’re talking seconds here.
But that delicious dopamine, that like, oh, you think I’m doing well, doesn’t last if you don’t shift the story of your value, your worth, and your self- confidence at the level of your beliefs. And so my love, that’s the work. As always in this family, to shift the beliefs.
What I’ve come to understand is that self-confidence is something that literally everyone can have. No exceptions.
And that’s because it’s never based in something you earn or are given or achieve. It’s something you build within yourself.
Your external success doesn’t create confidence. It simply can’t. And instead, believing that you are capable does. And yes, you may have gotten lessons in your childhood that you’re less than or not smart enough or good enough or whatever the then painful lesson may have been, or you may have been told day in and day out that you’re amazing and great when you were a child.
And after working with hundreds of women over 20 years in wellness, those early lessons about our worth and value don’t always translate into self- confidence as adults. Once again, particularly when they’re based on external achievements like grades and trophies and sport awards.
And yeah, this is Feminist Wellness, my love, so let’s call out that women and folks socialized as women, people of color, differently abled folks, immigrants, queer folks, we’re taught in these subtle and often very direct ways that we are less than, that we’re measured up against the cis white male norm.
And that’s something to both keep in mind and to thus be gentle and loving with yourself about, having been told over and over and over again by society, the media, our culture, our politicians, et cetera, that you’re not enough.
And it’s something to say “eff that” to, to reclaim your confidence, your power. To do so is a radical act and I’m all about each of us doing that work and then doing our part to ripple that change outward into the world for our collective healing.
I want to nerd about your brain. Your prefrontal cortex, my darling angel, will hold onto thoughts as facts. And it already does.
Your brain already may believe that you are not confident about anything in your life, and it will continue to believe that. So whether it’s your ability to speak Spanish, your weight, looks, body, smarts, conversation skills, relationship skills, specific work skills, whatever, what you get to do is to pull back the curtain on all of it and call BS where it’s BS, to lovingly address your prefrontal cortex and say, “You have a belief that doesn’t line up with my best life, with my living forward, with my moving forward, with my creating the life that I want, so we’re going to shift this.”
We’re going to actively learn to build a new story, to build your self-confidence, knowing, like we do, that self-confidence is something that you can create with your mind and it’s something you can have more of right away.
So it’s common to think that self-confidence is something that comes from being good at something. But if you think about it, most of us weren’t born being good at the things we’re good at now. We learned step by step, day by day. And the most important think to know about self-confidence is that it is a feeling, an emotion. And it’s one that you can cultivate.
Most of us only feel confident about things we’ve tried in our past, and that’s why we don’t pursue things we haven’t tried before for our future. Forgetting that you feel competent and confident about new things when you decide to feel it. When you build that muscle, slowly and surely, like we do.
Never lying to yourself but rather, my little nerd, finding that internal willingness to try it on, to work with your nervous system, not against it. To decide that you’re going to do an experiment, that you are a little scientist, and you are going to try on the persona of being confident, to see how it feels. To try on the thought, “I can do hard things,” until that feels real enough. Until you can begin to believe it. I can practice doing hard things. I can learn to do hard things.
And then you can shift that next story to I can do hard things and maybe they’re not so hard after all. See what I’m doing there? Inching yourself ever closer, building confidence by deciding to build it for yourself. Isn’t that fantastic?
Confidence comes from being willing to experience challenging emotions. The emotions that folks might call negative.
And so often, we don’t try because we want to avoid having those challenging emotions. The thing is that self-confidence comes from having a willingness to fail forward. That is to risk failing, knowing that failing is an amazing thing. It is a gift you give your present and future self because when you fail, you learn.
And my love, you no longer beat yourself up for it, right, my darling one? Instead, you give yourself props for failing because you took courageous action to change your life. Well done, you. And yes, of course that can feel really risky. Totally. And my beauty, it’s so worth it. So very worth it to learn what works for you and what doesn’t.
And in that process of scientific exploration, you build self-confidence. When you decide to live with the discomfort of a new practice like eating differently, communicating differently, exercising or moving in a different way, trying on new thoughts like, “Self-care isn’t selfish,” all of these things may make you really uncomfortable as you practice doing them.
And my love, this is how we heal.
We heal by building our trust in ourselves, by building our self-confidence, by knowing and choosing to believe that there’s no bad feeling out there.
No feeling you can’t survive. Just ones that are likely to make you feel so uncomfortable and that’s okay. You can do uncomfortable things.
So my love, let me say it once again. Self-confidence doesn’t come from talent, upbringing, experience, having done a thing a thousand times.
Self-confidence comes from being willing to experience the emotions that come with failure.
So, if you’re willing to experience the emotions that come with failure, embarrassment, defeat, judgment, regret, on and on, then you, my darling, will have more self-confidence than anyone around you. More self- confidence than past you could ever have imagined for you.
When we feel insecure and we feel a lack of self-esteem, self-regard, that’s generally a projection of our own fears and worries about what we imagine other people will think of us.
And of course, since it is your thoughts that create your feelings, and other people’s that create theirs, all that worrying about what other people will think of you is your brain’s way of protecting you because it loves you.
And doing new things and someone else potentially telling you you’re not doing them very well can feel really scary. And when you’re living your life to avoid other people’s judgment, to attempt to avoid feeling like someone is thinking something of you that you don’t want them to think and feel, you’re cutting your own growth off at the knees, my beauty. Robbing yourself of the chance to grow and stretch and become all that you can be.
At the end of the day, what most of us fear more than anything is that we, that you will be mean to yourself if someone else doesn’t approve of you.
So I’ve got a wild proposition for you. And yes, this is the remedy. What if you weren’t worried about other people’s judgments? What if you weren’t worried about feeling those challenging feelings?
Think about it. Think about if you didn’t worry about any of those emotions. The disappointment, the regret, the sadness, what if they were something you were willing to move through? Now, feel into it in your body. Breathe into it. Out.
Now, bring your beautiful inner child into the space for just a quick little moment. Connect in with that sweet human. What if you were able to soothe and care for your younger self? To let that person know there’s nothing to fear here? If you allow yourself to stop worrying about other people’s judgments, to stop worrying about feeling these challenging emotions?
And if you were willing to feel it all, with your inner child on board of course, reparenting yourself to your wildest success, then my love, you’d go all in. And then you would engage with your goals courageously and you would take courageous action and do the next right thing so you could build the life you so desire.
Going all in, dedicating yourself to yourself, your growth, your joy 110% makes you so much more likely to get the result you desire.
And also to fail and so to learn. Funny, right? So we fear the emotion so we don’t do the thing, which means you don’t build the trust or confidence in yourself to do the thing, which strengthens your belief that you can’t do the thing.
And my goodness, isn’t it so ironic? And trust and believe that the longer you avoid doing something, the more you worry about it and create more stories about why that result, that outcome, that action, that confidence is for someone else and not for you. And so the harder it will be to take those first steps to build that confidence within you to achieve it, whatever it may be.
So let’s look at this concept. Judgment.
The truth about other people’s judgment and your own judgment is that it’s harmless. It’s harmless. It literally cannot hurt you.
But what makes it painful is what we make it mean about us, about our lives, et cetera, if someone else doesn’t like our choices. Interesting, right? How that fear can keep us from self-confidence.
Defeat is also one of these emotions, and again, what’s really important is to remember that it’s just a vibration. It’s just energy in your body and it’s inherently harmless because it’s energetic. My darling, it’s not real that you can be defeated by making a wrong decision. It’s just a feeling.
Sure, disappointment is likely when you try something new. And you get to learn to breathe through it, to stay with that disappointment in all of its discomfort and to release your expectations and to learn how to accept life on life’s terms.
But yes, first, you feel it in your body. You feel all the hurt, the disappointment, the sadness, the failure, the regret. And the central point here is these words are just words until we fear them. These feelings are just feelings, energetic vibrations until we fear them. Until we make the experiencing of them mean things we don’t want them to mean. Until we beat ourselves up for them.
If you’re not afraid of any emotion because you know how to regulate and give love and care and tenderness and reparenting to your nervous system and your inner child, you’re unafraid to take on any challenge.
So my beauty, how do you do this? How do you release the fear of emotions?
Well, you start with a deep, slow belly breath in and long out. Through that process, you begin to shift your physiology into ventral vagal, to center yourself in yourself and your power, to ground yourself in your environment and your body, to release oxytocin and to get ventral vagal with you.
So let’s talk it out step wise my nerds. Let’s take a look at the remedies.
Remedy step one to finding your self-confidence and believing in it is of course, to ground yourself.
To settle your nervous system. And we don’t just do that once. You can get to continue to remind your nervous system that you’re safe and secure, all is well here.
Step two, list out how you have been a wild success for you on your own terms for yourself.
The things that I really put myself out there for and the places where I would call myself a wild success were in learning to be less codependent. Learning to release my perfectionism.
The thought work, the spirit work, the energy work, making peace with my ancestral line, all these ways. These are the things that I feel really successful about, so those are the things that I would list out in step two.
Like someone can give me feedback or something that sounds like criticism and I don’t take it personally. Babes, that’s wild success. That goes on the self-confidence list for me, far above a Master’s degree in public health.
Step three, make a promise with yourself that you won’t beat you up.
No matter what you do, no matter what you feel, whatever life looks like, you are going to turn to yourself with kindness first and foremost.
Step four to build your self-confidence, look at your goals.
Take one goal, one thing you want to accomplish and it could be taking a shower. I’m not trying to be cute or cheeky. Today I’m going to get out of bed, I’m going to make some kind of food sustenance and I’m going to take a shower.
It can really be that if that’s where you’re at and that is perfect. Or it can be today I’m going to give my feelings equal air time. Whatever it is that is your goal for your day, make a plan. Break it down into super tiny steps and each step of the way, read back the steps and remind yourself of your promise to be kind to you.
Step five, this is where you go all in. You decide that you are going to have self-confidence, to do this one small thing for yourself, and you’re going to practice writing out, “I am confident that I can do x. I am confident in myself as a person who’s willing to feel all my feels.”
And in that, you can then take courageous action for your life in these big and little things because there’s no big and little thing, right? There’s just the next right thing that you are doing, and you can bring your full passion to it.
Step six, assess, evaluate, recognize your failures and your successes as equally important pieces of information.
And step seven, feel more confident because you did it.
You put yourself out there and that’s a magnificent thing.
Finally, remedy eight, step eight, remind your body, mind, and spirit, that you showed up for you with less blame, less guilt, less self- recrimination than maybe ever before.
That you did your best to be kind and accepting and loving of you and that, that is the key to deep, lasting, sustainable self-confidence. And I know that you have it in you, my darling.
It’s all in there ready for you to turn your most loving eye to, to be your own most loving parent and remind you of just how magnificent you are.
Thank you for taking the time to read Feminist Wellness. I’m excited to be here and to help you take back your health!
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