How do we build self-confidence? How do we come to that place of feeling like we are not scared to put ourselves out there, like we don’t care what others think, like we’re easily able to communicate to others what we are selling – without feeling uncomfortable?
Creating a business and life that lights you up is so much harder when we are ruled by these factors, so let me give you another way to look at them along with some simple, actionable tips to increase your self-confidence from within your comfort zone.
What self-confidence is and how it’s created:
Let’s start with what confidence is.
It’s that feeling of assuredness. It’s knowing that all is well as you go about what you’re doing.
So, what creates the lack of self-confidence? Fear. That’s all.
It’s a fear of what others will think, it’s a fear of getting it wrong, it’s a fear of people seeing who you really are and rejecting or judging you.
And these are just things we’ve been taught.
When we were very little we were so full of ourselves. We knew who we were. We knew that we were worthy. We felt invincible.
That feeling of confidence slowly disappeared over time because we let what others were thinking about us and what they reflected back to us become more important than the connection to our True Selves (that part of us that already knows we are worthy).
The well-meaning people around us trained us away from this by telling us that we shouldn’t be so full of ourselves because others won’t like us, or if we threw a tantrum in a public place, they may have said, “Look! People are looking at you now because you’re behaving inappropriately.”
They probably told us, “No-one likes a person who blows their own horn.”
We were conditioned away from our innate confidence by them as they stood in their own lack of self-worth, their own lack of self-confidence, and their own limiting beliefs (because they, themselves, had been trained away from knowing who they truly are as well).
So, how do we deal with these fears? Do we face them? Do we push through them? Do we “fake it ’till we make it”?
No.
It’s not about more DOING; it’s actually about STOPPING what we are doing.
Self-confidence is not something we have to learn or create or conjure up. It’s already who we truly are. All that’s required to cultivate it is a conscious, deliberate reconnection to who we truly are.
In a nutshell, cultivating confidence is about knowing who you truly are and being able to make THAT your truth, instead of the limiting beliefs we’ve picked up.
Three ways to boost your self-confidence:
1. Explore a new story.
Check in with the stories your mind is telling you and ask yourself if they are true, now that you have been to your True Power Place and have felt who you truly are.
They can’t be true because they don’t feel anything like your True Power Place. They feel fearful and uncomfortable.
Make a note of the stories and ask, “What if I were the opposite of what this story is telling me? How would that look?”
Write down what is possible for you from this place.
2. Spend more time doing what you’re really good at.
Spending more time in that feeling of self-assuredness helps to make it more prominent in your life. The universe doesn’t distinguish between what you’re confident about because it is only responding to how you feel.
Connect with something that you do really well – a signature dish you cook that everyone loves (and perhaps even requests whenever there’s a gathering), a craft that you’re an expert at, serving your clients from your zone of genius.
Feel the self-assuredness that comes with that and make a point of reconnecting to that often.
3. Stop allowing limiting beliefs to hold you back.
Start identifying those limiting beliefs that pop up every time you do something that triggers your lack of confidence.
Work on turning them into positive affirmations that you believe are true about yourself, so that your monkey mind/ego has less of a hold on you in those moments that require confidence.
By retraining ourselves, we create new neural pathways in our brain, which means the new behaviors become as normal as the old ones.
Self-confidence is inside all of us. And if we can shift our belief around that alone, we have taken big steps toward feeling self-assured in our actions, without ever having to leave our comfort zone.
