39. Self Confidence

Hi, I’m Deidrea, wife, and mom to three teenagers, coffee snob, and certified life and business coach. If you’re a high-achieving, goal-oriented woman and you know you were meant for more, then you are a success minded woman and you’re in the right place. I’m here to help you make the money and the impact you’ve been dreaming of, to step into your confidence, create habits and systems to support you, ditch that imposter syndrome, and harness the power of your mind. If you’re ready to create a life and business you love, then let’s go. I’m so glad you’re here.

Hi there, welcome back to the podcast. This is a good one. And I am recording this on Monday, January 15th, MLK Day, the kids are off from school and it is cold, cold, cold here. We are all hunkered down, prepared for the freeze. It's going to be 16 degrees, here today. And for us in Houston, that's pretty darn cold.

 I am snuggled up. In my cozy pajamas with my warm cup of coffee and just loving this cozy time. And I am not looking forward to going for my walk outside today. I have given myself a goal of walking outside every day this year. For at least five minutes a day, rain or shine. I forgot to say at the beginning of the year, sleet or snow, but I'm doing it.

I gave myself a minimum baseline of five minutes a day because that is doable.  And that is achievable. I can go outside and walk for five minutes a day, no matter what. I can do that. And most days, I go way longer than that. Usually about 30 minutes.  But with my minimum baseline of five minutes a day, I know I can do it.

And so I'm developing trust in myself and belief in myself that I do what I say. I will do for myself. And that is what we're talking about today in the podcast. Self confidence so much of our goals and dreams are created from belief in ourselves, from the confidence we have in ourselves. And so I think today this episode is so important and has so much great content that I am so excited to share with you.

So let's go. So what is self-confidence? It's being secure in yourself and your abilities. It's your ability to accept and trust yourself and have a sense of control in your life. And one area that we can always control is what we are thinking. And feeling, which is why I talk so much about that on the podcast.

We really have so much control of ourselves and our lives when we take control of our mind, when we have confidence in ourselves and our ability to manage our mind. Self confidence is your overall opinion of yourself, how and what you think about yourself, talk about yourself to yourself and to other people.

It's your overall self image, self concept. You want to like you. You want to love you. And you can easily say things like, I love that about myself.  When you are self confident, you know your strengths and weaknesses. And you have a positive view of yourself and you don't make your weaknesses mean anything about you and you can handle criticism.

That's a big one for me. So I'm going to break down each one of these into more detail so that you really have an understanding of self confidence and how you can develop more self confidence, which will help you so much. When you're going after your goals and dreams.

So your ability to trust yourself, self trust.  I heard this quote from Zach Spuckler, who I learned how to do Facebook ads from, and he said, self trust is a muscle. I just love that. It's a muscle that you develop just like a muscle when you're lifting weights to improve, increase your strength. Self trust is a muscle that you work on and that you develop over time. And one of the things that is so important with self trust, it's self integrity. It's doing what you say you will do  for yourself.

So just like I said at the beginning of the podcast about my walking every day for five minutes, no one cares if I'm going to walk for five minutes a day outside except for my dog Trixie. And she's been very excited because I actually did tell her, I like looked her in the eyes and hugged her and I said, We are going to go outside for a walk every day. I said, I promise you. For me, I know that I do so much better with external accountability. So I'm even asking Trixie to be my accountability partner.

But  in general, I think that being able to trust ourselves, self trust is so important and having self integrity with yourself, trusting yourself to do what you say you're going to do  is so important. And it really is a key stepping stone on the way to your dreams. It's doing things no matter what.  No matter what you feel like doing, what you want to do, how late it is, how early in the morning you have to get up,  whatever other things you have to do in the day, it's no matter what, that when you say you're going to do something, you do it and over time as you build this self trust muscle, you will learn and really embody minimum baseline, setting realistic doable goals for yourself so that you can honor your commitment to yourself.

And I'll talk about that in a later podcast, really how to set those  minimum baseline goals. But for now just know that when you say you're going to do something, For yourself, especially in the beginning of starting a new habit or going after a goal, start small.  Set realistic and doable goals and commit to yourself that you are going to do it no matter what.

And that is how you build your self trust muscle.

And for some this might be harder if we have a history of not following through on things,  promises that we make to ourselves. And this is really where you start to develop that relationship with yourself that you love yourself, that you take care of yourself. And it really starts with this self trust and self integrity. So I really hope that you will take some time to consider some opportunities in your life where you can build this muscle of self trust.

A concept that I learned many years ago, that was one of those big aha moments for me when I learned this from my coach and mentor Brooke Castillo at the life coach school. And she said this. Self confidence and confidence are two different things.  I always thought they were the same, but here, let me break it down for you and it makes so much sense and it's so helpful.

So self confidence is our overall confidence about ourself as a person, our overall human and how we are in the world.It's our overall self image and self concept.  And the thing that is so important to know, that no matter what we think about ourselves,  We are, all of us, a hundred percent worthy and a hundred percent lovable just as we are because we're here. Because we are human on the planet. We're alive.  We are worthy and lovable and we have nothing to prove and nothing to improve or expect or about ourselves or anything except what we choose to do with our lives and to the expectations that we put on ourself and nobody can take away Your belief in yourself, your self confidence, you get to decide.

So that's the overall self confidence. What you believe about yourself, who you believe yourself to be, and knowing that you are 100 percent worthy and lovable, no matter what you do or don't do with your life.  But confidence  different from self confidence. Confidence is really having confidence in your skills, in your abilities, in your actual capabilities to do things and confidence.

It doesn't just happen. You develop it. So confidence is things that you do like, running or running a business or how you show up in your  career or even in your parenting. You develop confidence as a parent as you go. You don't have a lot of confidence where I know I didn't when they just hand you that baby. Go wave you goodbye as you leave the hospital. No,  most of us are scared and shaky and uncertain. And a lot of times in the very beginning, we're like, I don't know if I can do this. But then by the second or third kid, you're like, yeah, I got it. No big deal. No problem. You develop skills, you develop abilities and confidence comes from that.

So I think it's so important to separate these ideas, self-confidence versus confidence and self-confidence. You can bring into any environment, any task, any goal, and any dream, you can bring your overall image of yourself and develop confidence in certain skills, develop certain abilities that you will need when you're going after your goals and dreams.

And confidence is developed over time. It takes practice. It takes repetition. It takes action. And it's really in the taking action And failing and learning and going again and getting up and keep going toward your goals and dreams that creates confidence and also the confidence in yourself that you have a willingness to fail a willingness to keep going and that develops so much confidence when you're not afraid to fail, you keep going and you develop more and more confidence as you go.

And so it's so important to know that confidence will be created. Your confidence in yourself and your skills and abilities as you're doing something, it will come, but you have to start first.  And this is where you can borrow confidence in another area and bring it to something new that you're doing. So something that you're good at overall, like leadership, communication, figuring things out, those are all attributes of yourself as a person, ideas that you have about yourself that you can take into any new activity, any new skill or capability or goal that you're going after. One of the things that I always tell my clients and they all love this and quote this back all the time is that the image that you have of yourself that you can figure things out. So when something you don't know, if you have doubt, you don't know what to do, you just say, I'm figuring this out.

I'm figuring this out. I know I can figure this out. And that's the self confidence that you can figure things out. It's also the confidence that you know how to figure things out. And knowing how to figure things out is just the ability to ask for help, to research, to make connections, to network, to find the information that you need to figure it out.  And confidence is developed through training, through repetition. Repetition provides practice. And I love this. I love this quote that you can't learn to drive a car. by reading a book about driving a car. You have to get behind the wheel and drive and believe me, I know all about this because I have a 16 year old who just finished driver's ed and now we are doing the driving hour log and I'm a little scared.

But like I said, you can borrow confidence from other areas of your life and you can leverage your strengths and what you're good at and what comes naturally to you. And that's part of what I think is so important to really know yourself and what your opinion of yourself is and what are you good at?

What are your strengths and weaknesses? And that's another area where you can develop confidence when you have self confidence through self awareness of. Self knowledge of who you are and what you are good at and what things that what do you like to do?  What do you don't like to do? Where are really your strengths and Weaknesses and what you want to focus on and what do you want to let go of you can always borrow confidence from one area of your life when you're going after something new in your life. So for me as an example, I was a corporate consultant for 30 years, and I was very good at it.

I was one of the top corporate SAP global consultants in the world. And I had a lot of confidence in my abilities in consulting. And when I really started learning more about confidence and self confidence and for me going after my big goal and dream of being a coach and a speaker and a podcaster was borrowing my confidence from being a consultant and bringing it with me because of course here I am into my new endeavors. And so that's why it's so important to really know your strengths and know your weaknesses and know where you have just naturally confidence in your skills and abilities. And so for me, I did a list of like, what am I really good at? And why do I feel so confident in consulting?

And where can I leverage that into my new endeavor? And I encourage you to do the same thing because  we all have natural skills and abilities and talents and we all have natural strengths that we can work, you know, leverage and work on and then we all have weaknesses and we don't necessarily need to improve our weaknesses, I believe.

I think we can focus on our strengths and figure out ways to handle our weaknesses sometimes through outsourcing and there's so many other ways. So I don't really think it's that important all the time to really focus on our weaknesses.  There's actually a whole philosophy and approach about focusing on your strengths called Strength Finders by Marcus Buckingham, and you can Google that and find, I think his latest one's called Strength Finders 2. 0, but you can do a Strength Finders assessment and it will help you identify your strengths.  His philosophy is that to focus on your strengths because that's what you're good at. And usually there's an area that you like that you're that you want to focus on and grow. So anyways, check that out if you haven't heard of that or if that's something that interests you.

And I do think that knowing yourself, knowing who you are, knowing what you're good at, what your strengths are, what your values are. What is your opinion of yourself? I think all of that self awareness helps with self confidence. And when you have self confidence, when you feel self confident, remember, it's a feeling. It's coming from your thoughts, so you can generate that feeling of self confidence whenever you want by managing your mind and managing the thoughts. Thoughts that you're thinking and you want to, especially when you're in any kind of networking or any kind of collaboration with other people.  When you are self confident,  just think about it.

When you're in a room with people, people naturally gravitate to and are attracted to you. people that are confident because they're open, they're engaging. When people are self-confident, it's very different than arrogance. You know, arrogance is kind of like being a know-it-all all and I'm right and you're wrong and sort of being, I don't know, like boastful and, I know it all kind of sometimes, but true self-confidence, I believe is subtle.

 It's what's not said. Self confidence is really when you have confidence in yourself, you can be open and generous and giving an appreciative of others and people are naturally drawn to people, self confident people because those people know themselves, like themselves, love themselves.

And that is very attractive and good for you and the other person. And so much of this comes down to your opinion. of yourself, what you think of yourself. It either generates self confidence or depletes self confidence. Because remember confidence is a feeling. Self confidence is a feeling about yourself.

And all of our feelings are coming from our thinking. So the way we think about ourselves will determine whether we feel confident and a self-confident person is going to think they are good and capable and worthy. They're going to think they are strong and competent and notice that this doesn't have to be proven true.

Self confidence is a feeling that creates a result and that result doesn't have to be completed perfectly to create the feeling because you are in charge of your thinking and feeling. So you can choose to be self confident and you can choose to  be confident, create confidence through taking action, through learning, through practice.

You can create confidence through confidence, through taking action, through repetition  in the direction of your dreams. So when you can generate self confidence, you can take that with you in every place that you go, in every task that you endeavor, in every room that you put yourself in. You can bring your full self with all of your competence, with all of your belief in yourself, anywhere you are.

And believing in yourself, believing in your value, and your worthiness as a human, and who you are, and how you are showing up in the world, and what you are bringing to the world.  Only you can decide that and only you can believe in that and show up that way in the world. And self confidence is an attractive tool of influence.

It's not necessarily loud and outgoing, but a self confident person is not bossy or controlling or a know it all. Self confident people have no problem admitting when they don't know something or don't have the answer or when they fail. I learned that lesson. Yeah, probably many times. But I remember in consulting when I was early in my consulting career,  and I would get so frustrated when I didn't know something  when there was something left when someone didn't tell me something or someone left something out of the instructions or in the task.

And I would just get so frustrated that I didn't know that. And I would take it so personally that there was something wrong with me because I didn't know something that they didn't tell me or that I didn't know where to go find the information and it was one of the biggest lessons that I learned that I believe now has contributed to my self confidence is  I decided Not to take that personally and instead take responsibility for figuring it out.

And even though I thought they should have told me, or how was I supposed to know that, or any of those things, I decided to be self confident enough to ask for what I needed, for the missing information, without being embarrassed or, you know, afraid of what they were going to think about me. Because I knew that getting the job done, That was more important than me worrying about what they think about me.

So it was a huge personal growth area for me early on in my career when I realized that,  self confidence is,  you can generate it and it's perceived when you ask for help because you're confident enough to ask for help, to ask for the information that you need. And then when I became a manager and a leader,  and through my corporate career, that was one of my guiding principles that I would always lead my team.

And, you know, individually, when I meet with people, I would always take responsibility to share with them all the information to give them all the information that I felt they needed to do.  Because I took responsibility for them, anticipating if they could ask the question, how was I supposed to know that?

Then I knew that I wasn't fulfilling my end of the agreement as a leader. that I didn't anticipate what they would need, what information they would need. And so for me now in all areas, when I ask myself the question, how am I supposed to know that? Or how was I supposed to know that it empowers me to go out and get the information that I have the self confidence that I can figure things out.

And when you have more self confidence, you will set more goals. Take more action. Talk to more people. Take more risks. Achieve more. Believe beyond your current capability and capacity and live into your future. In any group, the person who has the most certainty and the most belief  will influence the conversation.

Self confidence is practiced self belief. You have to be certain about yourself and your amazingness. Don't rely on your ability. Rely on your belief that you can handle anything because everything is just a feeling and you understand where feelings come from.  They come from your thoughts and you can control your thoughts.

And it doesn't cost anymore to believe that you are awesome and amazing. That it does to feel like you're not good enough and not ready and someone else is better. Those are both thoughts that you can think. So why not choose thoughts that make you feel good, that build your self confidence and you can always live into it.

But it's your job to create self confidence, to be self confident and you can do that with your thoughts.  So here's some examples.  What others think about me is 100 percent about them. I was made for this. Fear is no big deal. I am capable. The worst thing that can happen to me is a feeling. I have my own back.

My potential is limitless. Failure earns success. The better I fail, the more confident I am. Worry only pretends to be necessary. So what?  What I make it mean is the worst that can happen.  I am capable. And most of us don't have self confidence or not enough confidence. And it's because we don't trust ourselves and we don't manage our mind.

So we feel out of control with our feelings and actions. And that leads us to let ourselves down consistently. And that undermines our ability to trust and stay in integrity. And when we're afraid of feeling our emotions, we don't want to feel any negativity. So we hide. And this leaves us scared to do anything that has risk of failure.

We doubt our ability because we have to do it perfectly or we will fail. And that leads to our opinion of ourself being low. And then we don't spend enough time thinking highly of ourselves. Remember, our brains are programmed to see what's wrong. Not what's right. We have a negativity bias as humans, which is designed to keep us safe.

But in our modern world, it keeps us stuck. And so this is where we have to think on purpose. You have to deliberately and intentionally think thoughts to create self confidence. And next week, I'll talk more about how to develop confidence through action. So I will leave you with this for today.  Since self confidence is a feeling and thoughts and beliefs you have about yourself, you can create more self confidence by purposely thinking positive, good things about yourself.

So one way you can do it is literally make a list of all the things that you love about yourself or that you're good at, or maybe what other people tell you about yourself that they love about you. Make a list of all the greatness of you and don't be shy and don't hold back because You want to see your greatness because you are great and you are amazing and  you are fully you and the beauty of you and the uniqueness of you can only fully come out when you believe it yourself.

Take some time to figure that out to really own it and believe in yourself and develop that self confidence. And so I have a little worksheet that you can do to go through this exercise of writing out and building the belief of your self confidence and your amazingness.

And then I'll give you some thoughts, some affirmations that you can use to remind yourself of how amazing you are. I am 100 percent worthy and capable. I was made for this.  I can figure anything out. I have my own back. My potential is limitless.  So pick one of those or come up with one, some other, empowering, self confident affirmations that work for you, but do them, say them.

That is how you build belief. Belief is just thoughts that we have. That we think so many times that they become beliefs and that is how you increase self confidence. You want to increase your belief about yourself and you want to develop trust and integrity with yourself. So you want to do what you say you will do and have your own back.

And you want to think highly of yourself daily. And on purpose. Sometimes I write in my journal, what I love about myself. And so I dare you to do that. It's hard at first, but then it's kind of fun. Self confidence is a state of being. Remember, thoughts create feelings and feelings create beliefs and beliefs create our state of being.

So build your confidence through your self confidence. And next week I'll talk more specifically about how to build your confidence. But for now, I'm going to leave you with this.  You are amazing.  You matter. You are  100 percent worthy and lovable and I believe in you.  And I know.  That you can do whatever you set your mind to.

Alright, I'll talk to y'all next week. Bye.

Thanks for joining me this week on The Success Minded Woman podcast. If you like what you heard on the podcast and you want to know more, then head on over to thedreamacademy.com where you can sign up for my weekly success and mindset tips to help you create your dream come true life. Talk to you all next week, bye.