You Don’t Need More Confidence. You Need This

There's a gap between the way you see yourself and the way you show up in the world and maybe you see yourself as someone who is calm and confident and clear and you know what you like that person but that person doesn't always show up, do they? Maybe when you're alone you feel calm, relaxed, all of those things but then maybe when you go out or when you're around that specific person or with friends or maybe your boss it just feels like that person doesn't quite show up and maybe you can't quite put your finger on it. Maybe it's that when you're around that person or in that situation you can't seem to get your point across properly, you can't seem to speak as clearly or as eloquently as you'd like to or maybe you're rehearsing what you say before you say it or you're trying to find the perfect time to say what you want to say so you make everyone laugh or so you sound smart or maybe you stutter or maybe there's just like a tension in your body, just a feeling of something doesn't feel quite right. There are a million ways it can manifest but at the end of the day you come back and you just feel off, you just feel like you didn't show up the way you wanted to, the way your best self would have or your authentic self would have and it creates this quiet tension and maybe you just can't really explain it because everyone else has only seen that side of you, the side of you that shows up in public whereas you feel more like why can't they just see the real me and so a lot of the conclusions we make from that is I just need to fix this, I need to become more confident, I need to get rid of my anxiety, maybe I have social anxiety, I need to get rid of it and so that's what I want to talk about, not so much the gap but confidence because if you're like me and you felt that gap before maybe you've read books, maybe you've taken courses, maybe you've been to motivational talks and this person is on stage and sounding so eloquent and so confident and so all of this you feel like yeah I want to be able to show up that way, I want to be able to show up as me and maybe those tips and courses and books helped or maybe they didn't and so I don't want this to be another motivational talk or just anything like that because I feel like most of the advice online about confidence targets the wrong problem and just doesn't have the correct view. I think the way we've been taught to look at it is just not quite there and so I don't want this to be tools that you can use to become more confident, no, I want this to be a different perspective on confidence. I want you to, after this half hour, feel like you now see what confidence truly is because what happens is we have those experiences of feeling shy or anxious or just not showing up the way you want to show up and we innocently conclude that I'm shy or I'm this person or I'm that person and we attach ourselves to these definitions and we turn them into personal failures and I've completely been there. I remember being at uni and walking home at like whatever 2-3 a.m. and just from hanging out with my friends and really feeling like I just didn't show up the way I wanted to show up. I was stuttering, I wasn't really eloquent with how I was saying things, I was talking too fast, didn't feel like people were laughing at my jokes, a whole bunch of reasons that I can't honestly remember right now. I was walking home and I just felt like why is this still happening? I have moments where I feel so confident and so sharp and so eloquent and basically every way that you would like to show up in the world and then other times where you're the complete opposite and in my mind I was a confident person so it wasn't that I lacked anything in my mind, it just felt like I just couldn't show up and so I know what that feels like and all the confidence talks and all the books and courses didn't really help me at least and over time you turn that into an identity, this subtle shame of why am I not showing up the way I want to show up. So by the end of this half hour I want to give a perspective that will hopefully stop you turning those moments into personal failures, stop you from judging yourself when you don't show up the way you want and more importantly understand why you didn't show up the way you wanted to show up and not see it as something to fix but actually clarity on what to do next and I'm also gonna go into why confidence is so misinterpreted and how most advice out there that goes into confidence not only is useless but actually makes you more anxious which is crazy to think about and so the premise that I have for you and you won't believe this when I say it so I'm warning you right now but I want to explain it in a way where it feels true for you not just because I said it not because you just believe me because I said it but it really makes sense in your head and it really gives you a new way of looking at confidence maybe even enough so that it dismantles some of the old beliefs you have around confidence and the sentence is you already are 1000% confident now I know you're gonna look back at your past and go well that's just not accurate that's just not true that's BS and I would probably think the same way but I want to point something out when you aren't feeling confident what if it's not about your lack of confidence and that you have to acquire it and build it what if it's already there it's just being blocked it's the same same idea like in the moment you aren't confident but it's one really profound shift because the main issue with a lot of personal development is that it hints that you aren't enough even you saying I have to build confidence is you saying I don't have confidence I have to get it from somewhere else therefore me myself I'm not enough and it sounds small it sounds subtle but the mind is literal and so the more you believe that the more true it is for you not only that but it completely removes responsibility but when you shift it to I have confidence but I just can't access it right now it's blocked right now it's no longer about you fixing yourself trying to get the right tool it's now about you trying to uncover what's really going on it's more about clarity than it is about fixing and the way I know that this is true is because well let me ask you the question when you were a kid were you confident kids are more confident than basically all adults they will do whatever they want to do they will not care what you think they will feel happy and courageous and say whatever they want to say whenever they want to say it and so if confidence had to be built if you had to take courses or read books or acquire knowledge to become confident how on earth are they confident just let that sink in for a second maybe you could say well some people are just you know more confident naturally and so it's easy for them and fine that would make sense if only a few kids were confident and then other ones who are really really shy but look at any two three four five year old basically all of them I would imagine are the same way there's no sense there's no idea in their head of lack of confidence and that's interesting when you think about it interesting when you think about maybe I was when I was a kid and you can look back on your life when you were a kid were you confident and again confidence is a weird word but because you wouldn't necessarily use that word for a kid but it's still true and so if you had it how did you lose it did you really lose it is it really the fact that you had it once now it's completely gone forever and you have to put all this work in to get it back this is the thing about personal development it kind of implies this linear progression of I have to do one step at a time I have to build up this house where the truth is you have access to the same feelings that you did when you were a three-year-old it's just now something is blocking them that's why you're not showing up the same way so the question now becomes what's blocking my confidence rather than how do I build confidence it's the same way off but I'm put it this way confidence is like the Sun right as a random analogy the Sun is always there even when you don't see it you know it's there you don't go outside one day and it's really cloudy and you freak out because you think the Sun's gone we're all gonna die the Sun's gone no you know it's there you just also know it's been blocked by some clouds what if you felt the same way about confidence what would that feel like what that feel like if you knew for a fact that huh I actually do still have confidence it's just that I'm blocking it wouldn't that be relieving wouldn't that be the massive exhale of whoa okay it's not that I'm not enough it's not that I am a failure it's not that I have to do all of these things to become enough it's just that I'm blocking myself and just by saying that you're taking back responsibility for how you feel because if you had to earn confidence or acquire it from somewhere you have no control you have to basically ask someone for it but if you're the one that already has that confidence you are then taking responsibility for that and so if confidence isn't something that you build right assuming that I'm right and assuming that this feels right to you and again everything that I say I'm a self-awareness coach I am never gonna tell you what the truth is because it makes no sense because my answers are different to your answers I'm gonna open up the question for you to ask yourself and see and feel if perhaps this is true for you because that's how you make real change real change isn't doing something because someone told you it's doing something because you actually see it for yourself you actually have clarity on wow this actually could could be real for me I can completely see how this could apply to me and so if confidence isn't something that you build and something that you necessarily and so and so if confidence isn't something that you build but in fact you already have it you may be thinking well why does all the advice make sense then because all the advice let me ask you this have you heard the phrase fake it till you make it that's classic confidence advice and you know what it makes sense it makes sense that if you don't feel a certain way you pretend but not even pretend you just try and embody it until you feel that way and it may work but there's a very subtle issue with it let's say you want to feel and show up confidently and so you use this advice and you stand up straighter you kind of puff your chest out a little bit put your shoulders back you try and speak slower try and hold hold eye contact more all the things that a confident person would do because that is you know how you fake it till you make it that can work but when you perform confidence you're doing all the things that confident person would do so you're performing it it quietly trains self-monitoring it quietly trains you to be self-conscious because if you're performing you always have to check yourself to make sure that you are still performing you have to constantly check yourself to make sure that you're still standing up straight that you're still holding eye contact that you're still speaking clearly and slowly and it isn't an issue to be aware of how you're showing up but the issue becomes you start to look at other people to validate how you're coming across you start to look at other people to check if you're coming across confidently to check if they are treating you the way they would treat a confident person if they're responding to you that way and again check this for yourself next time you maybe use this advice and what's the issue with that if you're constantly looking around the room trying to see if people are responding to you in the correct way or to check if you're still doing things right you're constantly looking for approval you're constantly looking for other people to say yeah you are still acting or showing up confidently you're not if you haven't accidentally gone back to that shy person quote-unquote you're trying to save face in a way and so if you're constantly looking for approval is that true confidence confidence is the opposite of wanting approval and so you can't build confidence true confidence by training yourself to seek approval and this is what I mean by doing that you will actually make yourself less confident because you will train yourself to care about the way others think of you and you'll train yourself to always show up a certain way to always be tense because when you're performing you're putting on an act you are making sure that the audience are seeing you a certain way that you're in character and that isn't true confidence so if that isn't true confidence and the advice out there isn't necessarily right what is confidence and what really is confidence and I'm gonna break it down in a way that just makes sense because I feel like confidence as the word it can encapsulate so many things people mistake charisma for confidence or being outspoken and loud for confidence or being an extrovert to being confident and so all these words get mixed in but if you really look at the word confidence self-confidence it comes from the root confide confideness right what does confide mean means to trust the very root of that word means to trust and therefore self-confidence is self-trust let that sink in for a second because the feeling of trust is very different to the feeling of what most people consider confidence most people consider confidence as this big energy it's loud this assured this maybe even arrogant energy right it's kind of booming energy almost what is the energy of trust very different right energy of trust is calm energy of trust is relaxed energy of trust is safe and you can just imagine it imagine talking to someone that you trust what is the feeling there someone that you really really trust what is the feeling there and compare that to if I say the word confidence what the feeling you have around that is and this is what I mean by we've been taught to look at it in my opinion in the wrong way and so in truth confidence has nothing to do with being charismatic or being loud or being whatever other word you want to use it has everything to do with trust and so if you like you have a low self-confidence what you're really saying is I have low self-trust and again that makes things simpler because trust is easier to understand than confidence is if you said to someone how do I improve confidence there's a million things they would say there's a million ideas but if you said to someone how do I regain trust how do I improve trust it's a lot simpler conversation and so going back to what I said earlier if you have moments where you feel confident you feel assured you feel like yourself in other words you trust yourself why do you then have moments where you feel the complete opposite you feel like you're not showing up right you feel like you're worrying about what others think you feel like you're just not speaking up because you're worried in other words why do you have moments where you lose trust and so you can ask yourself rather than the question of how confident am I what you can do is you can get some paper down and draw out the wheel of life if you're familiar with that or you can search it up it's basically a big circle and you cut it into where you draw rather and the lines going through going through it that was a really bad description like spokes on a wheel that's better and I go like a pie like a pie chart yeah that's better example and you have one slice for finances you have one for relationships you want slice for help and career and I forget the rest ask yourself how much do I trust myself in these areas of life do I trust myself with my health do I trust myself my finances it's out of ten that's a really good exercise because it in part it does answer the question of why am I feeling not in one day I'm feeling or on one day I'm feeling really pretty confident and the other one I'm feeling the complete opposite and this is about situational confidence right you've heard of that or situational trust where do you feel like you can trust yourself and when you can't trust yourself what's blocking that that's the question what's blocking those areas of your life where you feel like I I don't know I don't feel sure about this I don't feel certain about this I don't feel confident about this another way of putting it was how self-certain do you feel about those areas of life because trust is certainty right trust is certainty that the outcome is going to be what you want for example if you tell a friend a secret you're trusting them not to tell anyone else therefore you have an expectation that they'll keep it to themselves same thing it's a certainty a feeling of certainty so after you do that you can pause this if you need to ask yourself the question if there are any spokes in that pie chart in that wheel that are really low don't ask yourself why because your mind will give you a bunch of bullshit ask yourself what's blocking this what's if it's a two for example let's say your spoke on relationships is a two out of ten ask yourself what's blocking this what's blocking this from being a ten or being an eight or being a five and so I'll tell you I'll tell you what really blocks confidence or trust because most people think confidence is lost in big moments confidence is lost when you lose a job confidence is lost when you break up someone confidence is lost when something bad happens and that's true that is true you lose confidence that way but it's not the main way I want to think of confidence or trust as a habit if let's say a bad thing happens every two years imagine at the start of the year you set a new year's resolution this year I'm gonna break my self-trust this year I'm gonna be less confident imagine you had that goal and then you only worked on it one time a year or one time every two years would that be a habit that ends up being successful no imagine working out once a year and expecting to gain 10 pounds of muscle same thing with trust same thing with confidence so if it's not because of the moments where all hell breaks loose and the big things happen then what actually breaks trust isn't the big moments it's the small moments the small moment that you repeat because those end up becoming habits they end up becoming patterns in how you think they end up becoming patterns in how you act how you see yourself for example you saying yes to something even when you want to say no or you committing to something and they're not showing up or you saying you'd do something and they're not doing it and it could be really small things things that we just don't consider like the most basic one is talking to a friend and then going after when you're about to leave you'll say oh I'll call you or I'll text you and then you don't and it sounds so menial but believe it or not you're breaking self-trust and over time that compounds and so I want to go through the three blockages the three main ways trust gets blocked and these are really practical so you can change these soon as I say them you can recognize this in your own life and I encourage you to look into your own life and ask yourself what am I doing when am I doing this where am I doing this am I doing this the first one is outsourcing trust this is the first block that breaks self-trust an outsourcing self-trust looks like you asking people to make sure that they agree with your decision it looks like you knowing the answer but still having to double-check with chatgpt or a friend it's you having a few options for example a few options for jobs you want to take or you're looking at and you already know which one you want to do but then your mom or your brother or your parents or whatever say no you should do this one and you go okay maybe I'll do that one it's you not feeling certain again I use that word again so you're not feeling certain in your own decision and so you need to give that power away for them to validate it so you can feel the power is real it's you giving your foundation away and hoping they give it back to you this isn't in my opinion the biggest one for a lot of people and again it's simple to fix all you have to do is notice it first of all and then just pick one or two a day or a week and decide without needing to talk to anyone about it without needing to get someone's opinion I don't mean intellectual stuff I don't mean oh I have these three job offers and I know someone who's already been at those jobs maybe I should ask them to see what it's like that's a very logical thing that makes sense I mean where you know for yourself that one of those options is right for you and you still need someone else to validate it you still need someone else to approve of your decision so that's number one number two and we've already kind of been into this is turning states into identity it's turning those moments where you don't feel like you're showing up the way you want to show up or the moments where people you feel like they don't respect you or they're not responding to you in the way you want and turning that into a personal failure it's turning that into who you are and we all do this why because negative experiences hold more weight for us they feel stickier they feel heavier and so you could have 10 experiences where for example you're making everyone laugh and everyone seems really impressed by you and whatever other logic you need to feel like you're showing up the way you want to show up and then one moment where people start looking at you weird or it just doesn't feel right or you fail that speech and you'll remember that one more than any of the others it's just how humans are designed so it's better to be aware of it and be aware of where you're being biased and then we think about it so much we ruminate on it so much that it becomes who we are and everything we do from that moment on is done through the lens of fear of i'm not enough or worry of what are they thinking about me and so everything from that moment on becomes confirmation bias of what we think we know and so in those times where that feels like that's happening it's really important to remember that what your mind is saying is not necessarily the absolute truth it's just what it's focusing on it's like you put it this way you have a rainbow all the colors in the rainbow right on one end you've read other end you've violet it's you walking across the rainbow such a random analogy is you going through all the colors and and walking across and then deciding actually i'm just purple i'm just indigo you know what i'll give you a better example that i just thought of now because that sucked is you having a bag of m&ms or skittles and only ever eating the blue ones because that feels like you but the yellow one is how it doesn't feel like you it's the recognition that we contain multitudes we have the ability to feel incredibly happy and incredibly sad and incredibly courageous and incredibly shy so to define ourselves based on one emotion is insane completely insane and it's a nice reminder you can write that down i contain multitudes whenever you're feeling bad you feel like the issue with emotion is it's all consuming for a lot of people when you haven't trained to create that space between you and the emotion it's all consuming and so in that moment it's not just that you feel bad it's that you are bad it's not that you feel anxious you are anxious in that moment you are the anxiety so the second block is turning states into identity and the third blockage which is also very sneaky and it's the best dressed out of all the blockages it's conditional trust otherwise known as perfectionism conditional trust is you waiting to make a decision because you don't feel certain yet and it is so convincing because it sounds like you being planned or prepared or thinking logically and trying to have as much information so you can make the right decision but all of that just hides the fact that you're scared of taking action because you don't feel certain you don't trust yourself and you can see how all these words link together again you don't trust yourself with the outcome and so it's safer to stay still or you'll say i'll only move when i have all the information which is impossible i'll only move when i have this criteria hit in my head and the equivalent of that is to put it into perspective imagine you have like i said earlier a friend you really trust and you tell them a secret and you go don't tell anyone just don't tell anyone you can't and they go yeah of course i won't tell anyone as long as the day of the week starts with tea i won't tell anyone i promise how are you gonna respond to that and bullshit absolutely bullshit but that's what conditional self-trust is i'll only trust you and only be certain if there are conditions if the day of the week starts with tea and it's it's when you think about it that way it's unbelievably insane but a lot of us have that i definitely have this because you want to be certain but what happens is what you're already looking for is to feel safe which again is trust so by you looking to feel safe you're actually losing safety and what happens when you only act when you feel safe you only act in your comfort zone your comfort zone gets smaller and smaller and smaller and so the shift to make here is trust isn't that you're going to achieve a certain outcome that you're going to get a certain outcome trust is trust is a knowing in you that you can handle yourself in the outcome you know the saying a bird doesn't trust that when it lands on a branch the branch is gonna not break it trusts in its ability to fly if it does that's what true trust is and so look for yourself in all these different blockages see which ones apply to your life see which areas of your life you're blocking and how out of these three and it's very practical let's write them down and start to tackle them even if it feels scary because it will that's the point self-confidence or self-trust comes from your knowing and your ability to trust to trust yourself in the outcome and you can't do that if you're scared of the outcome and so when you feel shy or less confident rather than thinking how can i be confident now ask yourself what am i looking for here am i looking to feel safe before i act am i looking for someone's approval so that i can feel i made the right decision am i looking to feel better before i make any decisions again goes back to those blockages and that's a really powerful and practical way to assess yourself and have that ability to critically think