Confidence coach reveals three tips to skyrocket your confidence
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As a confidence coach, I enjoy transforming people from people pleasers into grounded, self-loving, and confident people.
I think so many people try to become more confident and fail because there is no clear understanding of what confidence is, and without that, how can we hope to develop it.
Today you will learn what confidence is and how you can create it for yourself.
Before selecting a confidence coach, I recommend reviewing their material to see if you connect with them.
To help you decide if I am the best confidence coach, I have given you some free tips below.
What is confidence? Answered by your confidence coach
We might have this image of confidence as a man walking up to a woman in a bar with his head high, chest out, and talk in a clear, calm, and direct way and walk away with her number.
Or a high executive woman is presenting to the board and walking away with applause.
First, we have to disguise between outward actions and internal emotions.
Someone might act confident, but that does not mean they feel confident.
Confidence is not an action; it’s an emotion, and as such, leaning to hold your head high, push your chest out or walk up to 1000 women will not develop confidence.
Confidence, neurologically, is the ability to regulate our nervous system and remain calm, where others might be pushed outside their window of tolerance by their anxiety.
Now you know what confidence is and is not, let’s look at developing confidence.
But first try out the confidence quiz.
The three skills to confidence I teach as a confidence coach
I used to develop social and emotional learning programs for children, and it was crystal clear that the confident kids have learned some critical skills that the other children did not have yet.
Let’s look at this first skill.
Our emotions guide our actions, so learning to regulate and manage our feelings is essential to confidence and a good and successful life.
It’s normal to feel a wide variety of emotions from joy, sadness, anxiety and none of these define you.
Emotions are temporary, so you are not a confident or unconfident person.
Emotions are signals trying to tell you something.
Like sensations, such as hunger or being cold, is telling you to eat and put on some clothing.
Anger is a way to tell you that you are being violated and need to stand up for yourself.
Resentment is a way to tell you that you are neglecting some of your needs.
So, start noticing your emotions and write down what they are trying to tell you.
It’s a great way to develop self-awareness and help you move through the emotions as you allow them to be heard and respond to their message.
Unheard, they will continue to linger and unconsciously control your actions and your life.
If you have been bullied in school and feel social anxiety.
Practicing boundaries with people can be a great way to start developing the confidence to engage socially as you allow yourself to feel the anxiety and establish boundaries in a way you could not as a child and therefore learn to trust yourself again.
This is referred to as re-enactment and is a way to recreate the original wound and heal it by expressing a new stress response.
It’s the freeze stress response that most typical cause long term trauma and issues to our regulation. So, practicing having a fight or flight response to the same circumstance can be just what you need to heal that part of yourself.
This is a whole article in itself.
It will take some time to teach your brain to regulate emotions, so anxiety does not take over and push you outside your window of tolerance.
Meditation has shown to do just this and, over time, grow your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that can regulate emotions such as fear or anxiety.
I struggle to sit still and meditate, so I do it in the evening and morning when in bed, and it often helps me sleep well.
I focus on my breathing and put a hand on my stomach and notice the contact between my body and the madness.
It’s OK to get lost in thoughts and daydreaming. Just bring yourself back to your breathing and your bodily sensations.
While dancing, I also do it as moving meditation is easier for me and more fun, so no need to sit still and look like a Buddhist monk.
Now that brings me to the next method of regulation.
The stress response that makes you feel fearful or anxious is biologically designed to make you fight or run away from a threat.
It’s that simple.
So, the way to release the stress response and calm our body and mind down is to move just like you would if you fight or flight.
Obviously, don’t punch your boss in the face before your presentation, even if it’s tempting, and don’t run home either.
But you can move both daily as this will make your stress response less alert, and when you feel stressed, find a way to move.
Leave your home or office and go outside for a power walk around the block. Go to the toilet and do some squats.
There is no better way to regulate stress in the moment.
Meditation is the long-term strategy; this is the here and now fix.
As babies, we need touch as it makes us feel safe and calm.
Guess what? Even as adults, this response has been hardwired into our nervous system, so touch can still calm you down.
If there is no one to hug you, then again find a private place. If you have ever seen a weird man embrace himself in the men’s bathroom, then that might have been me.
Squeeze your hands together, and slowly letting go is also a physical way to release.
Press your feet into the ground.
Let’s not forget that we can control our breathing and the smart scientists (I know some of you don’t believe in science, but then this is not the blog for you) say that breathing fast and shallow will activate the sympathetic nervous system and that is our stress response.
In contrast, deep and slow breathing will kickstart the parasympathetic nervous system that calms us down.
So, use that.
Get used to checking in on your breathing and practice throughout the day to breathe slowly and deeply.
It will not just make you more confident but also improve mental and physical health.
Once you get used to it, it will become a habit, and you breathe more slowly and deeply, and guess what, you will feel more relaxed, calm, and confident.
Why is Joe always so confident when James is not? James is so smart, why can’t he see that?
It’s frustrating to see how magnificent others are when they can’t see it themselves.
Here is why Joe is confident.
Some people are not just born confident, while others are not.
Confidence is mostly about nurturing, and if we consistently get positive validation and reinforcement, then over time, we will be able to validate ourselves internally.
As much as they just learn to love yourself sounds great, it is simply not solid advice.
We learn about ourselves as children through the feedback we get from others, and so people that are given consistent love can as adults feel self-love, and those that had validation most often feel confident.
So, we can’t just suddenly give ourselves something we have no framework for.
We are social creatures.
So, you need to build up repeated experiences of being validated and get positive reinforcement.
Firstly, I recommend putting effort into learning the skills you want to feel confident in.
Being skilled at something is not directly related to feeling confident about that, but you are more likely to get positive reinforcement if you are good at what you do.
Let’s look at an example of how to create the external validation that will eventually become internal over time.
If you don’t feel confident about doing presentations or public speaking and you have to as part of your job or want to, then here is what you could do. This applies to all other areas you want to develop confidence in.
Start by finding a supportive group of friends or family and practice your presentation.
Then do it in front of them. Ensure to tell them you feel anxious about this and want their support.
Get their constructive feedback and what they liked.
Slowly add more people and perhaps new people you don’t know, and over time you will feel more and more relaxed, and suddenly the presentation In front of 100 people does not feel overwhelming.
It might still make you a little nervous, and that’s natural, but it will not inhibit you and hold you back.
Same if you feel social anxiety, start by meeting small groups of friends or family and support groups and practice and ask for the positive feedback.
Having positive experiences created positive anticipation, and that is what defines confident people they anticipate a positive outcome. That brings me on to the next point.
Our brain is a storytelling organ, and so everything we perceive through our senses is interpreted through a storytelling network before it’s passed to our conscious mind.
And those stories impact our anticipated outcome.
People that are anxious or fearful tend to catastrophize and overestimate the negative consequences and impact on their life based on the stories they tell themselves.
Confident people tend to do the oppositive and anticipate a positive outcome from the job interview, presentation, or date because the stories they tell themselves are different.
So, examine your stories. Write them down. Question them and see if they are correct.
Based on your past life experiences, will the consequence be that bad if you don’t get the job if the presentation fails or the date goes wrong?
Ten years ago, you also had many worries and anxieties, and you are still fine today, right?
Remind yourself of that, and even if this interview or date goes badly, you will be fine, and there will be other opportunities, and it will not impact your life. Because that’s more closely linked to the truth.
Now, you can rewrite your stories so you can monitor your stories when they come up, and you feel anxious.
You can tell yourself the new story you wrote with positive anticipation and remind yourself that this is not your last chance, and it will not ruin your life if it does wrong.
Confidence at its core is trust in self and that everything will be OK. That we can deal with our emotions.
Once we know we can deal with painful emotions, they become less scary and feel less anxious.
That’s why being present with uncomfortable emotions and allow them to be expressed is key to confidence.
Have you noticed how we can be so understanding, kind, and supportive of others when making mistakes, but we are often so hard on ourselves?
Imagine next time you make a mistake that you are talking to your child or your best friend.
What would you say to them if they had messed up?
Now speak that way to yourself.
The way we treat ourselves impacts how we feel about ourselves and so confident people have compassion for their mistakes.
Therefore, they feel much more relaxed about making mistakes and less anxious.
They know they don’t have to impress their date because it will naturally flow if it’s a good fit. If the date does not go well, they don’t blame themselves or talk harshly to themselves; they acknowledge conversation did not flow and that it was to people with little in common.
They are gentle towards themselves. They have self-compassion.
You deserve kindness ALWAYS, so start giving yourself compassion today.
If you want to learn more, then check out the confidence and self-love programs or my one to one confidence coaching.
