CONFIDENCE. Who doesn’t want more confidence? I don’t really know anyone who doesn’t want more confidence. And it’s something that seems so elusive, like it’s just out there and some people have it, and some people don’t. I’m here to break that myth. That’s not true.
Confidence is something that we all can create for ourselves.
Why does feeling 100% confident really matter? And how do you manage your feelings when you start to feel not-so-confident and start going into the effort mode? You know what I mean by the “effort mode,” right? How do you stay steady, stay confident and committed and not self-sabotage, whatever it is that you’re setting out to do?
How do you manage all that doubt and worry and stress that you have? How do you stay excited, optimistic, hopeful? We all start there. We all start out excited, optimistic, and hopeful. And then it quickly can turn into frustration or skepticism, or impatience, fear or worry. And then guess what happens next? All of a sudden you decide that you’re not going to be committed because you really have stopped believing and you just don’t feel confident.
Here’s what comes next: No confidence leads to whatever you’re doing or not doing or thinking or not thinking, you’re all over the place, you’re spinning. So as my coach Brenda Lomeli sometimes says, “doubt is the number one enemy to confidence.” There are fluctuations in our confidence, but that’s just the ups and downs. So, I want you to ask yourself, is this doubt that you have really and truly disbelief?
Let’s talk about disbelief. Disbelief literally is “the inability or refusal to accept that something is real or true.” So, when you say to yourself, “I just don’t think I can do that,” do you have the inability to accept that that’s true? Are you not accepting that you can do it or are you accepting that you can’t do it? You are in disbelief. You don’t believe that it’s real or true, or do you even just lack faith in something like in yourself?
Going back to confidence, what effect does this doubt or disbelief have on confidence?
If you really think about it, there are two ends of the spectrum. On one end of the spectrum, we’ve got the disbelief like, “no way, Jose”. And then on the other end, you have the doubt in your head and that’s where you’re wavering. That’s where this rollercoaster effect happens, that some days you think you got it and some days you think you don’t. So, I want you to consider this: What if instead you believed with 100 percent certainty that reaching your goals for 2021 was possible? What if instead you felt confident that you were going to continue to get closer and closer to your goal, regardless of what else was happening to you or in the world? What would be different? Would the results be different if you believed with 100% certainty that it was possible for you to reach those goals regardless of what was going on in the world?
I’m going to give you my top five keys to confidence. I’ll list them and then I’ll get into the detail
- You get to decide what feelings like confidence you generate.
- The feelings that you generate matter. It matters whether or not you’re in doubt or in confidence.
- Confidence is a daily practice, a daily choice.
- Is it really true that you have never done this before? You’ve never reached this goal you’ve set for yourself?
- You get to decide ahead of time that you are going to tackle this with 100% confidence and certainty versus the worry, doubt, and uncertainty.
We are always looking to the past for evidence that the future will come true. But guess what? It generates doubt because if we look at the past, you probably haven’t done this before. And doubt, at its core is fear, worry, frustration and impatience. And what about all that stress? Think about this: you’re in an ice cream sundae bar and you have that delicious ice cream that you want to so bite into or lick, but you also get to put all these toppings on it. So what toppings are you going to put on top of this ice cream? Are you going to sprinkle doubt and confusion and uncertainty or are you going to circle confidence, sprinkle confidence? What are you going to put on top of your ice cream? To make it even more delicious.
OK, so you look to the future to decide because you know what they might taste like. You don’t look to the past to decide what toppings to put on it. You look to the future because you’re looking forward to eating the ice cream. So again, there is that concept of looking forward. As we’ve talked about before, you need to look forward to figure out which direction to go in. You need to look forward to generate feelings. Doubt and disbelief would go in that F line, that feeling line, but we have the power to create different feelings.
We might think that the circumstance is what’s creating the doubt. We don’t really know what 2021 is going to bring to the world. You’re going to say the year 2021 is the circumstance upon us. You have doubt or uncertainty about the year 2021. No, it is not the year itself. It’s your thought about the year and whatever you choose that’s going to trigger a feeling. OK, so there’s this little voice in the back of your head, and it’s giving meaning to the circumstance; it’s labeling the circumstance as good or bad.
That voice is creating the feeling of doubt. If your thought was “I already know this won’t work,” then you’re feeling doubt and you have what I call “little quits,” like you’re quitting on yourself. And the result is proving the fact that this isn’t going to work. You are self-sabotaging. But here is the great news-aligned with our first key to confidence – is that you get to decide if you want to keep creating doubt and disbelief. What emotions are you creating in the factory called your brain? And if doubt and disbelief creep in, you get to decide if they’re going to get funneled through and come into you, if you’re going to ingest them or if you’re going to dismiss them. YOU decide what feelings you generate. So, ask yourself, what emotions are you already generating about your goals? It’s up to you, you decide, and how often are you going to let doubt run the controls in your brain?
Inside, you may be feeling excitement, but you also may be feeling fear and disgust. Think about that movie Inside Out. All those characters in that movie Inside Out were named with a feeling like joy, fear, and disgust. You can generate new feelings. What does confidence look like? What if she were a character? What is she wearing when she walks into the room? What does she do? Earlier in 2020, there was this woman in the coworking space that I used to go to. I didn’t even know what her name was, but she would walk into this conference room and she just had something about her. She had it. She was like that girl. And I often wondered, what is it about her? She was my vision of confidence and empowered. And it was the way she carried herself. It was the way she dressed. It was the way she looked. So if you were going to create a character called Confidence, what would your character be wearing and who is that “it girl” in your world? That was super powerful for me to really describe in words on paper what this empowered woman looked like, felt like, and talked like, and I borrowed some of that. I tried it on and to see if it felt good on me and it did. It felt great. I learned from that experience that I, too, can feel empowered and confident. I just have to envision it.
The second key: the feelings you generate matter. Why does confidence matter? Because what you’re thinking and feeling determines your success or determines what goes in that result line. Imagine what you could do if you had a little more confidence. What could you do? Would you make the phone call, would you put yourself up for a promotion, would you post something on social media? Last week a client told me that she was afraid to post on her personal page because she said it ”made her feel naked,” like it was revealing everything about her. She was hiding it on her business page. But guess what happened when she put it out there? This guy that she had a crush on was the first person to comment with an amazing comment.
Is doubt or disbelief holding you back with confidence? If you change that feeling to confidence, I am going to bet money that you could achieve any goal. Confidence is a feeling and at its core is the belief that it’s possible and that you are able. Confidence is paired with certainty. And we put them in the feeling line and then that feeling line drives the action, which creates the result. If you were following along with confidence and certainty, what would be the results? You decide what you want to feel. And confidence matters because it creates certainty. And certainty is a firm conviction in something. That’s what Webster says. It’s a fact that is definitely true or an event that is definitely going to take place, so you want that confident feeling, and you want it to go with certainty. That’s why confidence matters.
Third in our keys to confidence is that confidence is a daily practice. When you wake up, I want you to decide how you’re going to feel before you do anything. I know we all have the best of intentions, like when we tell ourselves that we’re not going to look at our phones instantaneously when we wake up or we’re not going to scroll through social media. We’re going to get up and journal and meditate and exercise. And a lot of times that doesn’t happen. I’ll admit that I go in streaks whether or not this happens in my own life. But I want you to think about this. What if every morning you chose to create and generate certainty and confidence on purpose?
What would be the difference in your day?
What would be the difference if you’re trying to develop this as a daily habit? A great way to do this, to generate this feeling of confidence, is to do daily thought downloads, to dump out all your thoughts on paper and then ask yourself, what feelings are these thoughts generating in your brain automatically? It may not generate the feelings of confidence and certainty. It may generate the doubt and disbelief feelings. But then you have the power on purpose to intentionally switch your thoughts to create confidence and certainty. Every morning, with daily practice, you can create confidence.
Number four- you’ve never tried this before. You can look to the past and say, “well, yeah, I haven’t reached my goals in the past,” but have you tried to reach the goals with the tools you now have in your toolbox? Have you tried to reach this goal with making confidence a daily practice? Have you tried to reach this goal, having this model in your back pocket?
I’m going to guess no.
You’ve never tried this with the support in managing your mind that you’re now exposing yourself to? So why is 2021 going to be different? Here are some great reasons: You have powerful tools that you’ve never had before. And if you want more of these tools and to be consistent with them, I encourage you to consider investing in coaching. That is the number one best tool to help you stay on track. The next reason why this year is going to be different is because you know that you can create a complete support system. There are many ways to do that. There is a process that people who always reach their goals follow. If you make the decision to set yourself up in a way that is fail proof for success, you really will be doing this in a different way. So how do you set yourself up for success? You create accountability, you create community, you create exposure to coaching. You listen to a podcast like this. So, you can’t compare this to last time. You’re going to be a different person in 2021. You’ve got new tools and you know how to fully equip yourself for success. You will have a foolproof process if you do the work now in January and set yourself up. You can decide right now that you’re going to go through 2021 with 100% certainty and confidence if you choose to generate it every day and surround yourself with community, coaching, accountability, tools, and a different mindset.
Even if you do all this, I want you to know that you should expect fear, doubt and disbelief to come say “hello, we’re here.” You can still say “hi,” in return, because this has been a pattern for you in the past. But I want you to notice that nothing’s gone wrong. You just observe it and then you shift it. And then the next key is that you plan ahead of time to stay committed. Always. You intentionally shift your thoughts, and in order to plan to stay committed, you have to plan to “take out the trash daily.” And how do you do that? You do these thought downloads. You do these brain dumps, you get a blank piece of paper, you write all your thoughts down, everything that’s on your mind. And if you are feeling these feelings that you don’t like that are triggered by your thoughts, you can change them! They’re going to lead you to that self-sabotage and staying stuck. It’s like that show Hoarders. They have all that trash, all that junk that’s in those houses – they are self-sabotaging. You don’t want to be a hoarder of all of the automatic thoughts that are creating doubt and disbelief.
You want to take out the trash daily because you’re going to plan on staying committed. It’s like doing spring cleaning every day and you’re only going to keep the good stuff. You’re going to keep the confidence in the certainty because those are new skills that you’re going to take into the future and they’re going to become your new default. And when things are not going the way you want, you can choose to quit or doubt or you can choose to remain confident. You get to decide. So how would your results be different if you choose to remain and keep the feeling of confidence no matter what, no matter how long it takes to get that result line the way you want it or to reach that goal? In order to do that, you need to take out that mental trash daily. You need to dump out all the thoughts and feelings that aren’t serving you. And then you get to intentionally choose confidence and certainty daily and ideally before you even look at your email or feed your kids breakfast. So, OK, let’s review five keys to confidence.
- You decide what feelings you generate.
- The feelings you generate, matter.
- Confidence is a daily practice, a daily choice.
- You have never done this before. You have never kept confidence as a daily feeling.
- You get to decide ahead of time that you’re going to tackle 2021 with 100% confidence and certainty versus the old worry, doubt, and uncertainty.
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