Tag: Confidence

The Wisdom of Humility

Happiness, Success

In Buddhism there are levels of wisdom like glasses that help you see clearer and clearer until you are enlightened. It got me thinking about the way we sometimes cling onto our current level of understanding of something and avoid learning more because it might undermine our current thoughts on whatever it is.

This is the Ego getting in the way of wisdom. The Ego does not want to be proven wrong, as this would undermine it’s sense of self importance. As strong as the Ego may appear to be it is fragile. When another person or the world undeniably proves the Ego wrong it hurts and it can feel a little broken. The antidote to this is humility, the act of asking what the correct thing is in order to learn and grow. It is being open to being wrong.

The core belief, therefore, has to be that learning is life long and we don’t know all the answers all the time. We become students of life for life. Humility is not weakness, it is a strength, which seems contradictory to what our culture tells us. The problem with culture here is that it promises to reward the Ego with money, success and material things. We may even receive these things, but they only feed an unquenchable thirst for more of the same, and when we don’t receive them our Ego hurts.

It is better to be humble, as this develops resilience to the wins and losses of life and on balance leaves us happier.

How To Develop Confidence

Achieving Goals, Leadership, Relationships, Success

On the way into work yesterday it was quite misty, but it wasn’t thick enough to be fog. It reminded me of something I heard about how driving in fog is a metaphor for life. Often, when moving forward with a new venture, a new relationship, or anything that takes us out of our comfort zone, we are scared because we don’t know what the future holds. This is like driving in fog when you can only see 10 feet in front of you. The way to get clarity on what is ahead of you is to move forward 10 feet and then you can see the next 10 feet.

The lesson here is that we will never be able to predict the future 100%, but this should not stop us from moving forward. The best strategy is to work on your skillset and learn from your experiences. With skills and experience you can make wiser decisions and you can pivot where needed, depending on what life throws at you. If you trust your car brakes, steering, lights etc, then driving in fog is less stressful because your car and you can handle whatever you come across.

In order to improve your skillset and experience, you have to put in the time to try things out and develop skills. However, confidence also comes from our mindset, we have to believe in ourselves and our abilities or the actions we take will largely be ineffective. This mindset has to be a growth mindset, the ability to be agile and flexible requires it. Having a fixed mindset will cause your confidence to crumble when you hit the realities of life.

So, confidence requires skillset, mindset and experience. A seemingly obvious statement, but we often think of confidence as something we are born with. In reality confidence comes from how we behave on a moment to moment basis.

The final piece to the puzzle of confidence is our environment. If we feel safe enough to try and fail and try again, then our confidence goes up. If failure is treated with rejection, then we will develop a fixed mindset, we won’t believe we can do anything and we will not gain the required experience. This is why we need trusting teams at work, and supportive relationships in our lives. Add together all of these elements and you have the recipe for confidence.

Building Calm Confidence

Happiness, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

I saw footage online of a Park Ranger standing in front of a wild male elephant who was clearly angry and looked ready to charge. The Park Ranger only had a thin stick to defend himself with. He raised his arms openly either side of him and stood still and calm. He gave nothing for the elephant to react to, and seeing no danger the elephant went away.

To me this is the essence of calm confidence. It is confidence in yourself regardless of what you are faced with. It comes from testing yourself, knowing your limits and having a deep understanding of your values, your beliefs and your ethics. It also comes from developing a level of skill that allows you to handle whatever comes your way. It is not boastful confidence or aggressive confidence, it has a stillness that cannot be shaken. This is calm confidence.

Living A Fulfilling Life

The Pathway To Fulfilment

I am discovering through becoming more independent and confident in my job as a Complaint Handler that my health, happiness and success are all in my hands. This is to say that only I can achieve these things for myself, through good daily habits and believing in my own capabilities. Obvious I know, but not always easy to believe.

It begins with wisdom and self mastery, which leads into health and relationships, and ultimately purpose. These are all aspects of a life well lived, a life that in and of itself is a pathway that leads towards fulfilment. When we live well fulfilment is a natural state of being.

Believe In Yourself

Achieving Goals, Leadership, Success

No one will give you the perfect answer as to what you should do in any situation, because they are judging it based on what they would do, and they are not you. We need to make a choice and go try it, whatever it is. If it doesn’t work and we fall on our faces, we have learned something.

The trick is to know that you will always pick yourself up and try again. A bird does not avoid landing on a tree branch because it is worried that the branch may break, if they did they would never land on a tree branch. A bird’s faith is not in the branch not breaking, it’s faith is in the ability of it’s own wings.

Meaning Matters

Happiness, Success

Thinking small is a product of how we talk to ourselves, which is often negative. Those who are successful in life have a very positive self-talk, they say all good things to themselves, which boosts their confidence and their thinking on what they are capable of.

So, when you feel that there is something you are not capable of, pay close attention to the thoughts you are having and the reasons you are giving for not being able to do whatever it is. Then, play around with thinking about whether the opposite is true, and if it is then change your thinking accordingly.

Our negative self-talk is almost always wrong and some form of the opposite is usually true. What let’s us get trapped in negative thinking about ourselves is often either bad experiences we have had in the past or how those we care about have treated us in the past.


The thing about these past experiences is that they do not tell you who you are. How you choose to view these experiences is who you are. Often we let the past control how we feel and act in the present, but this removes our ability to choose our present and future, because we let the meaning we have put on these experiences control our decision making.

If we change the meaning we change the script we tell ourselves and we change how we act in the present. The key is the meaning we put onto what we have done and what we do now. Meaning matters.

What We Tell Ourselves

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Success

We need to consider the things we tell ourselves about ourselves. When we internalise the voices of others they become part of our inner dialogue. This includes what our parents say, what our friends say, what our employer says, what the news says and also what the teachings of our religion or philosophy says. All of these voices become part of who we are, but if we do nothing to take control of what we allow to become part of our inner voice, then we give up much of our power and self-control to the direction of others.

It is important, I feel, to do some mental spring cleaning every now and again to take a fresh look at what internal voices we want to follow and what internal voices we don’t. Some of this is of course subconscious, so is not obvious, but keeping a journal to put down thoughts, feelings and experiences and questioning these can lead to powerful realisations about why we make the decisions we make. In more extreme situations reaching out for support from a Councillor or Cognitive Behavioural Therapist can be invaluable. For most of us self-reflection and opening up to friends and family will help us figure out a lot of what is holding us back and find better ways to think and act to bring about a more fulfilling life.

I have reflected on this a lot over the past few years and I truly believe that we can be the architects of our own lives. What we tell ourselves can be with us throughout our lives, being careful what we think and say to ourselves is important. If we find ourselves saying that we cannot do something, because we don’t feel ready, equipped or able, then there is a simple thing we can do to help us get out of this trap. If you find yourself saying that you cannot do something out of a belief that it is beyond you, then I encourage you to add the word ‘yet’ to the end of each negative thought. “I can’t drive a car yet.” “I can’t draw yet.” “I can’t lose weight yet.” “I can’t find a new job yet.” “I can’t run a marathon yet.” Whatever it is, there is power in the word ‘yet.’ It opens up the possibility and hope of achieving whatever it is in the future, and it is empowering rather than dis-empowering.

How to be more confident

Success

“Your doubts will create mountains. Your actions will move them.”

– Mel Robbins

 

This post is going to be a brief summary of Mel Robbin’s ‘Confidence Crash Course Livestream’ that was replayed on YouTube. It is an outstanding exploration of what confidence actually is and how to manage the self sabotage that gets in the way of us being more confident. I have added in here and their my own take on what was said in this livestream. There is a link at the bottom of the post to the YouTube video to watch the hour and a half video chocked full of good advice. I recommend watching it as there is a lot of content that I have not included here, as there is not enough space in a blog post to cover it all.

 

Myths about confidence

  1. Confidence is a personality trait

  2. Confidence is fixed

  3. Confidence starts with belief

 

Truths about confidence

  1. Confidence is a skill

  2. Confidence is situational

  3. Confidence begins with action

 

There are areas in our lives that we feel more and less confident in, which shows that it  really does depends on the situation we are in more than our overall confidence as a person. Knowing that confidence begins with action means that we have control over our confidence, because…

 

Confidence is the decision to try

 

A lot of people feel less confident when starting something new, but it is key to remember that you are always going to either succeed or survive. Either way you will learn something new. It can help to remember Mel’s definition of confidence and replace the word ‘confidence’ with ‘the willingness to try’. This then becomes actionable and we can take the action we need to, so we can take control of the situation we are in and work towards a positive outcome.

 

Self doubt is the decision not to try

 

Self doubt is also a decision to avoid taking the action that we do not want to take. It often has become a habit to doubt ourselves rather than trust that our inner voice is capable of directing us in the right direction.

 

Wise words: “Your doubts will create mountains.

Your actions will move them.”

 

The 4 traps of self doubt

  1. Hesitating

  2. Hiding

  3. Hypercritical

  4. Helplessness

 

Hesitating

  • Triggered by uncertainty
  • Waiting
  • Overthinking
  • Wanting your work to be perfect

You will never find the right time to do something. The only solution when we are hesitating is to just do it. When we are waiting to avoid something the solution is to just take action. If we are overthinking a decision it can help to ask someone else to make the decision for us. Many of us are perfectionists and this is also a way of hesitating and avoiding taking action. Remember that ‘good is gold,’ the only person that thinks that it needs to be perfect is us. Good is good enough. Hesitating is a way of staying in control, but it causes us not to take advantage of opportunities. The only answer to avoiding hesitation is to take action.

 

Hiding

  • Triggered by fear
  • Avoiding people/calls
  • Being silent
  • Being a chicken about money and terms
  • Procrastinating
  • Not talking to new prospects

We avoid the actions that we fear, but saying that we can’t talk to that person or we can’t make that call is wrong. What we actually mean is that we don’t talk to that person or make that call. Avoiding it is a choice that we have control over, we just have to bite the bullet and do it. Procrastinating is another way of hiding from the thing we don’t want to do, it is a way to be in control. We don’t know what will happen when we take action, but we will either succeed or survive.

 

Hypercritical

  • Triggered by past failures
  • You argue against yourself
  • You focus on the reasons why you can’t
  • You fixate on what could go wrong
  • Your stress has an edge

Often we are hardest on ourselves. We say negative things to ourselves in our heads that we wouldn’t say to anyone else, because they are so harsh. We argue with ourselves, saying things like, “I can’t do that” or “I’m going to fail,” while we are trying to convince ourselves to do something. We often fixate on what could go wrong, rather than what we could get right. Sometimes our stress has an edge to it, it seems quite serious, but only if we focus on the wrong things.

 

Strategies

  1. Break down big steps
  2. Take small moves forwards
  3. Record your progress

 

Helplessness

  • Triggered by low self worth
  • You actively play the victim
  • You know the solution
  • You may say that “nothing ever goes my way”
  • You’ve got all the excuses in the book

Actively playing the victim means that we don’t have to take responsibility for things, even when we know the solution we avoid taking action. When something does not go to plan saying “nothing ever goes my way” is another way of not taking responsibility. As is coming up with a long list of excuses. If we own our mistakes we can always find a success in the situation.

 

Wise word: “The problem isn’t knowing what you want.

The problem is having the courage to say it.”

 

The 4 traps of self doubt are learned behaviour

 

Many of us are clear on what we want, we just don’t want to admit it, because we would then have to do something about it and take action. We need to ask ourselves, “Do we have self doubt or a habit of doubting ourselves?” Self doubt is a learned behaviour, often from the people we have spent the most time with. Knowing this means that we can change our behaviour to actions that serve us better. The ingredient we are missing is courage. To get from clarity, which is knowing what we want, to confidence, which gets us what we want, we have to have courage. We have to just do it, even if we are anxious or nervous, because courage is not the absence of fear, it is taking action even when you are scared to do it. Confidence is at the other side of courage.

 

Clarity > Courage > Confidence

 

Wise Words: “Changing is hard.

You don’t have to go through it alone.”

 

One of the best things we can do is to try and bounce back after failure. One strategy to do this is to write a list of all of the failures that we are mentally carrying around with us. All of the failures that we cannot let go of. Then, to write down one important lesson we learned from each one of them. This releases the burden of carrying the failure around, because we begin to treat the failure as a positive thing that can help us move forward.

 

Wise words: “If you have a problem that can be

solved with action, you don’t have a problem.”

 

It is important to focus on what you can control and let go of what you cannot control. We often spend a lot of time and mental energy worrying about things that we have no control over. Mel, during the live stream, had a few technical problems at the beginning, but she kept on going. She focused on what she was saying and the content that she wanted to deliver, which she had full control over. The result was that the message got across and the content hit home. If she had given up at the first sign of technical trouble then she would not have impacted the 1500 or so people that tuned in to the live stream and the countless others who have watched the YouTube replay. Focus on what you can control.

 

A technique that Mel Robbins talks a lot about is the 5 second rule. This is used when you have anxiety rise up and your frontal cortex, the thinking, rational part of the brain, shuts down and the amygdala, the emotional, fight or flight part of the brain, takes over. You simply say 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, which switches the frontal cortex back on and you think of your anchor thought. Your anchor thought is something that make you feel good or that you can get excited about. For me it is thinking about seeing my Wife and daughter at the end of the working day. The reason this works is that the body has the same physiological behaviour when you are anxious and when you are excited, the only difference is what your brain thinks about it. So, telling yourself that you are excited about whatever it is, your brain calms down and the anxious feeling goes away. It is a technique that can really work when the panic begins to set in when you are in a stressful situation.

 

And finally, the take away message is that a negative mindset does not serve you. So actively removing the negative mindset when it shows up and replacing it with a positive mindset is really important for a happier and more successful life, and a more fulfilling life as a result. If you have found this information useful please do watch the full video by clicking on this link (Confidence Crash Course Livestream Replay) and check out Mel Robbin’s YouTube channel, her books and her website, www.melrobbins.com.  Keep on working towards your dreams, and remember, fulfilment is a path that we walk together.

 

#LiveDeeply