2 Powerful Keys to Unlock Unshaken Confidence
Having and being confident looks different to me than what most people think of immediately.
I don’t need to be the loudest or most outspoken person in the room (I can be, but I don’t need to be). I also don’t need everyone to agree with me (it would be nice, but not necessary).
Having the internal confidence of knowing myself, knowing my values and my goals at any given moment in time is the key to confidence and having a good self-esteem which happens through two things: having clarity and practice.
Two things you need to improve on your confidence
#1 Clarity:
When you know your needs, your goals and purpose for any decision you need to make, the decision becomes clearer.
Your confidence is high when you have that clarity and that vision of the end goal for a specific thing or for yourself generally. This helped my confidence become unshaken.
I had to get clear and gain that clarity on my values, what characteristics were important to me, and decide how I wanted to show up for myself and others. When I did that, I was able to feel confident in my decisions even if no one else understood why.
This is possible for you too; when you have unshaken confidence, even if others don’t agree with you, or if they think you should be doing something else - you can still confidently stand firm in your reasons for your decisions at that moment in time, respectfully.
My confidence and clarity developed through a lot of experimenting, and trying on new thoughts, ideas, to see what fits with my core values, and how I want to show up in the world.
I truly believe everything we do and try, gives us more information and more clarity to what we want and what we need. So there is no right way to do it - we just need to continuously check in with how things fit with our goals and our values, for our confidence to be unshaken.
#2: Practice
Along with that clarity, I really had to practice. Yes, I had to practice the new activity, new hobby and practice being in new situations, etc. And still - I’d say that the most important thing I practice and that I recommend to everyone is practicing self compassion.
What is self compassion?
This is the practice of being kind to yourself in the way you treat yourself, talk to yourself, think about yourself, share about yourself. This is especially important when you are going through a tough time, or are feeling some sort of unpleasant emotion about something that happened.
Why is that you ask?
We tend to be the hardest on ourselves. You probably tell yourself things that you would not actually tell someone you love and care about. This leads us to feel bad about ourselves and feel like we are not good enough. Then we think people around us think negatively of us too - when they may not be.
This happens because we as humans generally think we should be great at things immediately, even when we are new or still learning about it. It’s as if I just picked up learning how to play basketball today and I expect myself to be great at it.
Self compassion sounds like: “This is something I am still learning and improving upon, it makes sense that this would still be challenging for me. I am doing my best.”
I developed my confidence through constantly checking in with myself to have that clarity on my end goals and my values, and through practicing self compassion. I believe it’s possible for everyone to gain confidence through these two things and that’s why I teach these skills to my clients as well.
Two Action Steps for You:
1) Get clear about your values and characteristics/ideas that are important to you.
This will help with knowing what things you want to stand up for, what you want to spend your time on and how to approach situations that may be not in alignment with your values.
2) Create a self compassionate statement you can say to yourself about a challenging situation.
Be kind - what would you say to a 5-year-old who is struggling with something? (hopefully something kind - and tell yourself the same thing!)
