Episode #39 Transcript
Instant Confidence Reframe
INTRO: This is the Decision Masters Podcast. I'm Kirsten Parker, the Decision Coach for Overthinkers. When you feel good about your decisions, life feels good. You get to be present in your days and excited about where you're going. I'm gonna help you build your decision mastery. So it's easy to know what you want, navigate uncertainty and handle any feelings that happen. Whether you're in the middle of some overthinking angst right now or you simply love feeling in charge of your choices, you're in the right place. Clear confident, decisions are right around the corner. Let's get into it.
KIRSTEN: Hey buddy! As a follow up to last week's episode on being in this mode of feeling constantly disappointed in yourself—so if that's the mode you're in and you didn't catch the last episode, hop back one and then come back here—but as a follow up to that, I thought it would be fun to talk about confidence, ‘cause when we're constantly disappointed with ourselves, we do not feel confident. And we haven't talked about confidence yet, you and I. So we're going to talk about some misunderstandings. I'm gonna offer you a new way to think about confidence, which is like a long, hard journey I've been through with the way I think about it, and what I'm trying to go for now in how I feel about myself and how I feel in the world. And I'm going to give you a fast, easy way to feel amazing about yourself—or at least, if you're starting from a lower baseline, I'm gonna give you a fast way to put some more gas in your confidence tank. Okay? Get ready, we're gonna go down some analogy lanes today, and it's gonna be fun.
So I've had a huge misunderstanding about confidence in the past, and you might be there too. I used to think confidence functioned like educational degrees, and certifications, and experience: you work towards it, you do the stuff you need to do to get it, and once you reach a certain level, you get to keep that. Like somebody gives you your degree, you get to keep that, and then forever and ever, whatever happens for the rest of time, you've reached that level and no one can take that away from you. I used to think confidence functioned like that. I used to think of it as this thing that we always had to be striving upwards towards and that once you reached a certain level, you should retain a certain level of confidence. You should just be unshakable about some stuff once you check the right boxes and achieve the right stuff and prove to either yourself or the world that, Look, I'm allowed to be confident about this.
And that's tenuous, right? Because all of a sudden you wake up and you're in that mode where you're feeling constantly disappointed about yourself, or you're feeling imposter-y, you're not feeling confident, and you're like, “Wait a minute, something’s gone wrong. I thought I earned this confidence. I thought I checked enough boxes, and now I'm feeling this uncomfortable human emotion. I wasn't as confident as I thought I was. Oh dang.”
But here's the truth, the truth that I made up that I'm gonna invite you to believe as well. Confidence actually functions more like your skin and your muscles. (I told you, analogy lanes.) It's not like degrees and experience and check boxes, it's more like skin and muscles: it’s a huge living part of who you are, it’s always regenerating, it can build upon itself in some places, in some times, and it can need healing and recovery in other places, at other times. Intrigue, right? Let's talk about it, because just like you can have strong biceps and weaker calf muscles, and maybe today you have sore abs from yesterday's hike—I don't know, I guess you can have sore abs from a hike. But just like all of those things can be true at one moment in time in your human body, you can also have strong confidence in a skill or job that you've done forever and you know you're good at, and at the very same time, you can have weaker confidence over here in something you're just learning. And then over here at the exact same time, you can also maybe have some bruised confidence from a hard experience that you just went through, or a challenge, or a failure. So that's how confidence is more like your muscles. You have so many muscles and you have layered wide-reaching confidence. A lot can be going on in lots of different areas at the same time.
Let's go to the skin analogy, see what's happening over there. Okay, so your skin is also layered, it's also always with you, and it's also always changing, and so is your confidence. We can get caught up in focusing on the one thing that we feel shaky in right now, and we can blow that up into thinking it's our whole identity. We can start internalizing that lack of confidence and misinterpret it as us being unconfident overall. I've totally been there. It's like you go into laser focus on the new challenge you're taking on—which, why should you be confident in it; you've never done it, it's new—or you've laser focused on the mistake or “failure,” your perceived mistake or failure, that you are just recovering from. And of course, why should you feel confident right now? Your human body is not designed to react to things that feel like mistakes and failure with confidence. This is just your body working correctly. But we can laser focus on that stuff and then we can walk around our lives telling ourselves the story that we are unconfident people. We can just think since I feel this emotion of unconfidence—is that a real word? The more I say it, the more it sounds wrong, but I'm just gonna go with it ‘cause we're already like seven minutes into this recording. But you can feel that one emotion and think, “Well, because I'm feeling this one emotion right now, this is who I am. This is how I am. I am an unconfident person.” And that's just not true. Whatever you did today, you had the confidence to do it, otherwise it wouldn't have happened. Can we agree on that?
You might not have felt the emotion of confidence whilst you did it, but you still did it, which means somewhere in your mind you thought you could. So we always have a higher baseline confidence than we probably give ourselves credit for.
And you might be wondering, wait, where did our skin analogy go? My point is that it's always with you, it’s layered, and it's always changing, but it never goes away. You're never without skin (I really hope). But we can get laser focused on the one thing about our skin that we don't like, or this one wrinkle over here, or this sunspot. Or the skin on our knee could be scraped ‘cause maybe we fell down roller skating—I don't know your life, maybe that's a hobby of yours! And we can do the same thing with our confidence, where we forget that we are constantly surrounded by and supported by and held together by our skin. Your confidence is working as hard as your skin all the time, every day, and it's doing a great job, my friend.
So maybe we can ease up on that laser focus about the very real, very visceral, super unpleasant, but also temporary, human emotions that are happening when we do not feel our most confident.
So I hesitate to use the phrase “give yourself a confidence boost,” because that's kind of treating confidence like, I don't know, a slowly dying helium balloon or something, and that's just not our metaphor, that's not our analogy. So I don't wanna give you a way to give yourself a confidence boost, but I do wanna give you a fast, easy, delicious way to do some confidence reps, or give your confidence a stretch, or a massage, or some lotion, okay? I am gonna die on the hill of these analogies, and I'm not sorry about it.
So here's what I want you to do, and I want you to do this literally any time you need that confidence stretch or you need to do some confidence reps. Just like you might need to take an Epsom salt bath for your muscles, or you might need to take a stretch, or you might need to put some medication on a wound on your skin. We gotta pay attention to this stuff, but stop treating our confidence like it's like something that we should have achieved and held onto, and now we're bissed—bissed?—and now we're pissed off and bitter at it for not showing up in our lives every single day and just being easy. It's like, I got the degree, I hung it on the wall,
why isn't confidence this straightforward? Grr. No, none of us feels good living that way. I get it. I've been there.
I want you to think about yourself a year ago. Who were you a year ago? And I want you to imagine looking at yourself today from that perspective of year-ago-you. What would past-you think, and feel, and be impressed by, and be proud of, maybe even be jealous of, looking at you and your life and who you are today? I have to do this sometimes because growing a business is a very future focused thing, and the way my brain likes to operate, it likes to focus on all the stuff that I haven't figured out yet and don't know how to do yet, and all the things I haven't accomplished yet. I mean, raise a hand, raise an eyebrow if you're driving, if you've been there, right?
Lots of delicious fodder for unconfident feelings. And I have to do this where I just let myself take a break from looking at where I'm not, or looking at the future, or focusing on how not confident I feel. I just think about what would past-me think? She would be jazzed to have these problems. She would be so impressed by this over here, or she wouldn't even believe I was taking this thing on, that right now I'm just focusing on all of the logistics that are annoying me about it. It can be a really nice break and it can give you a really helpful perspective on the growth and progress you actually have achieved. No matter what boxes you have or have not checked, no matter how things actually went in reality, the point is you have grown and you have progressed, because I know you, and you know you, and you know it's true.
Now, if this is a challenge, if a year ago you happened to be on top of the world for some reason and you're not feeling particularly amazing right now, and that's not a helpful reference point, don't use it. We don't need to make this more complicated than it needs to be. So go back two years, go back five years. The point is not to compare yourself with where you are and where you were and where you think you should be; we're not doing that. The point is to give yourself this chance to see, “Oh yeah, I'm allowed to feel confident. I actually do feel confident and I kind of forgot. Because I am amazing at the same time as being all the other things that I think I am, and feeling all the other feelings that totally coexist at the exact same time.”
So I hope this helps. I hope you leave today's episode just thinking about, how do I want to think about confidence? Maybe you've been thinking about it in a totally different way than I used to, but maybe it's still kind of crappy and doesn't serve you. So think about, how have I been thinking about confidence? What have I been expecting confidence to do on its own, or how have I been expecting it to be? And how helpful has that been? How's that working out? Maybe I wanna try on a different relationship with confidence, a different definition of it.
If you don't like the muscles and the skin, how do you wanna think of confidence? Is there a river involved? Tell me everything. Email me at [email protected] and say, Okay, I didn't like your analogies, but here's what I made up and here's how I choose to think about confidence.
I promise it’s very empowering, and at the end of the day, all I want is for you to feel like you have more access to this feeling that we can feel really deficient in a lot of the time. And that can kickstart a lot of crappy decisions that we do not love, and it can cause us to miss out on powerful, authentic, self-honoring decisions that we can't even see.
So do some confidence reps. Give yourself a little confidence stretch. Think about yourself from a past-you perspective, and just give yourself credit for what you've done and what you've achieved, and what you've enjoyed and what you've survived. And let it count and let confidence not be a static thing.
It's always with you, it's always growing, it's always changing, it’s also probably always healing, all at the same time. Not an either/or though. And I hope you have the best day. Go feel a little bit more confident. Have fun. I'll talk to you soon.
OUTRO: Hey, wanna know the number one thing you need to kickstart your momentum right now? (Obviously.) I know! That's why I created the Momentum Quiz. Head to kirstenparker.com/quiz to find out your number one momentum killer and get your personalized action plan to boost your momentum and get back on track. That’s kirstenparker.com/quiz. Have fun!
