Confidence; my journey in finding some
Written by Jaclyn | 12 minute read
Confidence!
What is it?
How do I build it?
And where do I get some?
A quick Google search reveals: “confidence is a feeling of self-assurance arising from one's appreciation of one's own abilities or qualities. Having no uncertainty; being sure of oneself…”
I’ve been obsessed with confidence lately, ever since Covid happened.
I’ve always been a very introspective and reflective person, but during that time of my life I got even deeper into that. Along with many others affected by quarantines and lock-downs, it made me deeply reflect on my life, what I’m doing with it, and my goals. Life as we knew it came to a screeching halt and it forced me to stop and think. (I mean, what else was I supposed to do with all this time on my hands?) For me, this was the perfect time to think, reflect and re-evaluate.
Confidence is something I’ve struggled with in certain areas of my life, specifically confidence in socializing with other people. It’s common to have confidence issues in things you aren’t naturally good at or drawn to, things that don’t come easy to you, and things that you have to work really hard at. Naturally, I am a very introverted and socially anxious person. Feeling 100% confident and calm while being sociable is one area I’ve never felt super confident in …which is FUNNY considering what I do for a living! (I remember how I used to feel training – and talking – to clients. It was painful at the start, but I was also so excited about my new career in fitness and helping people that the passion triumphed my feelings of being socially insecure and awkward).
To this day, I am still no Chatty Cathy, and I prefer to keep to myself most of the time. I prefer developing closer, more meaningful relationships with people instead of having millions of friends, and I hate small talk. I don’t fit the “extrovert ideal” deemed “more successful” in our society (a notion I’ve come to challenge, but that’s a story for another day).
Since 2020, when shit hit the fan and all hell broke loose in the world, I’ve become more obsessed with personal growth – trying to understand what it is I truly want out of this life, what’s holding me back from getting it, and how I can make cool shit happen. A big part of this never-ending personal journey had me pointing the finger at one thing: my self-confidence. There’s so much I want to share about this topic and the things I’ve discovered over the past 4 years, but I’ll keep my rambling tangents to a minimum.
I want to share with you what I’ve learned on my confidence journey so far, in hopes that it can help you dig a little deeper and tap into your inner bad-ass self that’s waiting to emerge.
To build confidence, I believe you need to work on these three things:
You need to get uncomfy
You HAVE to do this! As the saying goes “nothing good comes from your comfort zone”. If you want something you’ve never had before, you need to explore territory outside the comfort zone you currently reside. Get uncomfortable in bite-sized pieces. For example, let’s use a cold plunge analogy (because those are trendy these days). If you’ve never cold plunged before, don’t submerge your entire body into the cold right off the get-go. Instead, start with you feet. Keep doing your feet over and over again, for days, weeks, months. Then eventually, let’s go to the knees. Then keep doing that for days, weeks, months… You get the point. If you’re TOO uncomfortable, TOO soon, you’re gonna wanna run away and hide, and go back to where you were, which will put you right back onto the path you’re trying to get off of. Get uncomfy, but start small! Which leads to my next point…
You need to achieve small wins
If you set goals for yourself that are too large and don’t chunk them down into smaller, more easily digestible tasks, you’ll feel overwhelmed, discouraged, and retreat back to your old habits. Break your large goals down into small ones to prove to yourself that you can do it, and continue to build up from there. This sense of competency will compound over time. It's very common for me to see clients who’ve just signed up for training in-person commit to 5 sessions a week (when they’ve been doing nothing or years). That’s great, they feel motivated and ready to go, but I can almost guarantee that it WON’T last! They’ve bitten off way more than they can chew, and realize it’s not sustainable for them. If you’re starting something new, and want to stick with it long term, it’s much better to start small and then gradually and continually build up from there. Another example, is if you want to lose 15lbs of body fat. Instead of being hyper-focused on hitting that final goal number of 15lbs, you need to focus on hitting smaller, more continuous goals of losing 1-2lbs each week. The important part being is that you keep taking steps in the right direction until you eventually hit that final goal.
You need to believe in yourself
You need to believe that you can actually DO the thing. If you’ve set everything up perfectly, but you don’t actually believe that you can achieve the thing that you want, then you’re standing in your own way. Your mind wants to keep you safe, it wants to hold you back, but you need to override this. Often you’ll hear the term “limiting self-beliefs”, and this is exactly what I’m talking about. We ALL have them. Nobody is immune to them, no matter how confident you may think you are. You might not KNOW that you have limiting self beliefs because they’ve become so ingrained and patterned into your thoughts and behaviours, but the first step is recognizing that they’re there, that they’re living in your brain, and that it’s time for them to get a job and move out. It takes time and practice to crack them open and get them out of your way so you can take steps in the right direction to becoming the person you want to be. Our limiting self beliefs are often tied into our identity: for example, you tell yourself “I’m not a fit person”. As a kid you were always picked last in gym class, and were made fun of because you weren’t very athletic, and nobody ever passed you the ball in basketball. Years go by, you grow up, and you still hold onto this idea that you’re not athletic. The gym was never “your place”. You feel out of shape, deconditioned, weak and hate what your body looks like. Deep down you want to make a change, but you don’t think you have what it takes because you are not “a fit person”… you never were. You think to yourself, “the gym is just not for me”, but at the same time, you have goals! You WANT to be fit, you WANT to fit in at the gym, you WANT an athletic body! Your limiting self beliefs tie into your identity, they are a part of your history, but you have the power to change that. As the saying goes “where the mind goes, the body follows”. Essentially, you are trapping yourself into this box of how you choose to identify yourself. To challenge this you need to start identifying as “a fit person”, even if you don’t FEEL that way… yet. We are all guilty of this type of thinking. Another example, I see it in myself when I do jiujitsu, “Oh, I’m not good at half guard” LIMITING SELF BELIEF! Correct, I don’t feel like my half guard is a super strong game of mine, BUT by telling myself in my head that I’m not good at it, I WON’T be good at it. I’m stopping myself from being good at it, right then and there. If you want to be good at something you need to BELIEVE you can be good at that the thing. If you’re not good at something, re-frame the shit out of it, “I’m not good at half guard” needs to be re-framed into “I’m working on my half guard right” or “I’m not good at it… yet!”. We should all be working on our shit. Sure, we might have a natural affinity to be good at certain things, but don’t stand in your OWN WAY and hold yourself back by telling yourself that you’re bad at something. If you don’t have a natural talent for something, but want to improve, WORK ON IT! Re-frame your thoughts about yourself and the thing that you want to work on, to make it more positive and productive, not negative and limiting.
As Mel Robbins said in her podcast, Toolkit for Building Unstoppable confidence (according to research), she says “confidence is NOT a feeling, it’s an ACTION. Confidence starts with a willingness to TRY”.
You are not going to feel confident from the get-go. Confidence is an action. This ties back into point number one; you gotta get a little uncomfy and be okay with making mistakes, but the best part of that is that you’ll learn, and when you learn, things get a little easier.
I’m not perfect, and I’m not a confidence expert (…yet) but it’s something I’ve taken a lot of time reading about and developing over the past few years and I wanted to share some of my realizations in hopes of helping others who may also struggle with confidence in certain parts of their life.
Do something that scares you. Prove to yourself that you can overcome it. That’s one way confidence is built.
Playing it safe and staying in your comfy zone is the biggest confidence buzz kill in my opinion. Our minds are “smart” they don’t want us to venture out into the unknown, our survival instincts want to keep us “safe”.
From my experience, confidence is not a switch that just “turns on” and all of the sudden unicorns fall from the sky and the confidence gods start singing. You don’t just wake up one morning and go “Hey! I’m 100% confident in everything I do, yay! Life is amazing! La dee da!” Confidence is a SKILL that is built over time, so be patient with yourself! Be really fucking patient. It takes time, it takes work. I’m still working on it, and something tells me I always will be! But what matters is you keep trying, you keep getting back up even when you’ve been knocked down and feel like shit, even when you’re stuck deep inside that valley of despair and want to quit and resort back to your old ways. Get yourself up, build yourself back up, bit by bit. Because if you continue to do that, one day you’ll look back at yourself and be so amazed and so proud of how far you’ve come.
Click here for 12 tips for feeling more confident in the gym!
