You’ve heard that confidence is one of the main ingredients of success and happiness. But how do you develop it? What if you’ve tried to build it and it didn’t work? They say that successes build confidence, but what if you don’t feel successful in the first place? It turns out that much of the confidence advice you’ve heard from success “gurus” is total BS. There are actually mindset strategies that will allow you to build genuine, lasting confidence no matter who you are, what’s happened in your life, or what hasn’t happened for you yet. Read on with this episode to get our favorite ones to build unshakable confidence today!
How To Build Unshakable Confidence
We have an awesome session for you. We’re going to talk about confidence because it’s something that we’ve seen. I’ve struggled with it for most of my life. It seems we’re all out to get even more of especially in this country. We all want energy. We all want better sleep, better sex and more confidence. Everything else doesn’t matter as long as we have these things. It also seems to be something that’s elusive. It seems to be something people have for a little while and then it goes away or some big life event can happen and then confidence is gone and no idea how to get back to it. If you were like me for most of my life, it felt like I never had it and thinking this is going to be the thing. When you finally have enough confidence in yourself then your whole life will turn around, but not sure how to get it going, we’re going to give you clarity on all of that.
He’s going to coach you through your confidence. This is a fun one and what’s interesting is especially for a lot of entrepreneurs. We have a large sense of confidence in certain areas of our lives but in other areas of our lives, we’re not so confident. It’s interesting to bring to awareness where in your life you’re feeling less confident than you would like and what areas in your life you’re feeling more confident. Figuring out where the disconnect is and where the dissonance is and what to do about all of this so you can start to feel fully embodied and fully confident in every aspect of who you be and what you do.
We know what confidence is important for. I’ll throw a couple of symptoms of feeling not enough confidence just in case. It’s interesting where I’ll meet people, especially if you’re in sales, you’re trained that you need to have confidence as you will have confidence. A lot of people tell themselves that they’re confident to the point where they believe it, but then they see these things happen in their lives and that’s how they find out that, “Maybe I don’t have as much as I should.” Here are a couple of things that have come up lately in the world of my clients that maybe you can identify with something like this or maybe you’ve identified at some point in your life and can see that, “This is what we’re talking about.”
[bctt tweet=”The more clarity you have, the more confident you tend to be.” username=””]
If you know what you should be doing in order to have an even better business, but you aren’t doing it. You should be making cold calls, but you come up with excuses not to. You should be having face-to-face meetings, but you have them over the phone or you write emails or maybe you skip the whole thing entirely so that you can avoid doing that. Maybe you have something that you have the skills to get. You have a job that you could apply for, or you have a client you could go out and get or a deal that you know you’ve got the skills to do, but you don’t do it. You fool yourself into thinking you’re not talented enough, you’re not skilled enough or you come up with some other bogus reason to avoid going after these goals. That could be a sign of lack of confidence, but there are some others as well. For example, if you go to perform a task and your energy drops all of a sudden. That could be a sign of lack of confidence because it could be your unconscious mind preventing you from taking this action. It’s trying to keep you safe by stealing your energy so you don’t go ahead and do it. Sophie, what are some things that you’ve seen?
A big part of what I see for a lot of the women that I work with is not being willing to be seen and not showing up. What this looks like in the context of business is they know that they need to create content. They know that they need to show up on social media, but they don’t do it and then they’re wondering why they aren’t growing their business. Oftentimes, what I see for a lot of babes is it’s two-part. The first piece usually comes from clarity. I have a belief around the more clarity you have, the more confident you tend to be. If you’re clear about what it is you’re doing and how this needs to happen and who it is you need to be and who it is you are, you tend to have a lot more confidence around that, a lot more certainty. That’s a big piece of it is when people aren’t really sure. They have a lot of uncertainty about what to do or if it’s going to work. How it’s going to work or who they are? There is some fear or they have some past experiences or reference points they’re pulling from that maybe have some contamination because they were not the greatest experiences and that’s what they’re afraid of happening. It’s almost like they’re resisting it. They’re resisting doing the thing because they’re not clear. They’re not certain. They’re not sure and so they don’t do it.
There are a lot of different dimensions of this confidence thing. That’s one of the things I love bringing up as well that sometimes we can get bogged down in what we think we don’t know. I used to do this all the time, feeling like, “I don’t know enough, so I’ll go learn.” You know what happens when you start learning, when you’re covering up for the things you don’t know, you find out how much you don’t know. You learned one thing and find out that you need to learn two more. It’s like attacking a hydra, you chop off one head and three others pop up. You can fall into this case of never knowing enough and feeling like, “I need to know everything before being confident.” That’s a double-edged sword. You have to know enough to get moving and enough to get going.
[bctt tweet=”Confidence is not just your belief in your ability to do something correctly. It is also your belief in your ability to learn.” username=””]
After that, you’re going to figure it out on the way. Instead of needing to know everything before you leap, you’ll figure it out as you go. The thing you’ll need in order to get that going is you need clarity of who you are and where you are going. With a big enough why, the how becomes apparent. You will figure it out. Confidence is not your belief in your ability to do something correctly. I think even more importantly, your belief in your ability to learn because if you have this confidence means, “I know that I’m going to do it successfully,” you could screw yourself. What happens if you don’t know? You’ve never done this thing before. You’ve tried it a couple of times and you failed. If confidence for you is doing something correctly, then in that case, you’re going to fall down a slippery slope.
If you could include in there your ability to learn something and so you have the confidence. You are like, “I can fail a couple of times, but every single time I’m going to learn something, I’m going to get better. Eventually, I know I will succeed.” You have this greater sense of confidence. You can get in there and know like, “I don’t need to know everything before I start. When I start this process, when I start posting, I go online and I start posting to show up. Maybe I don’t know what I’m doing 100%, but by doing this, I will learn because I know I can do that.” You’ll allow yourself to do these scary things and you’ll allow yourself to bounce back from maybe posting and getting complete crickets because you’ll have faith in yourself that you’ll figure it out. You’ll have faith in yourself to find someone who knows it, who will help you figure it out. From that sense of confidence, you’ll get a ton of motion on that.
I love what you’re tapping into here in the context of where we’re placing the validation for our own uncertainty. Typically, what tends to happen is we run programs where we seek external validation to make us feel more certain about where we are and who we are. It’s like, “This happened, so that validates this.” A perfect example of this for a lot of clients, especially when they’re starting their business and they’re starting to post on social they’re like, “I posted on social and nobody liked it. That must mean it’s not good. I’m not going to post anymore.”
It’s a big problem for a lot of people and then what ends up happening is they start to judge themselves based off of the external circumstances of somebody either not liking or liking their content. All of a sudden, their confidence, their certainty in who they are is dependent on something outside of them. Another big part of this is looking at where you’re seeking that validation from, that need for certainty from and looking at where it’s coming from outside of you and starting to bring it inward. A big part of this is you embodying and having this almost unshakeable certainty in who you are regardless of what happens externally, it has no impact on who you are. Regardless of whether or not somebody likes or dislikes my comments or my posts, I’m still an amazing human being. I’m still going to love myself either way. I’m still going to show up the same way. That switch, that confidence you want to be able to instill in yourself.
That returns back to the idea of clarity of who you are. You are not the results that you get. I’ll ask you, “Who are you?” What’s interesting is a lot of people will respond, “I’m an entrepreneur. This is what I do. I have this number of clients. I earn this much money. I’ve been in business for so long.” My response is, “I still have no idea who you are. That’s not what I asked even in the slightest.” If you start identifying with the results that you get and you think that’s who you are, what happens when your results change? What happens when you want to change what you do in your business? What happens when you try something and it doesn’t work? If you identify yourself with your results, then you’re a failure. There goes all of your confidence.
You get into this, “I’m confident some days, I’m not confident other days. I know who I am some days. I don’t know who I am in other days.” That goes along with how much money you have in the bank. How many sales did you make? How many likes did you get in your posts? These are all things you can’t control. If that’s how you’re going, then the moment you get some good vibes going on from that, you’re going to want only to do that. You’re going to box yourself in. You’re going to find yourself in a comfort zone. You’re going to pull the walls of that comfort zone on yourself until you don’t allow yourself even to take a step in any direction. Instead of that, I would encourage you to get clarity on who you are by the energy you feel. By the emotions you feel, by the direction you’re going in, by how you make other people feel, the people that you care about.
[bctt tweet=”When you have unshakable confidence, you’ll find that regardless of what happens externally, it has no impact in who you are.” username=””]
When I ask you, “Who are you?” You can tell me you’re a loving mother of two beautiful kids and you’re devoted to your family and you love making people laugh. You’re an entrepreneur because helping teens at risk lights your heart on fire because this is who you used to be and this is what happened in your life, and this is what you’re doing in this world. Now I know who you are. I can feel you and you’re beautiful. The beautiful thing is that won’t change if you put a post out and you don’t get any likes on it. You’re still the same person. You have a couple of bad months, you’re still the same person. It doesn’t matter. That will be fixed. That will help you build this resilience so no matter what happens in your life, you’re still the same and the clarity and the confidence you get from that is unbreakable.
I was having a conversation with the babes in my mastermind. One of them was asking a question directly around this. She was like, “How do I embody more of what I’m trying to step into before I feel confident in doing it?” For her, it was wanting to step into being this sensuality and sexuality coach. Coming from a corporate world, there’s a lot of programming and a lot of fear around doing that and her not seeing herself in that light. The analogy I was sharing with the group was, “How the identities we have are programs. Everything we believe we are just programs. They’re things we tell ourselves and it’s what we condition ourselves to believe.”
When we recognize that, it’s a beautiful thing. We realize that everything I am is a program that I’ve been running. It’s what I’m choosing to believe about myself. In the same way that five-year-old little girl can pick up a stick and put on a princess dress and believe that she is a princess and fully go out and acts like she is this royal princess. You too can tap into your inner child. Tap into your creative space and give yourself permission to release any beliefs that you’re not. Any of the things you want to be and give yourself permission to imagine the possibility that this is you. One of the things that are interesting that comes up for a lot of people is there are certain aspects of ourselves that we identify more with. There are certain aspects of ourselves we identify less with, whatever you’ve been socially conditioned to believe.
In that context, you’ll oftentimes hear people say, “I am not a confident person or I’m not a sexual person or I’m not whatever it is, fill in the blank.” The truth is you are all of those things. It’s what parts you’ve activated more than others. You have confidence. You have sensuality. You have sexuality. You have this innate desire to achieve. All of those things exist inside of you, it’s just you have not yet, up until this point, been activating those parts. You’ve been activating the other programs. What Dan is talking about here and what’s shifting is you starting to activate more of these deeper aspects of yourself that you want to step into. Recognizing you’re not this concrete human being that is born this way and then stays this way for the rest of your life. You’re this dynamic, multidimensional human being who has the ability to shift and shape and mold into whatever type of energy you want to embody at that moment.
I can hear you thinking as you’re reading this and saying, “Sophie, I don’t have confidence not because of what I think. I don’t have confidence because of what has happened in my life. I’ve tried these things and I’ve failed. I don’t have confidence. I’ve tried to be sexual and it hasn’t worked, so I’m not sexual.” This is one of the things that tweaks me. I have a lot of pet peeves in the coaching world. This is one of them where people say, “The way to build confidence is to do things successfully.” I’m sorry. That’s not how it works at all. If that’s the way it would work, none of us would be standing right now. We would all be rolling around because when you’re a baby, you haven’t done anything yet. You haven’t done shit. You’ve shat, that’s all you had done. You’ve eaten and shat. That’s it, but then you try to stand. What came first, walking or the confidence to think you even can? Without the confidence to believe it could even happen, we would all still be floor babies. You haven’t seen that. Have you ever seen an insecure baby? It doesn’t exist.
The confidence had to come first before you even tried to get up off the floor. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have even tried. If you don’t have confidence, if you have zero confidence that you could succeed in something, you will not try it. That means that confidence must exist in you first before you even give it a shot. What that means is if confidence can be there before you take action, you can build confidence before you take action. That means you can build confidence on your own, confidence has to be there. If you tell me that you have low confidence because you have failed, it’s backwards.
[bctt tweet=”Give yourself permission to imagine the possibility that this is you.” username=””]
You haven’t learned how to activate your confidence fully and that is why you failed. You don’t need to have these successes for you to feel confident. You don’t need to have great sex before you can be sexual. You don’t need to have these. Another way of saying it is, “Once you believe something, you will see it.” You don’t need to wait to see something before you believe it. You don’t need to wait for the success for you to be confident. That’s one of the beautiful things about working with a life coach, doing this spiritual work and doing this work on emotions and beliefs. You can see that you can generate this power inside of you and then use that to go off and be successful in your relationships, in your business and your life in general. Use that to build even more confidence and get on this upward spiral.
It’s not a chicken or the egg situation most of the time. You can work on that. The beautiful thing is that when we start playing with these programs, you can see that these sometimes debilitating programs, they’re not part of you either. I dare you to show me a baby who believes they’re not worth it, they’re not good enough, or they don’t deserve happiness or a baby thinking that whatever they do, they’ll fail. It doesn’t exist. You weren’t born with that. You were born confident. You were born loving. You were born grateful. You were born with the ingredients of true strength and power in you. You need to help you re-identify with that. That’s the real you. Everything else other than that is completely crap.
The biggest piece for each of you tuning into this is to recognize that we are emotional beings and all emotion is energy. It’s vibrational frequencies. There are many episodes we’ve done on all of this stuff. What I want to remind you of is that you get to choose the vibrational frequency that you want to carry. You get to choose the energy that you embody. You get to choose the emotional state you’re living in. That emotional state is what creates for you that level of confidence or certainty or whatever it is you’re trying to tap into. It all exists. It’s all inside of you. You have the same neurocircuitry as anyone else in the world. It’s a matter of how you’re using it and recognizing that if you’re finding yourself hardwired to a certain emotional state, it’s a program you’ve been running and you’ve been conditioned to for quite some time. It’s a matter of rewiring that.
When we’re talking about re-wiring these programs, be careful with these beliefs that you may have and whether you are identifying it. People will say, “I am not confident. I am whatever.” You fill in the blank. Know that these are things that you have learned over time and anything that you learn, you can unlearn. This is an emotional frequency and you can choose it and you can change it like changing a channel. If you don’t know how to do it, the information is out there. Sophie and I do it with my clients every single day where I work. We’ve been doing it for years. I’m at a point and I teach people as well how to change beliefs permanently in minutes. I was at a Tony Robbins’ Unleash The Power Within event and I was in the room with 15,000 people all changing beliefs at the same time. It can be done. You need to know that it can be done.
When you have these thoughts of, “I’m not good enough,” know that isn’t even you. This is some voice that you picked up. It’s like a rock that you found when you were a child and you picked it up along the way. You had it in your pocket for so long you thought that was part of your leg. It’s not. It’s some crap that you picked up. When you feel this, you can start off by letting you know, “This is not me. This doesn’t happen to be me. This does not have to be my reality. I can choose something else for myself. I can change my emotional frequency.” There’s a lot. There are many modalities that help you with this. You can do it with breath work or energy healing or NLP or interventionist coaching and on and on. This isn’t even hard to find. You need to know that this is one option of your way of being. You do not need to stick with it. You can easily find help in shifting that.
The other piece I want to touch on here is becoming aware of your reference points. We all have them. We all start to pull from different aspects of our life and especially for entrepreneurs, myself included where we’re like, “I’m confident when it comes to these aspects of my life.” Then we talk about other areas maybe we’re not as seasoned or experienced, or we don’t live as much and we’re like, “I don’t know who I am in that area.” For example, me and dating. In business, I’m a boss. I know my thing. In dating, I’m like, “What is this?” It’s recognizing where it’s you starting to act it and tap into that part of you that exists that can feel competent even in the uncertainty or the uncomfortability of the newness of the new situation. It’s you starting to activate and say, “What are the parts of me that exist not because of what I do, but because of who I am?” Not pulling a gun from your external but from your internal. Forgetting any programming that no longer serves and support you and remembering the truth of who you are and giving yourself permission to embody that and working through what I always encourage as having embodiment practices. Things that on a daily basis help you activate and get into your flow state whatever that is for you.
[bctt tweet=”You don’t need to wait for the success for you to be confident.” username=””]
For me, I have my own routines. It allows you to ground and center into your essence, into your being, and making sure that you give yourself the space to do that on a regular basis like charging your phone. Nothing works when you have a dead battery. I would say that’s a big piece of this. It’s you figuring out what charges up those emotional frequencies for you. Like you plugging your phone, what is the plug that you need to plug yourself into? For me, that looks like meditation, dancing, self-pleasure practice, things of those sorts that help me to recharge and activate those frequencies inside myself. Breathwork, that puts me inside of those emotional states. For you, it’s getting clear on like, “What are the parts? What are the things I can do for myself to help me activate those emotional frequencies so that I can start to live more in that state? Carry that energy into every aspect of what I do and recognize it’s not what I’m doing that’s creating that as far as me going to work or me creating a copy or whatever it is. It’s me coming with that energy that’s allowing me to do it well.”
I’ll give you some of the things I regularly do as well, so you have an even wider menu to choose from. Here are some of the things I do to allow myself to feel good about who I am no matter what’s going on in my world. I practice a lot of gratitude. I celebrate myself for every little thing I do. It sounds childish and dumb, but I love it, so it doesn’t matter. I will celebrate myself for making a good cup of coffee or something that simple. I’ll celebrate myself for getting up out of bed every morning. I don’t even have a snooze on my alarm, but if I did, it would be like, “I got out of bed without hitting snooze.” I handicap myself. I can’t hit snooze but still congratulate myself for getting out of bed as soon as my alarm goes off. That’s one of these things we don’t do enough, especially with high achievers. We love to give ourselves task after task. We only look at what we did wrong or what we could do better in the future or what was missing or how we weren’t perfect.
I’ve given this example before but still, it’s like going to a five-year-old and every single task you give them, you didn’t even acknowledge them or thank them. All you do is tell them what was wrong and they need to do better and they’re not good enough. How long do you think would it take before that five-year-old would feel shitty about themselves and not want to help you, not want to work with you and not feel like they can do anything? All they’re getting from you is what they messed up. Let’s look at the other side. What happens if you’ve got a five-year-old and every single thing they do, you thank them for it or at least acknowledge them for it? You lead by what they did right and what you appreciate them for. Then you give in what they could improve to make it even better next time.
How quickly do you think you’d have a confident, positive and hardworking five-year-old? Someone who’s on your team. One thing we forget is I know we like to think we’re adults, yet we’re not. Whatever this idea of an adult is, it doesn’t exist. We’re like grown-up children. Your unconscious mind is 75% to 85% programmed before the age of six. Your unconscious mind makes up different people and different things. Some are between 88% to 94% of all the thoughts and feelings and everything you have. You’re mostly that five-year-old. What I do is treat my five-year-old really well. It may sound dumb to high five yourself for making a salad or eating healthy or going for a walk but try it.
When you learn how to celebrate yourself, you may find that you do a lot of things well and you take care of yourself well, or you will start to when you see that you can appreciate yourself. As that appreciation grows, as your gratitude for yourself and your life grows, you’ll feel that strength within you grow as well. That’s one of my favorite confidence building things. There’s that. I meditate as well. I do a combination of reconnection, connecting with my self-meditation, with a manifestation meditation and a gratitude meditation to allow myself to feel who I am and where I’m going. I love to do future pacing, envisioning my future a lot and do it in such a way, have it be so rich with details of all of my senses that when I’m there, it feels real. After a little while, my brain, my body, I know where I’m going. I felt it. It’s like remembering it. I know deep down, even if something bad happens, even if some unexpected surprise comes up, I know where I’m going because I’ve seen it 1,000 times before. That allows me to feel comfortable and confident knowing that I will bounce back because I know where I’m going to go. I’m going there no matter what. I know it. That has been a super powerful exercise for me as well.
Dan, didn’t we want to give them one more exercise?
I would say pick one of the ones that either one of us provided for you. Pick one that stood out. I want you to think of it this way. Instead of which one is going to give you the greatest effect or which one you like the most, think about the one that you’ll do most often. It’s like when people ask me, “What workout should I do?” The one that’ll get you to the gym every day or most often the one you’ll do repetitively. Choose one of them and do that every day. Do it every day for two weeks and see how you feel. If it doesn’t make a difference, scrap it and try something else. If you feel that it’s adding to your life and you feel even a little boost of confidence, keep it and pick up something else until you figure out your secret sauce, your recipe to confidence.
Tag us in your social handles, on Facebook, on Instagram. Share a pic of what you’re doing, what you’re trying. Maybe not your self-pleasure practice, but how you feel afterward would be great so we can know what’s working for you and so everyone else can keep moving it too. Thank you so much for reading. We will see you in the next episode.
If you like this episode, if it helped you at all, especially if you know of someone else who could use this, please share this out. Leave us a review on iTunes. Drop us some stars or you can even screenshot your phone as you’re reading this. Throw it up in your stories and tag us. Help us get this message out. The more people we can spread this too, the more we can help each other raise the vibes on the planet and maybe we can reach someone who needs to hear this. You might not think it makes a big difference, but it really does. It also lets us know you appreciate it so we can give you even more of this goodness. We know that we’re on to something for you. Thank you very much for spending this time with us. Lots of love. Take care.
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