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Self confidence is one of those things that ultimately determines whether you’re going to be highly successful in your life or not. When you look at people who have genuine self confidence, you just know that they either have created or are about to create something amazing. So how does it work and how do we gain that unshakable confidence in ourselves?

Thanks to one of our listener’s questions, in this episode of the Life Coach School podcast, we’re getting into the topic of self confidence. We cover where confidence comes from, why so many of us don’t have enough of it, and what we need to do to gain faith in ourselves. Don’t miss this important episode that’s sure to help you unlock your unlimited potential and accomplish anything you put your mind to!

What you will discover

  • Where we tend to look for confidence.
  • The main reason why we lack confidence in ourselves and how it affects our self esteem.
  • The reality of why we feel confident.
  • Why you should never try to gain confidence by comparing yourself to others.
  • The first step to self confidence.
  • Questions to help you feel self confident.
  • How to unlock your unlimited potential.

Featured on the show

Episode Transcript

You are listening to The Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo, Episode #58.

Hey, everyone, what's happening? Today, we're going to talk about self-confidence. This was actually a request I got from one of you all wanting to work on confidence, and I actually think that it's one of the topics that you can't talk about enough. I think that self-confidence is one of those things that really determines whether you are going to rock your life or not. When you look at people that have genuine self-confidence, you know that they've either created something amazing or they're about to create something amazing. I think that is a really powerful thing to know and a really powerful thing to understand.

The question is, what is self-confidence? Of course, I went to Google and the Interwebs to see what they thought, and I love this definition, "A feeling of trust in one's abilities, qualities, and judgment." Now, I think that we really need to think about what that means because so many of my clients say that they don't trust themselves and they don't believe in their abilities and qualities. I think that there's a distinction that we need to make here that's really important. For example, if there is something that I want to do in my life, if I set a big goal and I don't yet have the ability to do it, it doesn't mean that I'm not self-confident about it. I'm trying to help my students and clients understand the difference between having to already have the ability in order to have self-confidence or having self-confidence in your ability to get the ability, if that makes sense.

It's important to think about how you view yourself, and I have a ton of confidence in myself that I will find a way to get something done, that I will figure it out, that I will work as hard as I need to work to get the result that I most want. That does not mean that I already have that capacity. Notice the difference there. I have faith in my ability to learn it; I have faith in my ability to try; I have faith in my ability not to give up, but I may not have faith or trust in my ability to actually do it yet. I think that's where the self-confidence comes in, because I'll have brand new coaches and they'll say, "I don't feel confident in being a coach yet." I'll say, "Okay. What do you believe you need in order to be confident?"

Now, of course, self-confidence always comes from our mind, and the reason they're not feeling confident is because they feel like they don't have enough experience. Yet, when I first started coaching, I was very confident and I was very self-confident. I'm trying to understand what's the difference there. Here's why I was confident. I was confident in the tools that I was using; I was confident in my desire to help people; and, I was confident in the process of someone spending an hour with me, focused on themselves being a powerful use of their time. Even though I may not have been the coach that I am today, I may not have been quite at the level that I'm at today, I didn't need to be because I have self-confidence and I find it in other areas around me.

Here's the important piece, you all, are you getting or trying to get confidence from something that you've done, from your actions? Are you trying to get confidence from your results? Or are you getting confidence from the only place you can get confidence, which is from yourself, your mind, your brain, and how you think about yourself? People will say, "Well, when I think about the things that I'm very experienced in, I feel very confident, so how do you explain that?" I'll say, "Well, the things that you're experiencing, you have given yourself permission to feel confident about, and it doesn't mean that you're always going to do it well."

I like to use the example of pouring a glass of water. Most of us would agree that we're pretty confident when it comes to there being a pitcher of water and us pouring water into a glass. Now, if we go to pour that water and we miss it or the glass falls over or it doesn't work out the way we had planned, we don't make it mean that we're not good at pouring water. We don't make it mean that we don't have the ability to pour water. We feel confident in our abilities before and even when we fail at it. The thought is, "I can pour water. I know how to pour water."

Now, could you have confidence in pouring gasoline into a glass? Why? Why would you feel like you have confidence there? You've never poured gasoline into a glass, but it doesn't matter; you have confidence in yourself as a pourer. You know you can pour liquid, and so you're transferring that confidence over. What I'm suggesting is that that's only a thought in your mind. That's only your brain coming up with thoughts to think about pouring. You can do that with anything in your life.

Let's talk a little bit about what prevents us from feeling confident. Whenever I'm talking to a client and they're saying that they don't feel confident, I know that they're feeling something else instead. What are you feeling in place of confidence? What are you choosing to feel instead? What are you thinking about that's creating a different emotion? What most of them are feeling is some flavor of confusion, doubt, or second-guessing themselves, which is more of an action, that second-guessing coming from that doubt. Lack of confidence, insecurity, doubt, those are all kind of the same flavor.

Let's think about it. Let's think about first … I've been talking a lot about this in my Master Coach training, a lot about how we use confusion as one of those indulgent emotions. We use confusion as a way of not moving forward. We indulge in it and entertain ourselves within it, and I think that's a really dangerous emotion to indulge in, confusion. It has no upside and it feels necessary and it feels true and it feels legit. I think that's one of the scariest ones. Then, doubt is something that some of us have become so accustomed to feeling that we don't even acknowledge that there's another option, so notice when you're feeling confusion or doubt in place of confidence. Remember, confidence is just, "I believe in my ability to get it done. I believe in my quality. I believe in my judgment."

Here's the thing. You don't even have to take it personally, that confidence. You don't have to say, "Well, I'm confident because I'm such an amazing person." You can basically give the credit elsewhere. For some of you, that's God; for some of you that's the universe, whatever, your creator. You can give credit to the force that made you that you have the ability to overcome adversity and to overcome obstacles and get it done and to do it and to do it at the best of your ability. The thing that robs us of self-confidence is our thinking, and let me tell you exactly what I mean by that.

One of the areas where most people would say they don't have a lot of self-confidence is in public speaking, and here's how you rob yourself of the feeling of confidence. You go up and you're going to speak. You go up to the stage and what you're thinking about is possibly, "I'm going to forget what to say; all these people are staring at me; they're not going to like what I have to say; it's not going to be interesting enough and I'm totally going to flop." You start having these thoughts of anticipating how you're not going to do well or thoughts about how you're not going to perform to your own ability or how other people aren't going to like you. You start anticipating this worst-case scenario.

Now, the worst thing that can happen is your thought about something happening. Even if everybody hated your speech, the worst part about that would be what you would think about them hating your speech. You see what I'm saying? Your anticipation of that, you’re thinking about what you're going to be thinking is what prevents you from having self-confidence. I really want you guys to wrap your mind around this. Self-confidence comes from your brain, and you rob yourself of having self-confidence by what you think about your brain and what you project is going to happen or how you're going to do it.

Now, when I start talking about self-confidence, inevitably someone will bring up arrogance and fake self-confidence. We all know the person that has that fake self-confidence. They come in and pretend to be confident, but you can sense their insecurity. You can sense their need for approval and their desire for approval. That's not what I'm talking about here. That actually is the A-line of self-confidence. That's acting like you're self-confident but having it come from a place of insecurity.

The thing about self-confidence is it comes from thoughts about yourself and how you feel about yourself and how you think about yourself and your abilities. One of the things that generates a lot of self-confidence is believing that you are capable just because you're alive, just because you're a person in the world. Not because you're special, not because you're better than anybody else, but just because you are worthy. That is where the most self-confidence comes from. When you know that you're worthy because you're a human being, then you also know that everybody else is worthy, too. What this does is it takes you out of worrying or having a need for approval from other people, because we're all human beings and we don't need to have approval from anyone else to deem us worthy.

The other thing that it does is it takes us out of arrogance. It takes us out of that need of believing that we're better than anybody else. A lot of people try to generate self-confidence by comparing themselves to other people, and they think, "Ooh, I'm better than that person," and they try to get confidence that way. What that is is arrogance, and that's a very slippery slope because it depends on other people not doing as well. I've been in that position where you believe that other people failing, other people not doing well actually serves you. I have to say that is never the case when you're coming from an abundant mentality.

Excellence begets excellence, whether it's your own or somebody else's. There is enough for everybody to be excellent. There doesn't have to be any competition between us in order for there to be confidence. It's not like there's this finite amount of self-confidence to go around and you have to wait until you get yours. Right? No. If we really understand that we're all worthy and we're all capable, then we see that everybody can have as much self-confidence as they possibly need. The more self-confident I am, the less I'm going to try and put you down, the less I'm going to try and hurt you, the less I'm going to try and slow you down or sabotage you because I'm not depending on your failing in order for me to get my sense of confidence. You know what I'm saying?

A lot of people will say to me, "I went and looked at her website and I saw what she was doing and I just had this total compare-and-despair moment." That's because you're coming from this place that there's only so much success, only so much confidence to go around, and they took it all. They clearly have more than you. The truth is, they're just expressing their self-confidence in a bigger way. They're expressing it in a way where they're not waiting for approval; they're not waiting for the experience of going for it. That's what I want to encourage all of you to do is to really know that the only thing holding you back is your belief about what you're capable of doing. If someone else is capable of doing it, I believe you are, too, in your own way. Everything that you dream about or want in your life is available to you if you stop doubting yourself and holding yourself back by not believing in yourself.

I know that some of you will now say, "Okay, so how do I do that? That sounds all great, but how do I do it?" I would say that the very first step is getting to know yourself, is understanding where are you on that confidence scale, meaning what is your opinion of yourself and your capability and your ability and do you trust yourself? See, the more you know yourself, the more you trust yourself, because here's why. The more you know yourself, what I mean by that is you know more about what's going on in your mind. The more you recognize what's going on in your mind, the more you see how the thoughts in your mind are creating the results in your life.

There's something very empowering that breeds self-confidence from that knowing, because it really is just like math. What you think creates your result, and you can see it in everything you do. You can see every thought and how it's creating the result you get. You can see the areas where you've managed your thinking and thought things that are positive and useful, that you have the result that is positive and useful. The areas in your life where you haven't done that, you don't have the results you want. That, right there, is so confidence-producing because here's the thing. If all you have to do is manage your mind to create different results and you learn how to manage your mind, there is literally nothing you can't do that you want to do.

I believe the desires that we have are the maps to our destiny. We don't just get a desire out of thin air. When we are tapped in, we know what we want to do and we're either going to honor that by having the self-confidence to go after it or we're not going to honor it because we're too full of doubt for ourselves. I want you to think about every person who's ever influenced you, every teacher that's ever really taught you something and really shown you something with their example. It is because they were not indulging in confusion and doubt; they were going after it. They were going after their desires because they generated enough self-confidence to create it.

Now, in order to express your self-confidence, you have to be willing to risk rejection. People will say to me, "But it's so hard when people reject me. It's so challenging." Let's talk about that for just a minute. When you don't get the approval you want, when someone rejects you, why is that so difficult? When someone tells you, "I don't like what you're doing. I don't like your work in the world," when somebody criticizes you, those haters are going to hate on you; they really are. If you put yourself out there in a big way, they're going to come after you in a big way. Why? Because they're not coming from their confidence. They're not coming from their increased confidence in themselves. They're coming from that place of competition and scarcity.

Here's the thing. When someone rejects you, the worst thing that can happen from that rejection is what you make it mean. When you know that, you have your own back. You can tell yourself, no matter if this person rejects me or not, I am going to make it mean something that fuels me, that empowers me, that increases my self-confidence, and I will never use it as a reason to decrease my self-confidence. See, the truth is nobody can take away my belief in myself. I'm going to believe in myself more than anyone else on the planet, for sure. I'm going to believe in myself because that is something that serves me in showing up, in delivering the most that I can to the world.

Are you going to let someone affect how much you believe in yourself by what they say to you, by what they don't say to you? You get to decide that. You get to risk that rejection. If you ask somebody to go on a date or you ask someone to help you or you ask someone if they want to be your client or you ask someone if they want your free opt-in, if they say no, you can make that mean something about you. You can use that against yourself or you can make it mean something that increases your self-confidence, that grows you into the next version of yourself.

Confidence is always going to come from that space of believing and trusting that you can do whatever it is you want to do, that even when you make a mistake, even when you fall short, that you will show up as the next version of yourself, no matter what, whether you're approved of or not. If you live your whole life seeking your self-confidence from other people's approval, you're always going to be seeking. You're never going to land in that place where you feel confident. It doesn't mean when someone says something to you that it won't sting because of what you make it mean right there, but you can choose to stay there or you can choose to move on.

Here's what I want to offer to you. Notice what is your opinion of yourself. What is your opinion of yourself? That's going to determine your confidence. Now, often when we are trying something new, when we're setting big goals, we need to use courage in order to generate confidence. Here's the problem with that, you guys. Courage, as I talked about in previous podcasts, doesn't always feel good. It doesn't feel like confidence. Courage feels like there's some fear mixed in. It's like confidence with fear mixed in is courage. That's what keeps us moving forward. If you're willing to feel your own courage, if you're willing to expand your quotient of being able to feel courage, on the other side of that will always be confidence.

Now, only because you'll give yourself permission when you achieve something to feel confident, please don't misunderstand and think that the reason you're feeling confident is because you achieved something. That is not the case. The reason you feel confident is because of what you've decided to think, what you've given yourself permission to think because of that accomplishment. I really want you to focus on your worthiness as a given, as a God-given right or as a universal-given right. You are worthy; it's indisputable. You are capable of going after anything you want. Work with your mind. Use your acceptance, your curiosity, and your commitment to generate thoughts of self-confidence. You don't need permission to be confident and you don't need evidence.

I tell the story a lot of when I was a brand new coach. I had no reason to be as confident as I was. I didn't have the experience. I didn't have the ability yet, but I was. I believed in myself so much. One of my three clients that I was coaching said to me, "Wow, you're going to be so successful at this." The reason why he said that was not because I was such a good coach; it was because my confidence was there. My confidence was generating my action, and, of course, when confidence is generating your action, the result is going to be positive.

For everybody who wants to be more confident in your job, in your life, in your relationship, in your goal-setting, in your goal accomplishment, the first question is, why am I not feeling confident now? What am I feeling instead and why am I choosing to think that way that's creating that feeling? Next, what do I want my opinion of myself to be? What do I want my opinion and my thoughts about my capabilities and my abilities to be so I can generate more self-confidence to create the results I want in my life?

Let me know how it goes, you guys. You can go to thelifecoachschool.com/58 and let me know what you're going to believe about yourself to generate confidence. If you can be confident no matter what happens to you in your life, you will blow your own mind with the results that you can create. I want to say one more thing about this. There is something powerful about being around people who are genuinely confident, people that genuinely believe in themselves. It is contagious, so be one of those people.

I'll talk to you guys next week. Take care; have a good one. Bye-bye.

Thank you for listening to the Life Coach School Podcast. It will be incredibly awesome if you would take a moment to write a quick review on iTunes. For any questions, comments, or coaching issues you would like to hear on the show, please visit us at www.thelifecoachschool.com.

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