CULTIVATING CONFIDENCE
This reflection is about the methods and principles I have learned and applied over the years to cultivate confidence and belief in my own capabilities and qualities.
CONSISTENCY LEADS TO CONFIDENCE
Confidence…what does that even mean?
It is defined as “a feeling of self-assurance arising from one's appreciation of one's own abilities or qualities”
…but how do we build an appreciation of our own abilities or qualities?
I heard someone talking about the idea that life would be much easier if we could just pop to the store and grab a box on confidence on aisle 5, but alas, confidence has to be built through actions day in and day out.
I will give a disclaimer and say that in my experience, our VALUE and our CONFIDENCE are two different things, but oftentimes we lump them into one category which can make it difficult to increase either of them.
Quickly, to differentiate, our value as human beings is intrinsic. We were purposefully designed by a Creator who loves us which means that simply because we exist as a person, we have immense value.
However, the value we bring to the world around us, our families, our workplaces, the churches/organizations we are involved with, the marketplace in general, comes from making ourselves more valuable via our habits and choices.
For example, if I choose to watch news or mindless tv every night after work I’m not necessarily making myself more valuable. However, if I choose to read a book for a half hour about leadership instead, this will allow me to walk into the work the next day with more value to bring to the people I’m interacting with.
Our confidence on the other hand, is something that we have to decide to grow.
The visual of seedlings is how I imagined my confidence going from completely under the surface to being a big ‘ol oak tree. Excuse the corniness, but it’s a great visual!
Before we go deeper…
I don’t know about you, but my first thought when I’m reading something that someone has written, is, well, what results do you have in your life to be writing about this?
So, to share a bit of my journey with developing my confidence:
Into my early-mid 20s I had been very consistent with habits that allowed me to climb the ladder to a successful musical theatre career. I took class, I networked, I was up at the crack of dawn going to auditions, etc.
That consistency built me a lot of confidence in that career pillar of my life, but as I got into my late 20s I realized that I had been neglecting my other pillars for years.
I was almost 29 when I started to dive into getting my mind and heart, my finances, and my relationships healthier than they had ever been, which all started with expanding my confidence in myself.
Unless you knew me then and know me now, you have no context for the changes I’ve experienced over the last 6 years, but literally, and I truly mean LITERALLY, everything in my life is different for the better and every change is related to small, consistent actions that have developed and compounded over time.
Full disclosure, every change is related to finding community in which to get rooted, that made me WANT to commit to the aforementioned small, consistent actions. I’m not special. As my friend Bryce often says, I’m an average gal, who earned an above average association in my life and that has made all the difference.
All that to say, the changes across every pillar in my life are because I built my confidence via following through.
This increased my self-image to a place that has allowed me to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I’m a person of integrity. My words and my actions align. And although I almost never get the results I want in the timeline I’d prefer, (who does?!) I am 100% certain that I will continue to show up, grow, and change until I am able to have the impact on the world around me that I know God designed me for.
The journey of becoming someone who believes in their abilities isn’t usually easy or fast, but it certainly is worth it.
Back to the question…how do we build an appreciation of our own abilities or qualities?
My favorite way I’ve ever heard the building of confidence explained is that our confidence expands when we keep the promises we make to ourselves.
What does this mean? In my mind, it’s when our words, particularly the ones we say to ourselves, and our actions align.
If we tell ourselves we’re going to exercise in the morning, or spend more time with our kids, or start a new habit related to personal growth, or put an hour into our side business after we get off work and we follow through, our confidence grows.
Then the next day comes and when we tell ourselves we’re going to do that thing again, our subconscious says back to us, “Yes you will!”
And this upward spiral continues each day that we follow through until our subconscious has no doubt that we are going to do what we said we would.
Let’s look at the way this works in the opposite, because there is no neutral when it comes to our confidence. We are either building it or breaking it.
If we tell ourselves we’re going to spend time with God daily, or prioritize time each day to intentionally connect with our spouse, or make coffee at home and pack lunch so we can save more money and we don’t follow through, our confidence actually goes backwards.
Then the next day comes and when we tell ourselves that today we’re going to do that thing that we didn’t follow through with yesterday, our subconscious says back to us, “I doubt it.”
And this downward spiral continues each time we break the promises we made to ourselves until our subconscious has no doubt that we are NOT going to do what we said we would.
So how do we choose commitments that we can follow through on to grow our confidence?
We should be selecting a new habit or discipline that is realistic for us in our current season of life instead of something impressive or intense.
Take working out for instance.
If you’re starting from the point of not having any kind of exercise habit, choose something small to ease into…say 20 minutes 3x/week, or maybe even less if that’s not realistic for you VS saying that you’re going to workout for an hour a day 6x/week. You can work UP to the hour a day 6x/week if you want to!
Because of our instant gratification society, we often get the idea in our heads that if we go from 0 to 1000 we are going to have results in a week, and these days everyone wants fast results even though NOTHING worthwhile comes fast and easy.
But what does this 0 to 1000 mentality lead to? Doing it for a couple days or a week, not seeing results, getting discouraged, quitting, and then losing any foundation you started to lay with your belief in yourself…aka your confidence.
When you picked that super intense thing to commit to you felt motivated, but then Wednesday comes and that motivation isn’t there
And most days, that motivation (and the time) won’t be there. That’s life.
It’s more important that you choose something small you’ll be able to maintain, because your follow through is what will allow you to start to consistently see yourself as someone who shows up, which in turn grows your all around confidence.
This is a reminder that Micah and I have in our living room. I love ending these reflections with action items…consuming information is a waste of our time if we do nothing with it.
What are our action steps:
Evaluate where we are at with our confidence. Thus far in life have we built a pattern of following through or a pattern of quitting?
Choose an area of life in which we want to make progress.
Choose a habit that is REALISTIC. Something we can follow through with despite life’s circumstances.
Commit no matter what our motivation tells us.
If we fall off our commitment, jump back on the next day! Don’t let multiple days of no follow through pass by because then it becomes even harder to get going again.
Notice how our confidence increases as our subconscious start to tell us “Yes you will!”, each morning when we re-commit to our new habit.
As always, please reach out to me with questions, wins, losses, anything at all. I love connecting with you all, and I am in your corner!
WE THINK YOU’LL ENJOY. . .
