Regaining confidence after motherhood

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Experiencing a dip in confidence after motherhood is normal. Learning to care for an infant is a brand-new experience for most women that leaves them questioning – will I be any good at this? In this episode I will breakdown why confidence wanes after motherhood and give 3 specific ways to increase it.

Topics in this episode:

• The truth about confidence

• What most people think confidence is, when it really is not

• Why confidence dips for many women after motherhood

• What confident naturally think that allows them to keep moving forward

• What to do about those pesky doubts that creep in

• Why you should view the glass as half full (it’s not about staying positive)

Show Notes:

• Join the Ambitious and Balanced Working Mom Collective – This is a group coaching program for working moms looking to create the building blocks to work-life balance. The program teaches you a 5 step process, includes weekly group coaching and a private community of working moms all determined to create a balanced life. Find out more information here: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/collective

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Transcript

Intro

Hey working moms, have you experienced a dip in confidence since becoming a mom? Or maybe you’ve always thought of yourself as having low confidence and want to work on it. In this podcast, I am addressing 3 things that will help you to build up your confidence. These are qualities that I see across the board from the working moms I work with that exude that confidence in both their career and mom-life. Confidence isn’t black and white. It’s not something you either have or don’t have. So, what I want to help you do is simply move the needle closer to the confident side so you end the second-guessing and make more decisive decisions. Ready?


Welcome to the ambitious and balanced working mom podcast, the place for women who want to balance their ambitious career goals with their life as a mom. If you’re looking to feel more confident, decisive, and productive at both work and home then this is the place for you. I’m your host Rebecca Olson, let’s get to it! 


A lot of ambitious women describe a loss of confidence after motherhood. It almost feels kind of magical how it happens. Before kids we felt clear on what we were doing. We felt like we made good decisions and didn't second guess ourselves very often and then kids come along and now we don't know what the heck to think or want or what the right answer is and we spend a lot of time second-guessing.


Confidence has a domino effect.

I think there is a domino effect to confidence. When you feel confident about something, oftentimes you can carry that confidence into other things or when you're feeling a lack of confidence about something you start to feel a lack of confidence about things that you never had before. So what I think happens with motherhood is ambitious women are not used to not knowing what to do. And no matter how much preparation you made for motherhood, how many books you read, how many groups you joined, how many classes you took, nothing really prepares you for the in the moment decisions you have to make as a mom. Being a mom has a lot of trial and error. 


The constant trial and error of motherhood leaves this little space for self-doubt.

Your kid is crying and you don't know why, so you give them milk but they don't want it, you rock them to try to help them go to sleep and they don't want that either, you swaddle them so they can't flail themselves around and they don't want that either, it is guess after guess after guess. It can feel like you're constantly failing because all it ever feels like you're doing is guessing. And what happens is the constant trial and error leaves this little space for self doubt. I hear a lot of first time moms question themselves and their ability. They feel like they should know what to do. They feel like they should be able to control their kids crying. They feel like they should be able to control their milk supply. And we don't get it right the 1st time and the 2nd and the 3rd and the 4th time this little bit of doubt creeps in that says maybe you're not cut out for this… and then when you head back to work that little bit of self-doubt remains and there's that little voice that says maybe you're not very good at this. Or maybe you don't know what you're doing. Or maybe you don't have as much to offer. And those thoughts’ cause your confidence to plummet.


Remember that confidence is a feeling. It comes from the way you think about yourself and what you have to offer and how good you are. The words that literally go through your head either make you feel really good about yourself and confident in who you are and what you do or they don't.


So I want to break down a bit of what I see confident working moms thinking and those that describe themselves as not confident, what they are both thinking.


But in order for me to really dive into this I have to make a distinction for you between what it means to be confident and what it means to be an expert. Because I find this to be the source of a lot of confusion.


Why our values are so important.

I was talking to one of my clients last week and I have all of my clients go through an exercise of defining their core values, because our values are the criteria by which we make decisions and live our life. And so when we define them and bring to consciousness that criteria it becomes much more clear why we do the things we do and why we don't do the things that we know we should do. It almost always comes down to what we value and what's most important to us so it's a very core part of the work I do as a coach and in this case my client had the value of confidence. She told me that her family and her friends would always describe her as being confident but she always felt like she lacks it but it is something she always admired/valued. 


So I started asking her questions about confidence and what she thought it meant, and I had her envision someone that she saw as confident. And to start describing them to me. And one of the first things she said is: this person always seemed to move forward. No matter if they had the answer or not, they somehow were able to make a decision and keep the ball moving forward and to keep you going. 


So confidence is moving forward despite not knowing. 


I asked her if this person ever feared getting it wrong. She said yes she was sure they did because being confident doesn't mean that you have the absence of fear, it just means that you move forward despite that.


I found this extremely profound and I really want you to take that in for a moment. Confidence is not the absence of fear or we can put some other words in there like it's not the absence of hesitation or the absence of doubt or the absence of questions… confidence is moving forward despite those things.


Confident people don't allow their fears to be obstacles to moving forward. 

And then here's the thing she realized… Most confident people don't talk about their fears and hesitations and doubts and questions because They don't see them as a big deal. They don't allow their fears to be obstacles to moving forward. So on the outside all we see is someone that is constantly making decisions and moving forward and doing new things and we're not privy to what is going on inside of them. This is why my client’s family and friends saw her as confident because she didn't tend to express when she was afraid or fearful or hesitant. All they saw was someone that just kept moving forward.


Do you know what someone is that moves forward without any fear, hesitations, questions or doubt? An expert. An expert is someone who has comprehensive knowledge or skills in a particular area. They are someone that feels certain about the answer or a decision. An expert doesn't experience a lot of fear and hesitation because they feel sure about the answer.



An expert and someone with confidence are not the same thing. 

So here's what's really important that you see, an expert and someone with confidence are not the same thing. They are both people that move forward and make decisions and put themselves out there but an expert does so trusting their knowledge and a confident person does so by simply trusting themselves.


Knowing that distinction is important. When we are talking about becoming a confident person, we are not talking about gaining more knowledge and honing our skill set so we lessen doubt and questions, and hesitation. We are talking about building up a skill set that is about trusting yourself so when you don't have to have all of the information, you can continue to move forward and not second guess and not feel immobilized when all those doubts and hesitations creep in.


There are 3 profound beliefs or practices I have found confident people either naturally believe or do or have worked hard at believing that helps them to feel confident and make confident decisions. If you are looking to grow in confidence then these three are a good place to start.  


The first one is confident people have the thought and have internalized this belief of - I can figure it out.


Confident people believe the answer is within them.

It’s not that I can do all the research or have all the data or even that I will get it right. It’s “I can figure it out”. Confident people believe the answers are within them. That they have enough knowledge (not all the knowledge) but enough knowledge and enough natural smarts to move forward. 


I don’t subscribe to the fake it to you make it mentality, though I would say most confident people could do that, it’s just that only knowing 70% is enough. They are not faking the rest of it, they're trusting themselves and their instincts to figure it out or make a best guess, on the remaining 30%.


Look, you haven’t gotten where you are in life, with a career and a family… by accident. You weren’t just in the right place at the right time and someone believed in you and somehow you magically have had the success you have had. You are not faking it. You are not an imposter. You have extensive experience, good instincts, sound judgement, passion, a way of communicating, a willingness to put yourself out there, a way of putting yourself in the right places…you have everything you need RIGHT NOW. You are good enough RIGHT NOW. You are likely not an expert but you can likely figure out anything you need to figure out in life and work…you just need to believe you can. 


I was speaking to a client recently and we are celebrating because the last two weeks have been some of the busiest, hardest, most stressful two weeks in her job. And we were celebrating the fact that she did not work on the weekends or at night. She had held her boundaries even through the most stressful two weeks of work. This is so good, this is what being ambitious and balanced is all about. Because here's what she did instead of working, she could be a poster child for this thought; ‘I can figure it out’. What she did is she trusted herself and her ability to serve her clients without being 100% prepared. She trusted that her clients believed in her knowledge and instincts, she trusted that her coworkers and team believed she was capable and made good decisions, she trusted that even if she stumbled through a presentation or an interaction with someone, that it had no bearing on whether she was good at her job or not. So she decreased feeling prepared and increased her trust and belief in self. 


Confident people don’t judge their doubts.


If you're looking to increase your confidence, then this is one of the most profound things you can do. Don't judge your doubts. Confident people doubt. They have hesitations. They wonder if what they're doing is really the right thing. They just don't make those doubts and hesitations and questions mean anything. They don't ascribe any meaning to their doubts. An expert feels a lot of certainty, they don't doubt themselves and their opinions a whole lot because of their extensive knowledge and skill. But a confident person is not 100% they don't have all of the knowledge and skill to make them an expert - so they sometimes won't make the best decisions. That is just factual. 


But rather than beat themselves up for not knowing, for making their doubts mean they are not confident or not as good as someone else or questioning themselves and feeling like an imposter, they simply acknowledge the reality that they may fail or they may get it wrong or they may even look like a fool…and that doesn’t mean they aren’t good enough or a bad employee or a bad mom. They don’t judge themselves. 


Action: Focus on what you know, not on what you don’t


The last quality I think drives a confident person is that they focus on what they know instead of what they don't. They see the glass as half full and not half empty. Now that's not just that they have a positive outlook, though they might be fairly optimistic, it's when they're tackling something they assume that they're not going to know everything because they're not an expert and rather than dwell on what they don't know, they focus on what they do know. 


Let me try to give you an example, I have a client that gives a lot of presentations and has a lot of client meetings as a part of their job. An unbalanced approach to preparation would be to immediately do as much research as possible in order to build up her expertise on the subject and to feel very prepared. A confident approach, which consequently is a balanced approach, would be to start with answering the question: what do I know about this subject already? Or what do I know I need to accomplish in this meeting? Or what do I know about this client already? Or what do I know about the goal of this presentation and the best way to get there? A confident person starts with what they already know, the information that is already in their brain and available to them. They do this because it saves on unnecessary time researching and it re-enforces their value, leadership and expertise. Of course they may need to do a little research but that comes after they have already mined their brain for what they already know. 


The challenges of being a first-time mom is another great example. When your baby is crying, rather than focusing on what is wrong and that you don’t know how to get them to stop…ask yourself, what are the possible reasons? What can I try to help her calm down? What has worked in the past? Focusing on what you know first then onto solving for what you don’t know. 


Conclusion

Ok so to wrap this up, one last thing I want to offer you is that confidence is not black and white. It's not as if you either have it or you don't. Confidence, just like all characteristics or strengths, is a spectrum. You likely are already somewhere in the middle of the confidence spectrum. You find yourself able to move forward without all the knowledge in some areas and in some ways but not others. So if you want to grow in confidence and move higher up on the spectrum, these three qualities/beliefs of a confident person will get you going. 


Believe you can figure it out. 

Don’t judge your doubts.

Focus first on what you know. 


Ok, that’s it for today. Keep going working moms.

Rebecca Olson