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In today’s episode I am breaking down the #1 strategy to growing confident: increasing your self-belief. At a foundational level, confidence is simply believing in yourself and in this podcast, I want to show you two things you can do to build up that confidence: take control of negative thinking & learn to think intentionally good thoughts about yourself. Get your pen handy, because I give you lots of good questions to help you develop your confidence muscle.
Topics in this episode:
Confidence is like building muscle, it takes consistency
What it takes to control our confidence
The importance of self-belief when growing confidence
The necessary tool to developing confident
How to identify the subtle negative thoughts that steal away your confidence
Intentionally thinking positively and what questions to ask yourself
How you can create a foundation of confidence that never leaves you
Show Notes:
Regaining Confidence After Motherhood – Episode 20
Want to speak to me directly about how to regain your confidence as a working mom? Then apply for a free breakthrough call by clicking here: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book
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Transcript
Intro
In today’s episode, I am breaking down the #1 strategy to growing your confidence: increasing your self-belief. At a foundational level, confidence is simply believing in yourself, and in this podcast, I want to show you two things you can do to build up that confidence: take control over negative thinking & learn to think intentionally good thoughts about you. I give you lots of good questions to help you develop a solid foundation of confidence and start building that confidence muscle. You ready? Let’s get to it.
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!
Hey working moms, how are you doing today? My daughter is turning 7 tomorrow as I record this podcast and all of the feels are there as a mom. Oftentimes around my kids’ birthday, I spend time thinking about their growth and how far they've come over the last year, sometimes looking back at photos. I did a five-year journal and started it when she was nine months old so I can go back and look at what I wrote in that. And it's just a very sweet time of reflection on my kids and their development.
For my daughter at the age of 7, she is extremely curious. It’s fun to watch her brain churn. She doesn’t just want to understand why things work the way they do, she wants to understand the reasoning behind things. For example, I recently purchased a van from a friend. She wanted to know why we would spend money on a car when our other car still operated just fine. I explained that our family needed a bit more room particularly for road trips and vacations and she said, “yeah, but why spend money on a car when you can spend $0 money and just keep the one we have?” - these are the kinds of conversations we have every day. Why do we do what we do? Why do we make the decisions we make? Why does she get one thing and her brother the other? Why why why...
And as exhausting as her questions sometimes are, at the age of 7, I am watching this amazing child turn into a confident young lady. Someone who knows what she wants and why she wants it. I am seeing her opinions about herself and others develop right before my eyes.
What it means to grow confident.
This has provided a little bit of reflection for me about what it means to grow confident. Because confidence is something that many working moms struggle with, particularly right after they start having kids. There's almost this sense we lose our confidence in the transition into motherhood.
And most people think of confidence as being very black and white. As if it is something that you can lose. But I like to think of confidence as a muscle. we all have it, every single one of us has access to confidence. It is part of being human. We are born with it and it doesn’t leave us. It’s not something that is found or discovered. It’s not magical or mystical. It is a muscle to be developed and toned. Just like any other muscle in our body.
Confidence as a muscle.
I think this is the most helpful way to think about it because it gives us a lot of control over the feeling. Just like we have control over how strong our bicep is for example, by how much we lift weights and how often. We know that if we lift weights with our arms every single day our biceps are going to get stronger and larger. And that is also true with confidence. The more we practice confidence, the more we use that muscle, the stronger and more developed it will become.
So the most natural next question to ask is how do you develop this muscle of confidence? Because we all know how to do it with our arms, you lift weights, you do push-ups, you do pull-ups, you just simply isolate and utilize the muscle group and over time your arms will get stronger.
Well in reality confidence isn't much different. You just need to know how to exercise it. How do you use it? How to intentionally use it. And right now, I want to talk about the best exercise you can do to develop your confidence muscle the fastest.
What does being confident mean?
But before I do, I want to make sure we are on the same page about what we mean by confidence. Now I did a whole episode on regaining your confidence after motherhood, it was episode 20 and I will link that in the show notes, but for the sake of this podcast, very briefly I want to get on the same page because a lot of people mistake confidence with expertise and they are not the same thing. An expert is someone that has extensive skill or knowledge in a particular area and uses that extensive knowledge in order to make decisions.
A confident person doesn't necessarily have extensive knowledge or skills in one area and instead simply trusts themselves to make decisions.
Confident people experience fear and doubt, they just don’t let them get in the way of moving forward. They make decisions to the best of their ability, despite not being an expert.
Self-trust is what separates someone that is confident from someone that is not. The dictionary says confidence is firm trust, and I would agree, I would just expand upon that by saying it's a firm trust in yourself.
That is the muscle we are trying to develop when we talk about increasing confidence, you are developing a firm trust in yourself.
Self-trust and believing in ourselves.
So what does it mean to trust yourself? Trust, simply put, is belief. So self-trust is belief in yourself.
This is the number one strategy for growing your confidence as a working mom, it is building up your belief in self at a foundational level.
Remember, we're talking about this as if it is a muscle, so that belief in self it's something that develops and gets stronger over time. It is something that you have to practice over and over and over again.
Consistently building belief in self.
Now of course there are countless ways that you can do this, but the most important thing to remember is it's about consistency. Just like building muscle is about working out and lifting weights consistently, so is building up your confidence or your belief in self. And remember, just like you lose muscle when you stop working out and you stop lifting weights the same thing happens with your level of confidence. I like to think of the journey of confidence as being lifelong. I'm always going to have to put some level of effort into believing in myself.
And I actually think that's a really helpful perspective, to believe that you attain confidence and then it is with you forever is just not the human experience, we go in and out of experiencing a deep level of confidence and belief in self based on how focused we are in thinking about it.
OK. So what do you need to actually think about? What’s the tool to develop your belief in self? It's pretty simple when we're talking about developing a bicep, you simply lift 5lbs and then eventually 10lbs and then eventually 20lbs, and you know that if you lift that amount of weight over and over again the bicep muscle will grow. But what about the self-belief muscle? Self-belief is not as tangible, which is why so many people find it very elusive and they describe their level of confidence as coming and going.
The words you use to describe yourself build your self-belief.
But I actually think developing your belief in self is quite simple, it is simply the words you use to describe yourself. That's it. That is the tool for building your confidence muscle…choose to think positive things about yourself.
Now, this can get tricky, because most of our brains don't overtly say mean things to us, some do and some are very aware of how mean their brain is to them but for most of us it is quite subtle and we don't even realize how it is eating away at our confidence muscle.
For example…
When you choose to think things like, “They want to be with me, not at daycare.” Or you're standing in front of your team and you think “someone else could probably lead this meeting better than me.” Or your kid is throwing a tantrum and you think “I don't know how to handle this” or “they shouldn't be crying at all I must have done something wrong”.
Each of these thoughts says something about YOU. What do you think, is this person confident? They're thinking: They want to be with me, not at daycare. Someone else could probably do this better, I don't know how to handle this and I must have done something wrong.
Notice how this person’s brain is not overtly mean. It’s not saying things like: you're terrible, you're stupid, you're a failure. Instead of saying “you're not a great leader”, your brain offers to you “someone else could probably do this better”. Or, instead of “you’re a terrible mom”, your brain offers, “they shouldn’t be crying”. They both feel pretty similar when you say them to yourself, though. They feel heavy and discouraging and so they have the same effect on your confidence.
Tune in to what your brain is saying to you.
And that's why it's so important to tune into how your brain is talking to you because oftentimes the words and thoughts that tear down our confidence we don’t even realize we are saying.
And if growing confidence is about building up that self-belief – we can’t be tearing ourselves down in one breath and then trying to build ourselves up in the next. That would be like binge eating a container of Oreos and then trying to work out to offset the calories. It doesn’t really work like that.
The most effective thing to do is to gain control over your thoughts and at the same time start consistently offering your brain helpful and positive thoughts about yourself.
So, awareness of your default thoughts is key in order to start changing them.
A tool for gaining self-awareness.
A simple thought download is a helpful tool to start gaining some awareness. Now a thought download is simply a download of all of your thoughts as if your brain is a computer. You start writing down all the things we're thinking about yourself, your ability or a task. I did this just before I sat down to write this podcast. It's Monday and I just started asking myself ‘how am I thinking about my week? How am I thinking about the various appointments I have this week and my ability to show up for them? How am I thinking about writing this podcast right now? What are my thoughts about me and my ability to teach on this subject?’ A thought download just helps you to gain awareness over your default thoughts and it gives you a clue into if your thinking thoughts will build your confidence muscle or tear it down.
After looking at all of your default thinking you can then start to write out some intentional thoughts about yourself. You can learn how to tailor questions to your particular circumstance or situation. But, generally speaking, some of my favorite questions are how do I know I'm already good at this? Why am I the right person to be doing this right now? What's going well? The point isn't to trick your brain into believing something that isn't true about you or your abilities, it's just simply taking the focus off of the things that aren't going well or the things that you're not as good at and to instead focus your brain on the good-positive things about you.
I tell my clients all the time there are a 100 different things that you can think about yourself ALL OF THEM ARE TRUE. Some of those thoughts are helpful to you and make you feel good and some of them aren’t helpful and make you feel nervous or fearful or like a failure.
So the number one strategy to growing your confidence is to intentionally focus your brain on the good stuff about you and your life and taking the focus off of growth areas or challenging parts.
Now there is something that makes this work easier for you, and that is working on establishing some base-level core beliefs about yourself. With my clients, I help them determine their values, identity, and purpose as a way of creating these core beliefs. What we are doing is giving their brain some go-to language to describe themself in a positive way. That way they aren’t re-creating the wheel every day as they think about themselves.
They can simply go back to their values and say, yes, I value learning. I’m really good at taking in information and figuring out what is relevant and then using that to inform decisions. Or, I know one of my core identities is being a helper. I desire to help people when they are overwhelmed and I step in to assist in whatever way I can. Or, I know my purpose is to create structure in chaotic situations. I help gather all the relevant pieces of information necessary, find common ground amongst it all and then create a system to help filter the information or communicate it out. Yes, I know how to do that.
Knowing yourself and your values at the core.
When you have base-level beliefs like this to fall back on it helps you through those tough days when you flopped during that presentation you gave or you had to have a difficult conversation with someone on your team or you have to ask for an extension on a deadline. In these everyday moments that feel kinda crappy, you still know at a very core level what you value, who you are and why you’re here.
So, confidence is self-trust. Self-trust is simply believing in yourself at a foundational level. Everyone has something to offer this world each and every day. Everyone has something to give and has value to give to their families, marriages and workplaces.
In order to grow your confidence muscle, you need to focus your brain on what you have to offer. What you do well. What makes you special and unique.
If you do that every day, even just for 5 minutes, that muscle will slowly grow and get stronger and stronger.
Conclusion
If you need help, reach out to me and let’s schedule a free chat. Just like a personal trainer will help you get your body into shape, in coaching, I help you train your brain to focus on the positive, to be kind to yourself and to overcome all the challenging fears that come up in the process. I will put a link in the show notes if you’d like to schedule a free time to chat.
Ok working moms, let’s get to it.
