How to Be More Confident

Can you tell the difference between genuine confidence and the illusion of it? In this episode, we promise to unravel the intricacies of true, lasting confidence and how to cultivate it from within. We start by examining how society and social media mislead us into valuing superficial symbols of self-worth, like luxury items, which only provide a temporary boost. Through personal stories and relatable experiences, we highlight the importance of internal confidence, built through perseverance, personal achievements, and self-improvement. You'll understand how factors like critical parents and social rejection can undermine your confidence and, conversely, how supportive environments can help rebuild it.

Get ready to transform your understanding of failure and growth. We share practical methods for building confidence through self-reflection, such as journaling your goals and documenting negative remarks to prevent them from becoming self-doubt. Learn how to recognize your unique confidence cues and live in alignment with your values, taking control of your life's direction. By adopting a growth mindset, you can continuously improve and overcome self-limiting beliefs. We'll redefine failure as a stepping stone to resilience and character development, illustrating how life's challenges can ultimately lead to greater strength and integrity. Join us for this enlightening conversation and shift your perspective on confidence forever.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Cultivating Internal Confidence for Success
• 10:01 Building Confidence Through Self-Reflection
• 19:19 Embracing Failure to Grow Stronger

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Today I am so excited to talk to you about how you can increase your confidence. People gain confidence through different ways. Some individuals gain confidence through internal measures and other people gain confidence through external means. Now, today's society, social media is often presenting us with images. Social media is often presenting us with images. It's presenting us with images where people have a certain thing that's external to them. For example, a Rolex Media may present an image where a man has a Rolex on and he may be sitting in a really powerful power suit and he may be surrounded by lots of women. Now someone looking at that image may feel that if they had that watch, they would attract women, that they would look powerful, and so when they get that watch now, they're feeling good about themselves because they lived up to that image.

Speaker 1: 1:06

But the fact of the matter is that confidence is like a balloon it will deflate when the smallest critique or the smallest remark is made to that person. So external confidence it doesn't live very long. External confidence is like a balloon filled with air to be popped by one small critique. Or, you know, social comparison is a huge thing as well in today's society, where we look at everyone's highlight reel on Instagram or on Facebook or on any other social media medium, and then we compare ourselves to that person and we say, oh my gosh, I wish I could be like her and have those things. And we get those things and we, we feel confident because, you know, now we, like you know, compared ourself and we got that thing and now we're feeling good about ourselves.

Speaker 1: 2:08

But, like I said, external confidence lives very short term compared to internal confidence. Internal confidence, I feel, can, you know, bear the brunt of a negative critique or a negative remark. You know, bear the brunt of a negative critique or a negative remark. Inward confidence is the boost you feel when you step into a boxing ring for the first time and master a few boxing techniques, so you can replicate those techniques once again the next day and the next month. Now that skill lives within you and so you have developed inward confidence. Inward confidence comes from within and it's something you can replicate on the outside, whereas external confidence is when you're trying to take a thing such as a Rolex watch or a Louis Vuitton purse and you're trying to gain confidence through those means, trying to be confident in your image. But the truth of the fact is that a lot of people can have these things and yet still have very low confidence within. So it's not a good measure of our self-confidence when we have these things or when we see these images. They are not a good measure of that person's confidence that that image is showing or depicting to us. Now, when I think of when we are younger, our confidence is so high. We feel confident taking risks, we feel confident singing, we feel confident dancing without care.

Speaker 1: 3:47

However, life is unpredictable and we can go through so many different situations in which our confidence can be impacted. For example, our confidence can be impacted by overly critical parents, being rejected by a social group, going through bullying, transitioning into what it means to be an adult and media's representation of ideal beauty or the ideal strength or an ideal man or an ideal woman or an ideal human ideal, whatever. So media always gives us a representation of ideal beauty, and we feel that if we strive to be as beautiful as that individual, we will get high level of self-confidence. But the fact of the matter is that it doesn't work that way either. That is external to us, and so a good example is Marilyn Monroe. Now she became the poster girl for beauty, yet at the same time, she suffered from very low self-esteem based on the experiences she had of neglect when she was younger. So media's representation is not always giving us the true reality. It's giving us an illusion, an illusion of ideal beauty, an illusion of confidence, illusion of power. So we cannot always, we should not, trust what the media is presenting to us. And so when we're younger, we are feeling confident, we're doing all these things, and then we are faced with images from media and a social comparison and all these things that we get confused. We get confused in regards to our own value, and when we get confused in regards to our own value, our confidence drops. Now, other ways that our confidence can drop is being rejected by our peers, bullying.

Speaker 1: 5:53

I went through bullying when I was younger, when I was in one particular school. I didn't speak about my opinion as much. I didn't want to show my skills, I didn't want to show my strengths, I just kind of retreated inwards and so I started to silence my voice and that's what I did. So it's interesting, as our confidence can be impacted by our environment or the toxic people that we're surrounded by, our environment or the toxic people that we're surrounded by. But I noticed that when I went to a different school after that school where I experienced bullying, I was surrounded by more positive people, more supportive people, people that appreciated me for who I was, and I was more likely to open up about things that mattered to me. I started raising my voice, I started raising my opinions, I started public speaking more, I started taking more risks and befriending more people, and so after I left that environment, I was placed in a more accepting environment. That confidence came back. In a more accepting environment. That confidence came back.

Speaker 1: 7:08

And I also faced a similar situation when a few years ago, where I felt I wasn't that accepted in a social circle and it was a bad feeling and I didn't feel good about that. And I had my own opinions, but they just kind of stayed in my head rather than speaking about them out loud. Because I thought, hey, if I spoke about my opinions out loud I might get further rejected by this group who's already non-decepting me. And so once again, I started silencing myself, I stopped raising my voice as much, and so that was interesting as well. But when I went into different social groups where I was more accepted, I would be more vocal. And then that group that rejected me wondered like why is she more vocal with them and not with us? Because I'm not feeling accepted by you guys. So that was interesting. I feel the same thing can also happen in a workplace.

Speaker 1: 8:14

When you go into a toxic workplace where you feel you're not being accepted, you might start being silent about your amazing ideas you may have for the organization, your amazing ideas you may have for the organization, and then you might also stop taking risks that could benefit the organization. The opposite can also happen. When you go into a supportive workplace. You might start being more vocal about the ideas you have. You might even be more open to developing new things in the organization because you might allow yourself to be more expressive in the organization.

Speaker 1: 8:52

As I said before, as children we're so filled with strong confidence. We're outspoken, super expressive. However, life is unpredictable and we might face unpredictable events. When our confidence decreases, we will have trouble taking criticism from other individuals, we might stop trusting ourselves and our own opinions and our own ideas, and we may have difficulty making decisions as a result. So if you're in a relationship and you're finding it hard to make decisions for yourself, it might be that your confidence is low, and then it might be that you need to take a look around, look at your environment, look at how you're speaking to yourself, evaluate your own self-critic and go from there. One thing we can do to ensure our self-confidence is not getting muddied by our environment if we are in the situation where we cannot remove ourselves from the environment is to record keep where the lack of confidence is coming from.

Speaker 1: 10:01

So when I was younger, I did this interesting thing where I started a journal. I wrote down all the goals that I wanted to reach and all the smaller goals, smaller goals and bigger dreams, etc. And the funniest thing I did was I also wrote down the negative remarks people specific people made about my skills and my abilities, and I wrote down their names and wrote down what they said and I wrote down that I was gonna excel in those areas. And if you're listening to this podcast and if you ever said something negative about my skill or ability, then you're probably in there as well. It's an interesting thing I did, but it served me well.

Speaker 1: 10:54

So this is something that you can also do. You can write the name of the individual in one column. Make another column write what they're the negative thing that they're saying about your skills or your abilities and then make a third column where you argue against what they're saying and write down what you're actually going to do and how you're going to do amazing at whatever they're saying you're not good at. So this ensures that when people say critical remarks about your abilities, you are able to pinpoint where the remarks are coming from, so they don't get lost with that voice inside your head. Because what we don't want happening is you not pinpointing what other people are saying about your abilities and it getting what their remarks are, getting lost with that voice in your head. So we don't want it to become the voice in your head where you cannot decipher that these remarks are being made by other people compared to being made by you.

Speaker 1: 11:59

Another thing you can do is identify how you feel and what you do when you're feeling extremely confident and what you do when you're not feeling confident. For myself, I speak up more when I'm feeling confident. When I'm not feeling confident, I start shutting down, I start retreating into myself. So what self-confidence looks like for me might look completely different for you. So it's really important to jot down how you're feeling when you're feeling really confident and how you're feeling when you're not feeling confident. When I look for confidence in other people, I realize I see it.

Speaker 1: 12:34

When I watch Kevin Gates, I see that his voice is not shaking. He's not slumping his head over when he talks. He's making eye contact with the audience. He's firm in his opinion, he is unshakable with his voice. He is wearing things that are authentic to him and he that's because he's probably placed himself in an environment that is safe and accepting so he can speak and be in alignment with his own self and with his own values. He's not comparing his life to the life of other individuals Social comparison that is a big factor. So individuals who are confident are in alignment with their own values and are okay with their authentic selves. So they can sit up and look you in the eye with an unshakable and unapologetic voice. They express who they are, not who you want them to be. They are not afraid to be themselves.

Speaker 1: 13:34

When we have confidence, we try new things, we take risks, we perform better in tasks. We have confidence. We try new things, we take risks. We perform better in tasks we have. Confidence is a better predictor of performance than competences. So, despite your lack of experience, if you have confidence, you might perform better than the person who does have the experience. With confidence, we also start making the life that you want to have. Now, going back to kevin gates, when he talks we can see that his confidence is high and this is probably because he is living in alignment with his own values and with his own beliefs, compared to with what society's values are, with what society's beliefs are.

Speaker 1: 14:23

Now, society often comes at us with how we should be like, how we should look like, how we should talk like, how we should act like, how our life should look like and the timeline it gets so specific. Society even starts telling us how the timeline of our life should look like, and that's based on what traditions, societies, um advertisements from 100 years ago, what men from 100 years ago used to say. You know, people should look like, people should be like, people should act like. You don't have to follow anyone's timeline. You don't have to follow anyone's belief in how your life should look like, as long as you're not hurting anyone. And if you try to keep following other people's perspectives and beliefs on your life, then you're basically handling, handling, handling. Handing over the steering wheel of your vehicle to the other person. So when the other person drives it to a location where you're not satisfied, you can only blame yourself, because you're the one handing over the steering wheel of your life to them.

Speaker 1: 15:38

So it's really important not to focus on the shoulds of society and, in order to not focus on what society says you should have and should be like, it's important to be able to see media and social comparison for the illusion that they are, because it's all an illusion. A person can look beautiful but have low self-esteem on the inside. A person can have a relaxed watch but have low self-esteem on the inside and be deflated in a second by a negative comment. So recognize the illusion for the things, for the illusion that they are. Another thing you can do is adopt a growth mindset.

Speaker 1: 16:33

Don't think of yourself as just an individual with permanent qualities and permanent attributes and permanent abilities. There's always room for growing. In fact, we're all individuals who are growing and changing. Just like the weather changes, the trees change, so do we change, you know. So stop saying I'm not good at public speaking. Start saying I'm working on improving the eye contact I'm making when I'm making a speech. See how different the sentences are. See how much room you're giving for your growth when you say I'm working on improving this area, rather than saying I'm not good at this. It's such a difference. You're looking at yourself as an individual that is involved in a process, rather than looking at yourself as a person that is this permanent individual with permanent abilities.

Speaker 1: 17:35

Another thing you can do is start focusing on what is in your control. If you're in an environment where you cannot change certain situations and certain things, you can control how you are acting. You can control your own character. You can control how you respond, your own character. You can control how you respond. For example, if you're doing a presentation, you can't control what people think of your presentation, but you can control your character, how you respond, the amount of time you place in your project.

Speaker 1: 18:12

My favorite example is the example I'm going to end this podcast episode with. It's the example of the prisoner. Now this is really powerful. The prisoner can go to the boxing arena can't go to the boxing arena to perfect his boxing technique, but the prisoner chooses to do push-ups in the prison cell. The prisoner can't leave the prison and travel the world, but the prisoner chooses to expand his mind by going to the prison library and reading the books there, by reading about the different characters in these books, by reading about the different places in these books. So we need to start acting like the prisoner and stop focusing on what we can't control. The prisoner can't leave the prison gates and travel the world. The prisoner can't leave the prison gates and travel the world. The prisoner can't leave the prison gates and go into the boxing ring, but he focuses on what he can do. And similarly, we need to start focusing on what we can do and start focusing on what we cannot control.

Speaker 1: 19:15

If failure comes, let's let it come.

Speaker 1: 19:19

You know, know. But we can choose to learn from it. We can focus on that, focus on what we are learning from it, focusing on what we can control. We shouldn't even look at failure as a bad thing, because failure gives our life a storyline, a story that we can share with other individuals when they're feeling down, because life events are not permanent. Different things happen in life. For example, I went through bullying, so I can tell you about how bullying impacted my life and how it impacted my confidence and how I came back from it. So failure doesn't need to be judged as this chronically bad thing. There's so much we can develop from failure. We can develop our character from our failure. We can. Although we have failed in something, we have responded in a way where we maintained our integrity. You know you being rejected by a workplace, but maintaining your integrity gives a whole new meaning to the situation at hand. It's not a failure. So I hope you enjoyed this episode and I hope you stay tuned for my next episode. All right, bye.