What is Confidence?

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So, what is confidence? It is often described as the external way we carry ourselves and lots of people talk about having that poise and confident air about them.  Well I believe confidence is an external way of showing we feel safe and secure inside of ourselves in that moment. That’s why we can feel confident in some areas of our lives and completely insecure in others. The pleasure with this is, that confidence is a learned and developed habit. We can take that learning we have already and expand our confidence, or we can start from scratch and start building confidence.

Confidence is not only shown outside in our poise, eye contact, tone of voice and appearance I feel it’s also shown in our attitudes to people, in our beliefs, decisiveness and in what we feel is right and wrong.  If were looking at confidence as an outward display of safety and security, then being secure in our opinions and decisions shows how safe we feel inside ourselves too. The whole series on The Cat has helped you look at anxiety and the habits of worry, as you start to let go of these insecurities confidence is starting to grow.

Let’s look at a social anxiety, we might say on a lesser level that this person is shy or lacks confidence or if its more extreme then we might say they have a social anxiety or worst still a phobia.  I believe these are all linked and if you now understand about your own habits of worry, you can stop feeding them and start building confidence in the place of these worries.

Here’s a personal story about myself, I am not just sitting in my office having studied hard and got lots of qualifications and spent 24 years helping people. I am also a person who has suffered severe anxiety, depression, phobias and confidence issues.  When I was at my worst, social situations would cause such extreme anxiety and I would literally pass out! Yes, not the best hey.  For those of you who have met me, you will know that I am now one of the most relaxed and calm people you could meet, enjoying living a confident happy life. I have learnt to be this way and for those of you on the journey to get here, it is so worth the work to achieve this, but just like becoming good at anything in life, we have to work at it.

This is a story of something that happened about 30 years ago now, I had gone to a gym class and at this time chatting to people and being social didn’t come that easy. I had learnt to be more confident in work but not so great socially. I had chatted to a girl there over a few weeks as we had both been doing the same class, nothing much, but it was a start in trying to push myself to be chattier with people. For those that know me now will laugh as I am super chatty and will chat to anyone about almost anything. Well back to the story, the next week I saw the girl she rushed into the class late and didn’t even say hello, she didn’t seem to notice me at all.  It made me feel uncomfortable and I started replaying our last conversations in my head, what had I said? Maybe I had upset her? I started to feel more anxious as the class went on. At the end of the class she just rushed off and I was left with this feeling that I had totally upset her and now she didn’t want to speak to me. This was something I couldn’t just let go of, I kept thinking about it and finally decided I have 100% upset her.

The next week the class came around I was nervous about seeing her and if she would speak to me, by the time I got to the class, I was anxious and couldn’t stop feeding the worries. I kept checking to see if she had arrived and finally as the class began I realised she wasn’t coming. This of course in my mind was because she was so upset with me over what I had said. I spent the whole week going over this and the next class came and went in the same way. I continued to feed the worries and by this time even going to the gym was making me feel nervous.  I decided when I saw her next I would apologies as I couldn’t live with this anxiety and even if she never spoke to me again I could at least try and move on from this.  The class came and she arrived just in time for the start, so that was it I was going to speak to her after the class. That was a horrible hour of anxiously feeding the worry. When the class had finished I rushed up to her and just blurting out how sorry I was that I had said something out of turn and upset her.  I could see the confusion on her face and that total look of not knowing what someone is saying to you, she said that she wasn’t sure what I meant but she had just been super busy over the last few weeks. I apologised yet again, but this time for the mistake of having thought this and bumbled out of the gym.

This was a massive turning point for me I was like …. what was that all about? I has let my insecurities creative this massive issue and it wasn’t even there !!.. I realised that what I thought just wasn’t what was real. If you haven’t already read True Perspective then do, as it will help give you a wider perfective of this.  It pushed me to look at ways of sorting this out all the traditional ways had not been working for me and I found hypnotherapy. It was life changing for me and the true start in my development of my confidence and the beginning of coming to terms with my past. To be honest I had a whole heap of issues that I needed to get sorted and after trying hypnotherapy I thought it would be therapy for life for me as I was so messed up, or go and train and try and educate myself as well as heal myself. That is exactly what I did, I had no intention of practicing hypnotherapy I already had a great job but that’s another story. Now I am now sitting here after years of working in this field.

Over the next few blogs we are going to look at what confidence is and what characteristics we have if we’re confident. Now we’re not feeding the anxiety and distorting our perception we need to develop some positive habits to fill the space we now have within us.

 

Thanks for dropping by Sara x

 

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