Spam Filter For Your Brain - Episode 74
Confidence can be this mysterious little smoky thing that's quite hard to grasp, that everybody says that we should just have, but actually it can be quite ethereal in its concept. Everybody thinks that they know what everybody else is talking about, but we really actually pin it down.
When I've spent some time thinking about what confidence is for me and how you get more of it in your life, which is generally how I spend a lot of my free time, with a notebook trying to work out ways to be able to support people to find the emotions that they desire the most. I realised there was a brain-breaking little phrase that I think was sort of mashed up from things that I'd heard from other people combined with things that I'd read, combined with whatever little lightning bolt struck me at the moment. But it was that I realised that when I love myself the way I want to be loved by other people, then I know that confidence is not far behind. When I am exploring what it means to me to feel like I am being loved, when I think about the things that I crave from other people, the things that I have in the past tried to present myself as in order to be lovable, to be worthy of other people's attention when I give those things to myself. I know that I'm more assured and more certain about who I am as a person and what I'm able to offer both myself and the world.
And what does that look like in really real terms? Well, I think for me personally, some of the things that I really appreciate and value and crave from other people are care, compassion, love, authenticity, truth, clarity, and integrity. Just really thinking about some of those core things that when people offer them to me, reliability. I can see that when someone offers me these things, they feel so in alignment with who I am at my core that it builds our sense of connection, that it builds my sense of trust in who they are and who I believe they see me to be. And there is some unity in that connection that when they hold those values to be true, they know that they are important to me and they show me those kind of things in their actions, their words, their deeds. However it comes across, I see that as something that is worth noticing that person as someone who I want to draw closer in my life, whom I want to give more time to, to whom I want to give more space in my heart.
When I can identify those kind of things that are very important to me in the people around me, I can go, okay, how can I begin to give these things to myself? Where am I neglecting giving myself time? Where am I neglecting to give myself the kind of authenticity and integrity that I value so much in others? Where am I dismissing my own needs because I think that other people might like me more if I do more things for them? Where am I not respecting my own time enough and double booking myself or over-committing so that I'm always chasing my tail and always feel like I'm having to dash places? Where am I not showing up in the kind of way that I want other people to show up for me?
The more I can take actions which align with the kind of values that I hold in my life to be important, to be at the core of what I want my relationships to be, the more I strengthen the relationship with myself. Once I've identified those and made the active choice to try and make some of the actions that I take towards myself, the decisions that I make in my life to be more in alignment with those values, then of course my confidence is going to grow because I'm being more of the things that I think are important in life. I'm showing up for myself in a way that is more in alignment with the values that I hold dear in the world. I'm effectively being the best version of myself for myself.
And, of course, that is inevitably what confidence is. It is really glowing the things that are important to you out to the world and beaconing them out as the things which are the things that you want to both represent and are willing to stand on that hill, for want of a better phrase, when you can be the things that are important to you, of course, this equates to you feeling less insecure about yourself. You don't doubt who you are when you're standing up for the things that you believe in. There's less room for insecurities when you know that you can trust who you are and how you speak to yourself and the way that you're representing the values that are important to you out in the world.
So I know that when I love myself in the way that I want to be loved by others, the confidence is not far behind.