Episode #1 - Why Did you move here?

How to feel more self confident?

Hi everyone, First of all Happy New Year 2022. I wish each one of you that this is the best year yet. Why? Because you make it so. I wish you a lot of moments filled with deep inner peace, because you know that you are exactly where you should be, doing what your soul is calling you to do and life overall feels very pleasant. 

 I have some incredibly exciting news to share with you. This January I launched an empowerment program for women. It’s called Self Confidence Boot Camp. 

Who is this for? This is for you if you are a female and you feel like it’s time to level up your life. If you want to feel more in control of your energy and time. If you want to have a better grip on how you feel about yourself and how you show up when you interact with other people this is definitely for you.  If you feel like there are some areas of your life where you feel OK, but for example where it comes to interacting with your coworkers you feel insecure, unsure of yourself and filled with self doubt. 

So maybe at home you can be yourself 100% but at work for whatever reason you feel like you are not yourself. You stumble, when asked a question. You feel nervous, unsure, your hands get all sweaty… 

Truth is, as we go through life our self confidence level might change, getting fired, going through a divorce, losing a spouse, these are just a few examples of events that can definitely affect our self confidence level. In my program I explain how to get yourself back on track no matter what happened in your life. 

But this program is also for you if you feel like you’ve never really been that self confident, but you would like to be. 

So, if you join me I will help you figure out what your inner story is. What are you telling yourself about yourself, that is causing this, not feeling self confident kind of a situation. What are you thinking about people around you? How are they judging you? We address your mind, emotions and actions. When this process is finished you will feel more aligned with your true self. You will know how to support yourself from within. 

This  program I built is called Self Confidence Boot Camp and it’s a combination of a few things :First of all there is the online course itself which consists of videos, and worksheets to fill out as you are moving through the curriculum. And then we also have a very small private Facebook community where I give additional support to women going through the program during the specific month. This is also where I coach, teach classes and inspire. The whole program takes a month to go through. I’ll guide you through the whole process. All you need to do is show up and answer questions I ask you. 

It’s not that difficult, but if you do the work it can be life changing. 

And listen, to be honest with you I absolutely love this work. The satisfaction from knowing that I am making a big difference in so many women’s lives is incredibly energizing. 

Since self confidence has been all I have been thinking about for the last few months, and because this program has been running now. I thought, I will share with you here the basic information to help you understand what self confidence is. Many of us would like to feel more self confident. And today I am going to explain to you why is it that, you naturally don’t feel that. We will talk about where it comes from,  how can we build it on purpose. And I will also explain at one point how true self confidence varies from arrogance. So first of all let me explain to you what is self confidence. Self confidence it’s basically a feeling that you have about yourself. We generate this feeling when we feel secure in ourselves and in our abilities. 

Self confidence comes from three areas:

First of all, trusting yourself. Which basically means that when you tell yourself that you are going to do something, you do it. You follow through on whatever plan you made before, even when you don’t feel like it. 

The second way to build up self confidence is to teach your lower brain that you can experience any emotion. We do this by consciously walking into uncomfortable feelings. 

What? Yeah! Yes my friends, that’s how we do it! You walk into that discomfort on purpose, and why is that? Because the worst case scenario can always be boiled down to an emotion. We avoid the emotion of whatever the worst case scenario would bring us. If you are afraid of rejection and you are not putting yourself out there. The worst case scenario is actually the feeling of rejection that you would feel after someone says “NO” to you. If you walk into rejection over and over and over, on purpose you prove to yourself that you can survive it. That sweaty hands, and tightness in your gut is the worst that can happen. As you are doing this you are conditioning yourself to experience discomfort. To show yourself how strong you are. So instead of hanging out in self doubt in my program, invite the women to prove to themselves over and over and over that they can handle anything that comes their way. Because really there is no emotion that can permanently harm us if we feel our way through it and process it. So if you join my Self Confidence Boot Camp I will teach you exactly how to process emotions on purpose.

The third way I will invite you to build self confidence is by changing your self concept. What you think about yourself generates or depletes self confidence. This is because thoughts create feelings. So you can think about yourself in a way that makes you feel confident. You can think that you are a good person. That you’re capable of whatever you choose to do. That you are strong. 

This does not mean that there has to be something out there in the world that already confirms it.  You can think that without there being any proof. Listen. I am sure that you have seen before someone who thinks that they are doing a really great job but many people out there would agree that they are not that great at whatever it is they are doing. For example the talent TV shows where from time to time they have a candidate that can not sing, but tries anyway. Why is this person doing it? Because she or he believes that not only she or he can sing… but they also believe that they can sing so beautifully that they have a chance of winning a well known competition on national TV. That from all of the thousands of people there, they have a chance of winning. Why do they think that? Because they can, so they do! Nobody is stopping them, right? Even if the majority of us would agree they are not that great at it, at all. Their confidence level comes from their minds. I believe I can do it, so I do it. Type of an attitude.

So now you might wonder why most of us don’t feel as confident in our abilities?

Why is it that we are filled with self doubt, and we worry so much about what other people think about us? Well my friends, there are few good reasons why this happens:

First of all, evolution… Our lower brains are programmed to scan our reality for threat. It’s like we have this device in our heads that is constantly… I mean constantly, constantly running, constantly scanning our reality for what is wrong.  5 cycles per second, that’s how fast this is happening. God gave it to us so we would survive here on this planet. So this is what our lower brains are doing all the time… they’re searching for what’s wrong in our world, so if we don’t manage our minds on purpose our minds will be creating a lot of negative thoughts which then will lead to negative emotions like anxiety, doubt. And these feelings will lead to behaviors based on the beliefs like: I’m not good at this; When I try something new I always fail; The less risk I take the better; I don’t know how to do it. When we think these kinds of thoughts to ourselves  we don’t take risks and we prove to ourselves that we are not that good at new things, because we don’t even try. It’s like a self fulfilling prophecy. 

I don’t believe I can do it, so I’m not gonna try and since I’m not trying I’m failing ahead of time. And when I’m failing ahead of time I’m proving to myself that I can not do it. Yeah that’s what we do, day after day, all of us. Isn’t that something…

Now the second problem is that we do not trust ourselves. And we are honestly not really  actively building that skill up. How would you build trust in yourself you might wander. Well build trust in yourself by doing what you said you would do. Let’s say that you are making a decision in the morning that at 6pm you will go to the gym and no matter how dark and cold it is outside, you get your gym bag and you go. Why? Because you told yourself that you will do that. 

Or let’s say that you’ve decided  ahead of time that you will eat salad for dinner, but when it comes down to it pizza sounds so much better. Well, a person that can trust themselves will eat the salad. They will not sabotage their own progress. They will follow through on the decision they’ve made before, no matter how much they want that pizza. Why is this? Because they understand that if they fulfill it. If they fulfill that promise to themselves they are building that self trust, which then turns into self confidence. If you know that you will do what you said you will do you can make decisions with deep conviction. You are not gonna say one thing and do something completely different because you feel like all of the sudden because your lower brain had a different idea. This skill is something that is developed with time. You have to earn it. You can’t just talk yourself into it. You have to prove to yourself over and over that you can trust yourself. So you might wonder now why is it that we have to earn it, why can’t we just have it. Well no, because Most of us don’t understand how to manage our minds, so we feel out of control with our feelings.These different feelings that we feel we can’t control cause us to do sometimes things we don’t 100% want to do. We let ourselves down. We judge ourselves for it, which then leads us to feeling guilty and judging ourselves for  whatever it is that we are doing. So like that example I was giving you with eating pizza in the evening instead of salad, even though you promised yourself you would have salad, right? Why does this happen? Why is it that we will choose pizza over salad even though we’ve promised ourselves that we won’t do it. Well, this is why… our lower brain puts thoughts in our minds that create desire. We act on the desire instead of letting it be. What? I will say it again: we act on the desire instead of letting it be. So you are like: What? Can it be done that we don’t act on the desire? Yeah, yes it can. There are many people out there who choose not to act on the desire, even though it’s there. How do you do this? Well you observe your lower brain with your higher brain. What? Yeah I teach that in my course. That is how you build emotional control. 

Now the 4th issue is that many of us question our abilities to do different things because we feel that whatever it is we want to do has to be done perfectly, and if it’s not done perfectly then we will judge ourselves for it, which will create more guilt, and other negative emotions. We like to have so much fun in our lives don’t we? And since we don’t know how to feel it, we just want to hide and not invite it into our lives, right? So a lot of it has to do with managing  of your emotions on purpose. Now, another problem is that many of us don’t choose on purpose what we want to think of ourselves. We don’t examine our existing self concept. Instead  we allow other people’s opinions to determine how we see ourselves. 
And the last problem is: We don’t spend a lot of time thinking positive thoughts about ourselves.

So in my course I help you address each one of these problems. As you move through the modules your mind starts changing, you start seeing yourself differently. You start developing habits that support your self trust. You are figuring out how you actually want to see yourself. 

But let me continue because now that you know what self confidence is, where it comes from and why we don’t naturally feel self confident. I want to share with you what self confidence is not. True self confidence is definitely not arrogance. What is the difference? Arrogant people think they are better than everyone else. 

And they do a lot in their lives to prove that. They criticize others a lot. They compare themselves with other people. They are doing all of that to prove to themselves that they have value. Ironically deep inside, arrogant people are filled with insecurities. They are trying to feel secure within themselves by controlling what others think of them. They think that if they act tough everyone else will think that they are powerful and strong and always in control, therefore better than others who appear to be weak. Well the truth is that true self confidence is quiet.

When you really feel self confident you don’t have to prove it to anyone around you.

You know who you are, you know what you want. You know what you stand for. And you know what you think about yourself, your good qualities and your weaknesses. You own them. 

You don’t have to rely on other people to give you a sense of security within your own world, because you create that security for yourself with your own mind. That is my dear friends what I teach in my course. How to build a secure world for yourself from within.

How to have your own back no matter what happens. How to be in charge of your mind and your emotions. How to change your self concept so that you see yourself as a person that is strong, capable and worthy. 

So for those of you who are intrigued and maybe even interested in joining my self confidence boot camp for women I have additional info for you: 

First of all remember, that we start every 1st day of each month, and that the program runs for a full month. This is the way I have it set up right now, but it may change in the future, so keep this in mind if you are listening to this podcast way past January 2022. 

I will share with you a link where you can find out more about it and where you can sign up. 

So look in the description of this podcast and check out the details of this specific episode. 

Now, If you have any extra questions about this course you can always email me at coach@lifecoachforimmigrants.com

Alright my loves, this is it for now. I will talk to you on the 22nd of January when you will hear me interview a really amazing Finish American business owner. Thanks so much for listening to this podcast, please remember to take a moment and rate it for me. This is the very beginning of this journey for me and I would really appreciate if you could help me out. 

Have a great day and I will talk to you on January 22nd. Bye!