Hello and welcome and today's word is confidence.
So what would you do if you weren't afraid of failing?
What would you do if you truly believed in yourself,
Believed in others,
Believed in the world?
How many opportunities have you perhaps let pass by because you didn't believe in yourself enough?
Or perhaps you didn't feel you deserved the happiness that an opportunity might have brought you?
Confidence is not arrogance.
It is self-trust and self-belief and it's the ability to stand in your own power,
In your own light,
Knowing that you are capable,
You are worthy and you are strong.
It has nothing to do with needing to be perfect.
It has nothing to do with never making a mistake and never failing.
In fact,
Quite the contrary.
Many people believe that confidence is something that you either have or you don't and that's also not true.
There are so many different types of confidence.
Confidence really is a skill and I believe that we're all born into this world with a deep sense of belief in ourselves and our environment.
You only have to watch a very young child moving through the world,
Touching things,
Tasting things,
Listening,
Being fascinated by all things around it to see that it has a certain sense of trust in this lifetime.
But that quickly gets taken away and part of it gets taken away because we need to be taught certain lessons to help us survive,
So that's a good thing.
But in many cases,
Our confidence and our self-belief and belief in the world gets taken away by our environment that we are in in the first seven years of our life.
Beliefs that we hear,
Values that we hear,
Punishments that we incur and very soon we start doubting our own instincts and at birthright of self-belief and quickly get taken away and gobbled up.
So ask yourself today,
Please,
Where in your life do you lack confidence?
It may be one area like work or relationships or perhaps certain hobbies,
But it won't be everywhere.
When we look at lessons from history,
Muhammad Ali is a nice example.
He's one of the most confident athletes of his time and he declared,
I am the greatest.
He declared that before the world believed it.
His self-belief and his discipline and his relentless training backed up his words,
Proving that confidence and preparation go hand in hand.
And remember my golden words around practice,
Practice is power.
So the more we practice confident mindsets and confident behaviors and confident ways of turning up to life,
The more we will imbue confidence deep within ourselves.
Eleanor Roosevelt,
Once a very shy and insecure woman,
She transformed herself into one of the most influential voices in history.
She famously said,
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
Isn't that fantastic?
And if we look more present day,
Beyoncé,
Early in her career,
She created Sasha Fierce,
An alter ego to boost her confidence on stage.
She later integrated that confidence into her real self,
Showing that sometimes you must act confident before you fully feel it.
Oh,
Such wonderful advice there.
Psychologists have found that people who practice power poses,
For example,
Like standing tall with hands on hips,
Like Wonder Woman,
Or standing with your hands behind your back and walking around a room,
Helps us really feel more confident deep within and perform better in stressful situations.
And if we hold those poses for as little as two minutes,
It has a profound effect,
Apparently,
For the whole day.
Fake it till you make it is no joke.
Scientists back this up.
And in fact,
The word confidence comes from the Latin confidere,
Meaning to have full trust.
Confidence is literally about trusting yourself.
Why would we let anyone,
Anyone's voice,
Destroy that for ourselves?
So three areas today to think about.
One of them,
Keep small promises to yourself.
Confidence really grows when you prove to yourself that you can follow through on commitments,
No matter how small.
And we're perhaps now needing to retrain ourselves back into learning how to trust ourselves.
And that may take a little bit of time if we've neglected that part of ourselves,
But stay with it.
Small promises,
Small steps.
Number two,
Please challenge negative self-talk in your head.
If you have words in your head or phrases like,
I'm not good enough,
I'm stupid,
I'm never going to be enough,
I'm never going to manage this,
That voice never really came from you.
It was either given to you by somebody who may have meant well,
Or they may not have done,
But it may have been given to you at a time when you absorbed that belief without thinking twice about it.
So in childhood,
We don't have yet the power of discernment,
But it could also be that you very innocently watched a situation as a young person and you concluded from that situation that you were perhaps not enough.
And in most cases,
When I go into those situations with clients,
We somehow missed a step when we looked at the situation and we've misunderstood the depth and meaning of a situation in our life.
And we've carried a belief with us ever since that wasn't really true.
So I want you to challenge that negative self-talk and I would like you today to just decide for yourself that from now on,
You will be the only voice you listen to.
And if voices pop up in your head that don't bring you forward to live your best life,
Let them go.
And number three,
Step into a bit of discomfort.
Confidence is built through actions.
And so taking small steps outside of your comfort zone daily will really boost that attitude of confidence.
And very quickly,
You will find yourself getting more and more courageous and more and more trusting in your own abilities to move through different areas of your life.
And today we're going to be ending on a quotation by Marcus Garvey,
With confidence,
You have won before you have started.
