Unlocking Confidence the 3 Principles Way

Looking to unlock unwavering confidence and embrace self-belief? Do you feel like you have tried everything to do that? Join Clare in this enlightening session, grounded in the principles of the 3 Principles, as she guides you on a transformative journey of self-empowerment and renewed confidence in a much simpler way than you might think.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the CalmCast,

A time to feel calm and think clearly.

I'm Claire Downham,

The Queen of Calm,

A Transformational Life Coach.

I was a burnt out head teacher who finally made the journey to calm after years of trying,

And I want to prevent you from having to do the same.

The CalmCast is a series of short explorations gently guiding you back to your natural state,

Which is calm and clarity.

Just listen like you would listen to music,

With an open mind and curiosity.

There's nothing else to do.

Now let's relax into today's episode.

So today we're going to explore confidence,

Which is probably one of my favourite subjects in a really ironic way,

Because I don't really believe that confidence exists,

Which sounds a bit rebellious.

Good.

Good.

I hope it does sound a bit,

A bit rebellious because what is it that we really want when we talk about wanting to feel confident?

Well,

Really it goes back to this equation that I'm exploring a lot at the moment,

Which is performance equals potential minus interference.

And when we think about confidence,

I think really what we're saying is,

I want to be able to get on with my life without interference.

And what's interference?

Well,

It's our thoughts and feelings,

Isn't it?

It's our psychology.

Our potential is infinite.

That's way,

Way more than even the deepest spiritual teacher can ever really see.

You know,

Our potential is the potential of universal intelligence.

It's the potential of life.

It's the potential of the universe.

It's huge,

Absolutely huge.

And that is covered over by our psychology,

Which isn't who we really are.

And when somebody says to me,

And often my clients do say this to me,

I want to feel more confident.

I want to have more confidence.

I want to be more confident.

What they're really saying there is that they want to be able to do the things they would like to do unhindered by their thinking,

Their feelings,

To just get on with life,

Really.

But confidence has been built up to be this huge thing,

Absolutely enormous.

You'll have heard me say before,

If you've been listening to me for a while,

But if not,

This will be news to you.

But if you search how to feel more confident on the internet,

You will get hundreds of millions of hits,

Hundreds of millions of ways to feel more confident.

There must be something going on there if there isn't just one way that works.

Because we've been at it for a long time,

Haven't we?

Exploring how to feel more confident.

That's been a thing for years and years.

Goodness only knows for how long.

And we still haven't found a definitive answer.

Well,

It's because we're trying to create something on the outside with using outside means,

Outside tools and techniques and strategies and blogs and goodness knows what else,

To create something that is innate.

And really what's innate is the ability to do things.

And that's what we want when we talk about,

We want to be able to have a conversation with somebody,

Speak in front of a group,

Take the next step in our business,

Ask that person out.

We just want to feel okay doing that,

Don't we?

Without any hindrance.

But the trouble is that what we really need to understand is that there's hindrance there.

Understand that there's just something in the way in the moment,

Not that there's anything wrong with us,

But in that moment we're caught up in our psychology,

Thinking,

Feeling and that's getting in the way.

When in actual fact our ability to do the thing we want to do is always there,

Underneath that.

And yet we go searching and searching and searching outside of us to try and find it.

And the title for this session today,

Unlocking Confidence The Three Principles Way.

Revealing it,

Finding it inside,

That's what I'm talking about.

It does feel like it's locked away,

Doesn't it?

I work with a lot of people who talk about my confidence has gone,

And I've lost my confidence.

Well,

Yeah,

Because you never really had it in the first place,

It just doesn't exist,

It's just a feeling.

It's a feeling of being able to take the actions in the world that we want to take,

Easily,

Without hindrance,

Without that interference.

So what's the interference?

Well,

It's often anxiety,

It's definitely fear-based,

It's the what-ifs,

What if it goes wrong,

What if it doesn't work out.

It's the voice inside our heads that chips away,

Chips away and chips away at the sense that we can move forward.

It doesn't chip away,

It just covers over.

So what we do is,

We instead of spending our time in this infinite potential,

You know,

Moving forward and doing things,

We spend our time in our psychology.

And I was listening to a book the other day where the lady shared the story of a woman who'd had a stroke.

I'm going to probably get the sides of the brain wrong,

I think she had a left brain stroke,

Which meant that all the stories she had about life just disappeared,

They weren't there anymore.

Now obviously that made life a little bit difficult,

But the one thing it did do was literally have her able to do anything fearlessly,

Because that voice,

She couldn't hear it anymore,

Wasn't there anymore.

All the things she'd learned about what she couldn't do and who she was and who everybody else was and what was okay and what was not okay,

All of that just disappeared.

And she found herself able to move forward in life without any hindrance to love fearlessly,

To live fearlessly.

Because that's really what we're talking about when we want to feel confident.

It's not that we want to feel,

There is no feeling really of confidence other than just a calmness,

A sense of moving forward.

It's that we don't want to feel the other feelings.

We don't want to feel anxious,

We don't want to feel fearful,

We don't want to feel you know stuck,

We don't want to feel like that kind of oh can't move forward feeling,

We don't want to feel overwhelmed,

We just want to feel at peace when we're doing things.

Now the fun thing here is that I've seen is that we can in fact start to do things while we're not feeling at peace,

While we're not feeling calm,

While we're feeling afraid,

When we're feeling anxious and that moves us to a whole different level of playing this game of life that really does start to reveal our potential.

It's like moving forward with fear on board and if I haven't already,

If you haven't already heard me mention this,

Elizabeth Gilbert's Letter to Fear is a powerful piece of writing about this idea of moving forward in life while you know the fear will be there accepting that you've got some old habitual thinking about what you can and can't do that's covering over your innate ability to do things and it's going to be chowing away and you're going to feel some of that but actually that's your psychology,

That's nothing to do with your potential,

That's nothing to do with your ability to move forward,

It's nothing to do with that.

It's separate,

I mean it's part of the same universal life but you don't have to be stopped by your psychology.

Your psychology is created from the past,

It's created from your past experiences,

It's nothing to do with what you can do right now and when you really start to sit with the idea that you've got everything you need inside you right now,

That you have infinite potential,

When you begin to see that you can in fact move forward with all that other stuff on board and you can do things with with an anxious feeling,

With a fearful feeling,

When you're feeling a bit meh you can still do things,

You don't have to feel confident because really that is there underneath anyway and as you start to move forward what I've noticed is for me and the other people who come into this conversation with me is that it starts to fall away,

The noise,

The fear,

The chatter in your head,

The unpleasant feeling,

The bit that felt like it could stop you moving,

If you start to move because you kind of go oh I know what you are,

You're just my psychology,

Don't really need to pay attention to you because you're just trying to stop me,

Lovingly you know we lovingly think about our psychology because you know that the psychology is set up to keep us safe but actually it's holding us in a place we don't want to be held in.

So really as I you know I've explored confidence quite a lot this year and really seen that it doesn't exist,

There is no such thing as confidence,

Really there is a lack of what we would call confidence is moving forward with ease,

Doing things with ease,

Doing things without interference,

Without insecurity,

That's all it is and I did see a quote the other day from a friend of mine who's in this conversation here and he said something like you know confidence is a lack of insecurity,

That's it really,

It's a lack of thoughts and feelings that get in the way of you moving forward,

Beautiful and simple definitely.

So I hope you have a day where you can move forward in your life and if you're struggling with that,

You know I really would love to point you to all the things I'm doing on Insight Time and Out and you know I've got courses,

Two courses on here now so if you're not already following me you can follow me and find out about those,

I've got lots and lots of free tracks and I've even got a few meditations now to kind of help you ease into this understanding and take it on board and yeah a little bit more and a little bit deeper so I hope to and of course loads of live sessions every week so please do join me on one of those and we have lots of fun,

We have lots of laughs,

We do some crying and some laughing and some you know chatting and loads of fantastic stuff in the comments and you can bring things that you would like help with because I tend to help people on those sessions too.

So lots of love everyone,

Hopefully I'll see you somewhere out there in the world,

Take care,

Bye.

Thank you so much for listening,

There's nothing to do now but bring some awareness to how this is working out in your life.

Listen regularly to experience longer and longer periods of calm.

This has been the Calmcast with Claire Downer,

Queen of Calm.

Take care and keep listening.