How To Boost Your Confidence With 5 Mind Hacks

Studies prove that most people around the world struggle with self-confidence. If you lack a healthy sense of self, it is impossible to feel confident. Many self-esteem issues originate in childhood. In this episode, Life Coach Lisa A. Romano discusses 5 mind hacks you start using today to boost your self-confidence.

Transcript

Welcome to the Breakdown to Breakthrough podcast. My name is Lisa A. Romano. I am a life coach, Bestselling author, YouTube vlogger, Meditation teacher, And expert in the field of codependency and narcissistic abuse. I am a believer in the power of an organized mind. My aim is to help people learn what it means to live above the veil of consciousness rather than living a reactive life. May your heart feel blessed, Your mind feel expanded, And your spirit find hope as you spend time with me here at the Breakdown to Breakthrough podcast. So today we're going to be talking about how you can boost your self-confidence. When I was a little girl, I used to receive report cards. On the back of the report card, There would be a little comment section. And on a number of occasions, I read where my teachers wrote, Lisa needs self-esteem. And my first initial reaction was to feel guilt and to feel shame that whatever it is that my teacher saw, She saw a deficit in me. And like most children, I assumed responsibility for that deficit. I didn't understand that I had low self-worth. I didn't understand that low self-worth is tied to beliefs and the emotions that you experience as a result of these beliefs that you hold about yourself. So doing some research, I found a pretty cool definition of self-esteem. And it's impossible to have self-confidence if you don't have esteem for the self. And it's impossible to have confidence in the self, Esteem the self, If you don't have a self. So this is a very serious, Deep issue that so many of us struggle with and have a difficult time navigating. So let me read you this definition. Self-esteem is an overall reflection. Reflection. Remember, Hopefully you remember that in past videos that I've done and past podcasts that I've done, I talk about life being holographic. I talk about the matrix being a mirror. And it's very interesting that in the scientific PDF, They use the word reflection. Self-esteem as an overall reflection of an individual's self-worth encompasses beliefs about oneself as well as an emotional response to those beliefs, Representing the capacity to feel worthy of happiness and be able to successfully address life challenges. Self-esteem is an important determinant of adolescent mental health and development. And what happens in our childhood becomes mirrored in our adulthood. But let's break this down because this is very, Very serious. So self-esteem is a reflection of an individual's self-worth. So what that means is if I as a child had healthy mirroring, Then I would feel good about myself. I would feel like I had a healthy sense of self. I would feel like I had a self. The self that I am or believe that I am, I would on a psychological level when I was thinking about myself, Would consider myself worthy. The worthiness that I experienced from the outside would be reflected by how I felt about myself on the inside. If you were a child and you grew up with a mother who was a narcissist or someone who was an alcoholic, If you experienced abuse, If you were rejected and if you were abandoned, How good do you feel like you believe about yourself? How much confidence can you have as a human being if your earliest experiences in childhood were negative and the very being or people responsible for your care did not meet your needs, Not enough, Or you were abused? What happens in childhood is that these external experiences create emotional responses. And then before we are logical, Before we are critical thinkers, We are very egocentric thinkers. So if something outside of me happens, It's my fault. Before the age of seven, We're all being brainwashed to believe and to make sense out of what's happening outside of us. So if my father comes home every day and he complains that there isn't enough money to buy groceries to feed the family, I end up feeling guilty when I'm hungry. If I have a mother who is struggling to make ends meet and she is crying and she's frustrated and she's complaining about money, I don't dare ask for anything to eat. I don't dare ask for a Christmas present. I act like I have no needs at all because I feel guilty and responsible for what's happening outside of me. I'm not a critical thinker. I don't understand what's happening with my mother and my father. That it has nothing to do with me. These are adult situations. And very oftentimes a reflection of how our parents think about money. I remember my father saying over and over, You kids think money grows on trees. I remember being seven and thinking, Well, Yeah, Money is made from trees because money is paper. So it was really confusing. But I heard over and over and over again, Negative things about money. And so no, I did not have positive feelings about money. And money is very much tied to our worth. Do we feel like we are worthy of money? Do we feel like we are worthy of abundance? Do we feel like we are worthy of happiness? A big part of this description here is representing the capacity to feel worthy of happiness and to be able to successfully address life challenges. Self-esteem is an important determinant of adolescent mental health and development. When you have self-esteem, You believe that you are worthy of happiness. When you do not have high self-esteem, You do not feel worthy of happiness. I did a survey years ago, Over 1, 000 people answered the survey. And it was like 98% of the people who answered the survey believed that they were unworthy of happiness. Unworthy. And yet each and every single one of us is worthy. We are divine creatures, Every single one of us. The problem is the mental field, The subconscious mind has been affected by these external experiences. These experiences of feeling unworthy. These experiences of feeling like we should feel guilty because we have a need. When you do not receive the love and affection that you deserved as a child, As a child you believe that it's your fault. And that leads into feeling unworthy of happiness. Why? I say it all the time in my videos and inside my meditations. We don't feel good enough. If there is any thought, Any limiting belief that hurts us more than anything, In my opinion is I'm not good enough. And so when things don't work out my way, I think that's just the way it's supposed to be. I have this concept in my head that other people are more worthy than me. I'm just one of the unlucky people. And what does that do? It prevents me from even trying. I don't try. I don't set goals. I have a fear of failure. I have a fear of success. I have a fear of being made fun of. I have a fear of putting myself out there and being ridiculed and being judged. Now I'm afraid of other people's judgment and it arrests me. And so I walk around feeling unhappy and unhappiness then becomes my norm. How many of us are walking around unhappy and we don't even question it anymore? I know my mom and my dad were generally unhappy people. I don't ever remember a time when my parents were happy, Like in a state of happiness, Maybe one or two times, Three times at a wedding or an anniversary party, But they were fleeting moments. But their general disposition was worry. And I believe that at their core, Neither one of them ever felt good enough. And they handed us that baton of you're not good enough. When you don't feel good enough, You don't push yourself. When you don't feel like you are worthy of happiness, You don't even try. So you settle for faulty relationships. You become codependent. You acquiesce. You subjugate yourself. You become a people pleaser. You don't set boundaries. You stay in relationships longer than you should. You're afraid to put yourself out there. You're afraid of what people are going to say about you. You're so afraid of being criticized and it arrests you. And so you might be a high achiever. You may even be perfectionistic. You might be someone who is achieving and achieving and achieving as a way to avoid criticism. But are you really happy? You might have all the things that you think might make you happy because you think that something outside of you is going to make you happy. If I have the right car, If I have the right job, If I'm married, If I have 1. 2 children, I'll be happy. And then you gain all these things, Which is what I did, And you're still not happy. One of the amazing things that came out of my divorce was I learned about subconscious programming. I learned that human beings can live completely below the veil of consciousness. I learned all about limiting beliefs. I learned about how children are brainwashed before the age of seven. I learned that it wasn't me. It was just my programming. And in fact, That has become my trademarked tagline. It's not you. It's your programming. And as I began to understand that, Wow, There is a voice inside my head and it's not mine. It's like a taped recorded message of my mother's voice, Of how my mother has made me feel, How my mother made me feel unworthy. She didn't mean to. I know she didn't mean to. Well, At least I like to believe she didn't mean it. But that was the consequence. Never feeling like I could approach my mother, Feeling criticized and judged, Having her be very hostile towards me, Having her call me names, The verbal abuse, Having her generally distrust me and making me feel like I needed to live inside a Petri dish made me feel unworthy of her love. And what I did, Like so many people do, Is I assumed responsibility for it. So the person who hurt me was outside of me. So logically, I thought below the veil of consciousness that the answer is also outside of me. So I'll get married and I'll be a great wife and I'll have children and I'll be a great mom and I'll start a business and I'll be a great business owner and I'll work security at my children's school and I'll be a great security person. I'll join the PTA and I'll be great at that. I'll have friends and I'll be a great friend. I'll do everything right. I will fit the need of everyone around me and certainly then I will feel good enough. It doesn't work. You end up running yourself ragged and what ends up happening is you end up feeling less confident in yourself because the happiness that you seek never really comes. You're chasing. It's a pursuit of happiness, But you never achieve it because you have been brainwashed to think and I think it's because the love that we were supposed to receive did come from the outside and if all the boxes had been checked, Then perhaps we would have felt good enough. We would have had confidence as women. We would have had confidence as men. We would have felt good about ourselves because this other, This external figure would have reinforced this idea. So now the base program would have been positive. So now this mirror experience, This reflection within myself, I would have seen a positive reflection and then that reflection would have reflected outside of me in the things that I achieved. I remember being in nursing school and I did fantastic in nursing school and the last semester I quit. I quit because I had anxiety. At least that was the cover story. But deeper, I quit for so many other reasons. Number one, I was afraid of surpassing my mother. I thought that if I actually did graduate nursing school and I became more than my mother, She would dislike me even more. That was a real fear that I had. It was subconscious, But I eventually worked it out on the recovery path. I was afraid that I might hurt someone. I was afraid that who I was, I had no right to be a nurse. Smart people were nurses. Kind people were nurses. Good people were nurses. I certainly wasn't any of those things. So how could I be graduating from nursing school? So in the last semester, All of these limiting beliefs got to me. They affected my emotions. My emotions created physiological responses. The physiological responses manifested as anxiety, Intention, And fear. I could not think straight. And I ended up quitting nursing school and never went back. And I regretted it ever since. So when you have this experience early on where you don't feel good enough, The base message is you're not good enough. It becomes what you hear yourself saying that's living below the veil of consciousness. And to boost your self-esteem, You must become aware that these limiting beliefs are not your voices. These limiting beliefs are reflections, Just as this very scientific explanation has presented, That there is an overall reflection of an individual's self-worth that's coming from the inside, That was created from the outside. Remember, If you had had a positive outer experience, Then that inner experience would have been positive. So the way you think about yourself and your lack of confidence is a reflection of something that happened when you were younger that is the result of the outside, And that's not your fault. And the good news is that if you can become highly aware of the holes in the wall, Then you can fix them. So let's talk about a couple of things. So the exercises that I'm going to give you, I call them stop and start. So the first thing is stop seeking and believing the answer is outside of you. I learned during my divorce that one of the major things I had done wrong as a codependent was that I believed that if I loved my husband enough, He would love me enough in return, And this giant hole inside of me that had to do with lacking self-esteem and lacking self-confidence and feeling unworthy would heal up. Suddenly this person would love me, He would find worth in me, And then certainly my mother's voice would have disappeared. I would have been good enough. Codependents don't feel good enough and they seek the comfort of people pleasing, Rescuing and fawning. They seek to take care of people and hope that in the taking care of this person, Which is their identity, I'm built to take care of this person because I feel unworthy. And we also unconsciously believe that love is conditional. So if you struggle with codependency, A big part of this is that you have learned to believe, You've been brainwashed to believe that love is conditional. So you're not good enough as you are. You have to do something to prove that you are worthy of love. And that's going to diminish your self-confidence because as long as you are codependent and you make this other person your God, You are chasing a carrot that is outside of you. If this person wants to divorce you, If this person dies, If this person moves to another country, If this person just whatever has a brain fart and doesn't want to talk to you anymore, Then where does your self-confidence go? What does your sense of self go? Where does your self-identity go? If you are someone who's identity is wrapped up in taking care of other people, Then you are reliant on something outside of you for a sense of self. And that is a problem. So you want to stop seeking and believing that the answer is outside of you. You want to start speaking to yourself like a friend would speak to you. What I started to do is I began to journal about the way I wished my mother would have spoken to me as a child. I started to pick up a more nurturing and positive inner narrative and I did this over and over and over again. For instance, The first time I sat in my car and I looked in the rear view mirror, I heard myself say something very negative about myself. Was like, Wow, Lisa, You look like crap today. And I caught it. I had this seat of the observer moment where I was witnessing through metacognition. It's an ability of the prefrontal lobe to observe the way you think. I wasn't reacting. I wasn't living below the veil of consciousness. I actually heard this negative thought and I was pulled back in time and I remembered all the times that my mother would give me negative looks when she would glare at me or she would make a comment about something that I was eating or she would say something like, You look terrible today. I can't remember except for one time where my mother complimented me, It was the day of my communion. I was seven years old. She had a nice thing to say about my legs. But aside from that, It was nothing but criticism. And so here, Wow, Lisa, You look like crap today. That wasn't my voice. That was my mother's taped recorded message showing up as the narrative voice of my inner critic that was highly critical. I was learning to observe my limiting beliefs. And what I started to do was I started to rewrite the program. And so I would go home at the end of the day and I would start writing out sentences that were loving, That were compassionate and that were kind. And I had to practice this over and over and over again. Remember, Children learn through repetition, Observation and consistency. And if you want to boost your self-confidence, You have to understand how your brain works. It works through repetition, Observation and consistency. And so you want to continue to do this, Rewrite the script and practice it over and over and over. Number two, Stop comparing yourself to others. When you feel unworthy, Your brain goes to work to prove to you that you're unworthy. And so when you look in the mirror, You immediately judge yourself compared to some model that you saw in a magazine. Or you can't compare yourself to a woman that you saw at the beach. Or you compare yourself to the man that did whatever at work and your project wasn't as great so you think. Your brain does not argue with you. When you have a belief, Your brain goes to work to justify that belief. So if I feel ugly, Then my brain goes to work, Oh, Lisa feels ugly. Let's see what she feels ugly about. Oh, Look at those spider veins. Oh, Look at that cellulite. Oh my God, Look at the bags under her eyes and that gray hair. Oh Lord, So my brain goes to work to justify that belief. That's how powerful your beliefs are. So stop comparing yourself to others because that's going to interrupt that belief. So when you catch yourself comparing yourself to someone, Just stop. Then what you want to do is you want to start. Remember, This exercise is start and stop. You want to stop comparing yourself to others. And the second thing that you want to do, Which is start, Is start staying mentally and emotionally in your own lane. What you want to do is repeat yourself over and over and over and over and over again. I am enough in spite of my spider veins. I'm enough. What do these spider veins have to do with me being enough? Nothing. They're just a fragment of what is going on below the veil of consciousness to justify this nasty belief that I have of myself, Which is diminishing my self confidence. And so every time you hear yourself comparing yourself to someone else, Stop. And then start staying in your own lane. Pull your focus back and repeat yourself over and over and over again. I am enough. If you want to take this to another level, You use the I am enough in spite of blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah. That will teach your brain to no longer be in fear of this thing that you think is cause for why you don't feel good enough or you are not enough because you are enough, But your brain doesn't know that. The next thing that you can do, Number three, Stop denying yourself self care. When you don't feel worthy of happiness, Then you don't do nice things for yourself. When you don't feel worthy of happiness, You don't take care of yourself. When you don't feel worthy of genuine happiness, You oftentimes don't eat right. You don't exercise. You don't take care of yourself. You don't floss your teeth. You don't eat the way you should. You stay up late. You engage in risk behaviors. Sometimes you're involved with people that you know are not good for you. When you genuinely don't believe that you deserve happiness, You're not taking care of yourself. Studies are proving that with adolescent young women, They often get involved with risk taking behavior, Sometimes sexual behavior, Because it's tied to a lack of self confidence, Which is tied to a lack of self esteem. It's tied to not feeling worthy of happiness, Which is tied to never feeling worthy of mom and dad's love. It's important that we recognize how not feeling worthy of happiness affects how we treat ourselves. You want to stop denying yourself self care. You want to start making your nutrition and your health a priority. This is something that is so easy to do. Rather than have sausage, Egg and cheese on a buttered roll for breakfast, You have a bowl of Cheerios, You have a bowl of Wheaties, And I don't get paid to endorse these cereals that's just flying off the cuff. You make yourself a smoothie. You make yourself whatever it is that you think, Maybe a bowl of oatmeal, But you begin to swap out unhealthy food for healthier food. This is a form of self care. This is you rewriting the script. This is you saying, I matter. This is you esteeming yourself. When you have esteem for the self, You're building self confidence over time. It doesn't happen overnight, But it happens over time. So another thing that you need to stop doing is you stop pushing away your fears. This only makes them worse. So you want to start embracing your fears. You want to look, Listen, And feel. So you write down what you hear this subconscious program saying. You find the limiting belief that is keeping you stuck. And here's the thing, You start embracing the inner child who is worthy of you taking care of them. The inner child within you, The inner child that was below the age of seven, Who learned to believe through all sorts of horrible external experiences that they were not good enough, Does not feel worthy of happiness, And that has to change. And so what you want to do is you want to start seeing and feeling and connecting to this inner child within. So when you feel, I am afraid, You imagine that you're embracing the inner child and you want to explore that. What am I afraid of? What is this really all about? Whose criticism do I fear? Why am I not confident in this area? When we struggle with confidence issues, We're afraid of failing. We're afraid of making a mistake. Are we really afraid of failing or are we afraid of what we think that means if we make a mistake? We are afraid that if we make a mistake, Someone's going to judge us. Someone's going to rattle our cage and say, See, I knew you were unworthy. I knew you couldn't figure that out. It is the power that we give this other, This silent critic that's outside of us, This imagined boogeyman that we fear is going to laugh in our face if our business doesn't work out, Which prevents us from trying. We make our failures and our successes about another person. And that's why I firmly believe that we need to stay in our own lane. Whether we succeed or we fail doesn't matter. It's irrelevant because what matters most is that we tried. And when you make a mistake, I tell my kids this all the time, If you're falling, That means you're trying. And that's all that matters. And every time you fall, And it's the same with a baby. One of the mistakes I see young mothers make is that when their child falls, They run and they try to pick them up. And I encourage young women who appreciate my input that it is better to let the child struggle with rolling over and getting up because in the struggle and in the trying to get up on their own feet, They're developing tendon strength. They're developing ligament strength. And if you keep running in to pick that kid up, That kid is never going to develop the spatial awareness it needs to be able to stand straight up on his own two feet or her own two feet. It's never going to develop the ligament and tendon or muscle strength it needs to be able to stand on its own two feet. So it's important to recognize that the struggle is important. And so when you're struggling because you failed at something, Right, You have to recognize that you really didn't fail because in this failure, You learned something about what you were trying to do that you would have never otherwise learned. You are actually richer. Every time you fail at something, You're actually smarter. That's where wisdom comes from. I had a coaching session today with a woman that I've been coaching for a long time now. And she said, You know, Lisa, I just want you to know that I listen and I just want you to know that I am making progress. I know that you tend to say the same things over and over and over to me, But I want you to know that every time we have a session, I feel myself moving forward. And I believe it. I wouldn't be coaching this person for years if I didn't feel like she was being pushed along that she wasn't growing because I don't believe in enabling clients. And I believe in empowering people and giving them the tools that they can learn. You can do it. I don't want anyone to think because I'm their life coach that I did something for them. That's the last thing I want. It is so important that people take these tools and they learn that they did it. I'll hold the flashlight. I'll even give you the map, But you're going to do the work. You're going to do the walking up the rough terrain. And when you fall, I'm going to stand beside you and I'm going to teach you how to roll over a stand up and get back up again. Why? Because you hold onto that glory. I don't want your glory. I have done this work. I have self-confidence because I've learned to roll over and to get back up again. And every time I fell, I got back up again. And mind you, I have fallen many times over. And I told my client, I said, The reason I believe I'm a good guide is because for one thing I didn't have a guide. Aside from learning how to trust my inner self and trust in the process of falling and trust in the process of letting go of what other people would say about me. I was a big one. I was codependent. I was afraid of what my mother and father were going to think. If I asked my ex-husband for a divorce, I was afraid of what he was going to think, What the neighbors were going to think. I was terrified of the rumors that would surface as a result of getting, You know the deal. When someone gets divorced, Everyone speculates some things are true and some things are exaggerated and some things are not true. I was afraid of all of that, But what was that about? That was me not believing that I had the self-confidence to move forward in spite of these people's judgments. And guess what I learned? I could. In spite of all of the judgments, I absolutely could move forward. I learned to stay in my own lane. I learned to have positive, Reinforced, Self-compassionate language for myself. I learned to do everything that I'm asking you to do. You can do it. Another thing that you can do is stop imagining what you can't do. When we lack self-confidence, We're always ruminating or we generally tend to ruminate about the things that we can't do. Oh, I can't do that Ted Talk. Oh, I can't do that video. Oh, I can't create that project. Oh, I can't start that business. Oh, I can't make that phone call. Oh, I can't do this. Oh, I can't do that. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. There's a limiting belief there and oftentimes a limiting belief is tied to the fear of what other people are going to think about you, The fear of failure, The fear of being abandoned. And so when you recognize that you tend to say things like, I can't do this and I can't do that, You want to stop that. And the next thing that you want to do is you want to start imagining how your life would be if you could do that thing. How would your life change if you did have self-confidence? How would your life change if you came from a healthy home, A positive, Reinforcing home? How would your life change if you never heard anyone talk badly about money or poorly about making money? How many of us believe that life is supposed to be hard, People are supposed to suffer? And then when we do, We think, See, My parents told me life was hard and we don't realize that we might be involved in a self-fulfilling prophecy. It might be a limiting belief. How many of us don't feel worthy of buying ourselves something nice? You ever notice, You may notice this within yourself, That when it comes time to the holidays, You get all excited about purchasing gifts for other people, But you would never imagine purchasing a gift for yourself. You lack esteem for the self. And if you can't esteem the self, You can't have self-confidence. Self-confidence comes the same way the confidence comes to believe that you can finish a marathon, A 25-mile marathon. I have no confidence that I could finish a 25-mile marathon. None, Zip, Zero, Nada. And that's a rational, That's a rational thought. You know why? Not because I don't think that I'm worthy enough to finish a marathon. It's because I haven't put enough effort into training for a marathon. I would have the confidence to finish the marathon if I got up every day and I ran and I ran and I ran and I pulled some Forrest Gump wonders out of my hat. Then I would have the confidence to believe, The self-confidence to believe that I could actually participate in a marathon. Self-confidence comes from trying and failing. Self-confidence comes from teaching yourself that you actually can face and address life's challenges. When we stay small and we are too afraid to take a risk and to live out loud, Then our confidence wanes. Our self-esteem stays small. It is by loving the self and esteeming the self, Understanding what's really wrong is not us, It's just our programming, And stepping out and taking small risks, Not big risks. It would not be wise for me to just put on a number and want to finish the New York Marathon. That wouldn't be wise, Right? I'm not prepared for that. It wouldn't work out well. So I don't want to take on this huge long goal, But what I could do to boost my confidence if I wanted to finish the marathon was I could bite these goal lists down so I could start running inside the house. I could get on my treadmill and maybe try to run for a mile at a time, Then two miles, Maybe three miles, Then maybe go over to Central Park and maybe run up one of those hills in the cold weather. So I would incrementally shift and take on these challenges until what? Until my confidence in myself began to increase. So self-confidence is really tied to meeting challenges, Getting up after your fall. Now in order to have self-confidence, You have to have a self. In order to esteem the self, You have to believe that you have a self. And so you have to detach from the outside. If you're struggling with codependency, You are other focused. And so if you stay on the codependent recovery path, Then you recognize that you have all these attachments to the outer world. You're seeking validation. You're seeking permission. And as you address those issues, You fall into the self. And as you create small goal lists for yourself each and every day and you achieve them, Your confidence in yourself begins to increase. Your esteem for self begins to increase. I am giving you part of the blueprint that I use to build my own self-confidence back. And so stop seeking and believing the answers outside of you. Stop comparing yourself to others. Stop denying yourself self-care. Make yourself a priority. Stop pushing away your fears. Embrace them. Try to understand what's going on with the inner child. Try to investigate and excavate what are the limiting beliefs that are keeping you stuck. And stop imagining what you can't do and start imagining what you can do.

Reviews

Fantastic.

Absolutely fantastic and boy oh boy, did I relate, saving it!

I love you Lisa. You helped me save myself from a contentious, debilitating, self destructive, narcissistic relationship. And for that reason I am grateful you answered your calling. It's been 3+ years since I left that relationship and went no contact. These three years have been all about loving myself and healing my self-esteem and self worth. Yes, I've done the work, but as you said in this video, you gave me the tools, thank you.💜

This was incredible. I have saved this to listen again because I connected with so many things you said. My mind is actually racing right now, thank you.

Thank you so much Lisa! I will not be here if not for you. I listened to all your podcast and knew abt this amazing app from you as well. Your msg is just on the spot and much needed at this time for me. Thank you so much again.