How to awaken your inner confidence

Do you know what it feels like to wear uncomfortable shoes? Maybe you’ve dressed for an occasion, you’ve gone to the trouble of really getting ready. You wear clothes that make you feel good. If you are a woman, you will have taken the trouble to do your hair and make up.

And then the shoes… Ah, the shoes. You have chosen the shoes that best adorn your outfit and support the look you want to project. But here’s the thing; Most stylish shoes that make a statement aren’t… well, comfortable.

“No one ever said they were meant to be comfortable,” you might object. Of course you would be absolutely right. It wasn’t comfort you were most concerned about when you chose them. Still, when it comes to standing and sitting in them for hours, you can’t help but notice that they aren’t comfortable. They can rub, pinch, hurt… or all three. And as pleasant as the occasion may be, you can’t help noticing the annoying complaints of your poor feet…

Lack of confidence looks a lot like that. It’s the kind of nagging pain that can seep to the front of your mind, no matter what you’re doing, wherever you are. It is caused by old restrictive beliefs that you have actually outgrown.

When people talk about wanting to be confident, they assume that they need to acquire something they don’t already have in order to function properly. “I would be able to do this, that, and the other easily, if I just had the confidence.”

It’s almost like they’re doing some funny kind of mental arithmetic in their head, which goes something like this: “To behave the way X does in this situation, I’d need 5lbs, 20lbs, or half a ton of confidence.” .” The problem is: how do you arrive at confidence in industrial quantities?

I would say not. It’s not really necessary. It’s not like you could anyway. Not until you get rid of the old limitations that are getting in the way.

Now, there are a couple of interesting things about the old beliefs:

First: people do not recognize them as beliefs; they mistake them for fact, because once, usually in the dark and distant days of childhood, they were taught these limiting beliefs as fact.

Second, they don’t think they can ever get rid of that old programming.

There is an old story about how to train an elephant; Maybe you’ve heard it, maybe not. It’s a story worth retelling, I think.

The first step in training an elephant is to make it believe that it cannot run away. Take your elephant, preferably a baby one, and tie it to a strong steel stake in the ground, the same way you would tie a horse to a mooring post. The baby elephant will try to break free, but he won’t have the strength to do it. Eventually, he will give up and stop trying to escape the rope and stake that limit his reach.

Once the young elephant has learned that it cannot pull the stake out of the ground, you can replace the strong stake with a smaller wooden one, even if the smaller wooden one does not have enough strength to hold the adult elephant.

An elephant trained in infancy to believe that the stake is strong and will not budge is ultimately shackled by the belief. He won’t try to break free and run, even after he’s gotten strong enough to pull almost any stake out of the ground, because, early on, he learned two things:

It wasn’t as strong as the stake

It is useless to question what you know to be so.

Have you ever had reason to change your beliefs? Have you ever discovered that the beliefs you once held were no longer true? I bet you did. You stopped believing in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the inevitable triumph of Good over Evil and many, many other things. You changed friends, partner, job, maybe the vision you had of your parents. Too many things to mention. Things happened and your beliefs changed.

Old beliefs about lack of confidence are actually like uncomfortable shoes: you can take them off whenever you want. And then what happens? Your feet are already beginning to delight. Okay, yes. As long as you only wore those shoes for a day or two. But what if, like most women, you have been in the habit of wearing uncomfortable shoes for years? So you deform your feet. Your feet end up being shoe-shaped, rather than your shoes being foot-shaped.

In that case, it may take years, at the very least, for your feet to return to an approximation of their original shape. And of course, he may find it uncomfortable to walk in more ‘anatomically correct’ shoes, because he is not used to them.

Are you ‘getting’ the parallel? At some point, maybe in childhood, maybe later, something happened that made you feel very uncomfortable. It may have only happened once. It may have happened repeatedly. But at that point in your life, he exerted considerable power over you to make you feel small. It still does.

It doesn’t matter that years have passed. It doesn’t matter that it’s not how the world sees you. It doesn’t matter that that’s not how you behave these days. You are still firmly tied to a small, flimsy stake in the ground by old beliefs.

What is the most constant in you, since you are always renewing your entire body on a cellular level? Most likely it is your beliefs; specifically those sad, outdated beliefs about you not being X or Y enough, and that you need more confidence before you can feel good about yourself and behave the way you would really like to behave.

The uniqueness of human beings lies in our ability to think and change behaviors that no longer serve us. In Dogs Never Lie About Love, Geoffrey Masson tells how dogs don’t have that ability. If they get stuck in one place, they will keep trying the same escape route until they run out. They will not explore what other possibilities exist. limited thinking can be fatal.

Isn’t it great that we humans have all the resources we need to think differently and do things differently? As long as we use them.

So how does this relate to increasing your confidence? really simple. Start testing the stake. Why not start taking small risks, the ones you would normally tell yourself you dare not take? See if something terrible happens when you do it. Trust me, it won’t.

I have worked for years with clients who expect the sky to fall on their heads because they took a small new initiative. He didn’t. But it increased his confidence to take the next step and the next. Know? They didn’t even notice when the stake came completely out of the ground. They were too busy concentrating on the direction they were going. They were having too much fun.

That can be you. Just take that small first step and get ready to enjoy the ride. If you really don’t feel ready to take that step on your own, hire an expert to walk you the first few steps down the road. It’s always good to get help when you’re learning a new skill. Successful people in all walks of life have teachers, mentors, role models. Get yourself one and look forward to the day you can ‘return the favor’ by doing the same for others struggling right where you are right now.

(C) 2008 Annie Kaszina