Ep #21: The Secret to Long-Lasting Confidence

Everything in life is about balance. And true confidence comes from awareness of ourselves, both the positive and the negative. A lot of times, when we want to achieve a feeling of confidence, we want to just forget we have any weaknesses or we want to completely disregard the parts of ourselves that we don’t really like and we only want to focus on the ones that we do like.

But, here’s the deal; where your weaknesses go, so do your strengths. Where your strengths go, so do your weaknesses. So you turning a blind eye to the part of yourself that you don’t like very much doesn’t solve this for you.

Welcome to Mental Health Remix, a show for ambitious humans who are ready to feel, think, and be different. If you want to stop struggling with perfectionism, build better relationships, and connect with yourself and your potential, this is the place for you…

Here’s your host, educator, coach and licensed psychotherapist, Nicole Symcox…

Hey, hey, everyone. Welcome to episode 21. Today, we are talking about confidence and I’m sure you were hoping that I would start this off with some big mantras and anthems and some energetic things that would really get you pumped up about yourself. And I want that for you, but it does not last, just like we talked about in episode 20. Motivation is a temporary feeling; so is confidence.

So, we have to do a little bit of backtracking here. We have to do a little bit of work so that we can maintain a confident mindset no matter what, so that we’re not just relying on a temporary feeling of confidence, you know, the kind of thing that we get, you know, when we have our first sip of coffee or when we have a shot of tequila or when we’re with people that we feel really good around. That all generates a positive feeling.

But feelings are meant to be temporary, and so feelings dissipate. And so what we want to put in place are the foundational concepts to allow you to grow and achieve a confident mindset, even when you don’t feel like it. A lot of this comes from knowing yourself. Because, here’s the deal, everything in life is about balance.

And true confidence comes from awareness of ourselves, both the positive and the negative. So some of you are bummed out already because, I think, a lot of times, when we want to achieve a feeling of confidence, we want to just forget we have any weaknesses or we want to completely disregard the parts of ourselves that we don’t really like and we only want to focus on the ones that we do like.

But, here’s the deal; where your weaknesses go, so do your strengths. Where your strengths go, guess what I’m going to say, so do your weaknesses. So you turning a blind eye to the part of yourself that you don’t like very much doesn’t solve this for you.

We want to learn how to work with both. We want to give our strengths the support and care that they need and we want to give our weaknesses the support and care that they need. So, you have to remember that these are all just different parts of yourself. We all have multiple parts that go into working together and helping us to show up as our best selves.

And so, when we learn to work with both sides of ourselves, it breeds confidence because when we are not afraid of ourselves, when we have confidence, maybe even if we don’t have it figured out, like maybe I don’t have this figured out, but, “I sure as hell trust I can figure it out,” is going to breed a lot more of a confident mindset than just focusing on the parts you don’t think you’re doing very well at.

You find your power in having a realistic and balanced perspective of yourself, knowing your weaknesses, learning how to work with them, knowing your strengths, and learning how to work with them. Because when these two things are balancing each other out and working together, so to speak, it creates a larger sense of balance, peace, and wholeness, which is going to create a sense of wellbeing which is likely going to fuel confidence.

Confident people, you guys have to remember, it’s not because they are not aware that they have weaknesses. Because people who are not aware of their weaknesses are arrogant. And this is one of the things that I hear that comes up a lot. People are afraid to really embrace their strengths and say what they’re good at because they don’t want to come across as they’re posting or they’re arrogant or they’re full of themselves.

But let me tell you, if you are in touch with the parts of you that maybe you see as a weakness or not as strong or not as good as other things, your chances of coming across as arrogant are probably pretty low. People who are arrogant are usually disregarding all of their insecurities, all of their weaknesses. They literally approach life as if they don’t have any, and it’s annoying to be around. I can’t stand arrogant people.

It is so irritating to me because they’re not balanced. And so I’m sure that’s been a similar experience for many of you out there, right? When we’re around arrogance, it just doesn’t feel good to be around these people because they’re just not emotionally available, number one. And number two, they have an inflated view of themselves.

And so that is like an example of how things, on an extreme, can kind of go wrong when we’re not in touch with our weaknesses. On the flipside, we have other people that are too in touch with their weaknesses, like all they see are all their bad traits. And they don’t embrace any part of themselves that is good.

And usually, people tend to be anxious or depressed because you’re constantly feeding your mind and your emotions that you suck. And that’s not an empowered place to live. So those are two extreme ends of the spectrum.

Where we want to be is balanced. We want to be in between those two. We want to be able to really claim what we’re good at. So, for example. Maybe you are a great writer. I’m making this up right now as I go. Let’s say that you are a great writer.

It is important for you to honor yourself and honor your gifts and talents by owning that. You need to own the fact that you are a good writer, that that is one of your gifts and talents and something that you can probably use in the world and people would benefit from if you chose to use it in a creative way or whatever you decide to do with that, right? Make a business out of it, write poetry, or whatever, I’m making this up.

But on the flipside, if you’re a good writer and you don’t own that, then you’re just going to come across as insecure because other people are going to see your strengths and it doesn’t come across well when people don’t own their strengths, okay. So, we want to have a healthy balanced perspective.

Again, I don’t want you to be arrogant, but I want you to have a clean balanced perspective of who you are as a human and where you need to get better. So, since I’m using the writing example, let’s say you’re really bad at math because, unfortunately, this tends to be the case.

People that tend to be really, really great creative writers tend to struggle a little bit more with math and vice versa. And no, this is not a perfect science. It’s a very general example. But let’s say you’re not very good at math.

It’s important to own that as well, okay. I’m not great at math. So in school, I need additional tutoring or I need additional support. That doesn’t say anything bad about me as a person, it just speaks to my strengths and my weaknesses. But having awareness of those two things allows confidence to grow because I’m not driving blind.

I’m fully aware of what I’m good at and what I’m not, and then I can create plans and action steps to get better in the areas I’m not doing so well in, or I can provide more support for myself for the areas I am doing well in and I can make a plan to create a business, to do it for fun, or to entertain friends, whatever.

So hopefully you’re kind of understanding what I mean by this. But it’s truly very important for us to own our strengths just as much as our weaknesses and have an awareness of the two, because this is going to lower insecurity because we have a higher chance of becoming balanced and at peace with ourselves.

You don’t have to be good at everything, alright, guys. You really, really don’t. And you don’t have to be bad at everything either. You are a human being with strengths and weaknesses and you are beautiful and unique because of those two things. Embrace it, work it, find a way for that to really work for you.

One of the reasons I think we sometimes run from our weaknesses is because our weaknesses cause us pain. So my holistic side is going to definitely show here because I have a viewpoint that our minds and our bodies and our souls always want to be whole, that we always want to be healthy, whole, and complete.

So from a holistic standpoint, we tend to believe that pain shows up in our lives as a signal to us that some area of our life needs attention and support so that we can heal and grow, not so we can be destroyed, not so we can be totally hurt forever over this pain that’s coming up in our lives.

And so, it’s a completely different viewpoint if you are to take an approach that, okay, there is a part of myself I don’t particularly care for and it’s creating a lot of pain in my life and I don’t like that. What do I need to do to support myself in order to heal grow, and change?

Not every painful experience is made to destroy you and not every emotional painful experience is meant to keep you stuck. I want you to hear form me, you have choices, you have options, but you have to be willing to seek those things out and figure out a whole new way to be because just blocking it out or ignoring it isn’t going to get you there.

We have to work on these things because, again, when we are able to heal these extreme viewpoints about ourselves and embrace a balanced perspective, it puts us in alignment and we have an opportunity to become free or to become better or to become who we want to be. And the person you want to be is still going to have strengths and weaknesses, but it doesn’t have to stop you. It doesn’t have to make you feel stuck. And it doesn’t have to destroy you either.

There’s ways to work around this. I want you to learn how to be in touch with your power.  Want you to learn to lead with confidence, that maybe I don’t have this all figured out, but I sure as hell trust that I’m going to try.

Alright, so I’m going to give you some tools on how to really do this and make this happen for you in your own life. So, these are three of the main tools to just get you going on this, how to work through when you’re feeling a little insecure about something so that you can start building up the foundation for confidence and have access to that whenever you want to.

So number one is, of course, heal. You need to heal whatever hurt, pain, or emotional wounds you have that really is breeding some fear or insecurity around who you are as a person or around some of your weaknesses. Because a lot of times, when we heal the pain in our lives, we are able to move forward in new ways.

You have to remember that painful memories hold emotional charge in them. So how something went down in your life, not only is it a picture memory, but it also has a feeling state with it. And so when we’re able to heal those parts of ourselves, we’re able to open up to a more positive viewpoint or a neutral viewpoint, or however you want to say that. But it’s really important to heal from your past because we have to know where we came from.

We have to know that we survived things, that we are strong, capable, and confident. And if that message isn’t there, of that is buried under a lot of pain, overwhelm, and trauma and struggle, take the time to heal that out so you can learn how to walk in more empowered ways.

Number two, know your strengths. Do not be shy about this. Don’t be arrogant, because that’s annoying, but don’t be shy on owning who you are as a person and what you are good at. Your strengths should take up just as much space in the room as your weaknesses. And you need to let the, shine. They are a part of you. They are a part of what make you who you are.

Be aware of them, keep them strong, put self-care practices in place that support your strengths. That is the whole idea behind self-care is to keep you strong and functioning at your best because when we get tired, overwhelmed, anxious, angry, frustrated it’s harder to lead with our strengths because we’re out of emotional resources to do so. So, it is imperative that you keep up your emotional resources because that is what’s going to fuel your strengths. We always show up as our best selves when we are working in our strengths.

Number three, learn how to work with your weaknesses. Everyone cringes when they hear the word weakness because it has such a negative connotation. We think of weakness. We think of something we don’t like, like people don’t like feeling weak. But weakness is not bad necessarily. And if you can give it the right support and get a handle on the story you are telling yourself about your weaknesses, it can actually be pretty enlightening and it can lead to feeling more confident.

One of the biggest things to do around your weaknesses is to be telling yourself a healthy story around it. You should never define yourself by your weaknesses. And you should never define yourself by your strengths. They are parts of you, okay, and they show up to help you in this world. But your weaknesses don’t make you any less valuable of a person on this Earth than your strengths.

So, you’re just learning, so I would invite you to have more of a curious mindset about how can I work with these areas of myself that I don’t particularly like. How can I improve in this area? Or who or how can I get help from someone or something to get better at it?

But if you don’t even know what your weaknesses are, like if you’ve blocked that out from you, it’s going to be hard to give support to something you don’t even know that exists and you’ll probably just keep telling yourself a negative story around being a failure or sucking at life or whatever story you come up with, and I can almost assure you it will be negative since the brain has a negativity bias, it will probably be a negative one, okay.

So we have to actively participate in our thoughts and changing them and intercepting before we get too far down the track of beating ourselves up over our weaknesses, because as I said before, no one is perfect. No one is good at everything. Some people are just better than others at putting on a good show. But the truth is, none of us are perfect. We all have strengths; we all have weaknesses. It’s part of what makes us human.

And as humans, we weren’t designed to do life alone. We’re designed to complement each other. So if you’re weak in some area, find someone else who’s strong in that area and maybe they can mentor you, or maybe they can support you, but there are options. We don’t have to block off parts of ourselves just because they’re not meeting our expectations. We have options.

So I want to encourage you, if there’s an area of your life where you’re feeling like, “I’m not quite there yet,” or, you know, “This is an area I would like to improve in,” I would really encourage you to adopt a learner’s mindset and be curious about what you need to do to give yourself the support you need to move forward and be the person that you want to be.

And don’t take every mistake personally. Embrace what you are good at. Embrace what you are not good at. This is going to start making you feel a little bit more balanced and a little bit more confident in who you are. Change the story. Change how you talk to yourself. And notice how things change from a feeling state. If you’re not beating yourself up all the time, you probably are going to have more emotional space for a confident mindset.

But you have to actively participate in this. This doesn’t come easy to anyone. We can all get pumped up by songs. We can all get pumped up by affirmations and things like that. And those are all good things. So hear me loud and clear, those are all good things. I want you to participate in things that make you feel confident. But again, I don’t want you to depend on it. I want you to learn how to embrace yourself as a flawed human being and being committed to being the best version of you every single day.

Alright, my friends, I hope this was helpful to you, and I’m hoping that you’re able to put some of these tools into action this week. I am rooting for you, for sure. And if you enjoyed today’s episode, you can totally get on my email list and we will let you know every time a new episode drops. I get a lot of emails about that, so we have a specific list that will just let you know every week when a new episode comes out and what it is about.

And lastly, if strong emotions came up for you during this episode or you felt triggered or overwhelmed, take it as information. Emotional responses are information that something in our internal world needs support and there is no shame or blame in getting mental health support in your local state of residence.

Alright, my friends, I will see you next time.

Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of Mental Health Remix. If you like what you’ve heard and want to learn more, go to nicolesymcox.com.

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