You are listening to The Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo, episode number 114.
Welcome to The Life Coach School Podcast, where it's all about real clients, real problems, and real coaching. And now, your host, Master Coach Instructor, Brooke Castillo.
Hello, my friends. How are you guys today? Amazing.
I'm in a yellow dress. If ever you want to feel happy, wear a yellow dress. This is my advice, too.
Hey, so today, we're going to talk about confidence. We're going to talk about creating confidence because this is one of the biggest issues that so many of my students struggle with. And I think that we should have to take as many math classes as we have to take.
We should have to take confidence classes. I think we should be taught confidence because the way that we are programmed to evolve is the opposite of creating confidence. It creates fear.
Be afraid of everything. Danger is just around the corner. And that has helped us get here alive, right?
It has helped us survive and evolve. And now that we don't have danger around every corner, literally, we can stop being so worried all the time and start really building confidence. And so I feel like, as a human alive on the planet today, we have to be taught to overcome our primitive brain.
Our primitive brain that's all about survival and keeping us alive and being afraid of everything in order to keep us alive is now detrimental in our ability to create higher level, creative contributions to the world. So that's what I'm going to talk about today. I'm going to talk about what I believe confidence is.
I'm going to talk about how to create it and give you some tips on how to create it. This is one of those that you might want to listen to a couple of times. It'll be short, but it'll be packed with information.
So I want to make sure that you really get the full sense of the simplicity and the powerfulness of it. I think most things that are powerful are usually quite simple. So you can use all of the information that I gave you in episode 113 on how to create passion, how to create any emotion.
You can use that same process. So you could go back and re-listen to that or get the transcript and just insert confidence where I put passion. But I'm going to give you kind of another spin on confidence here and teach you a lot of what I create in my own life comes from my own confidence.
And I'll teach you how I do it and how I help my clients. So confidence is a feeling. And it's a feeling that creates very predictable actions and results within your model.
Now it's really important that you understand that it's in within your model. A lot of people think that confidence creates a perception and that confidence creates results in other people's models and that confidence creates opinions in other people's heads. It does not.
Confidence creates predictable actions only in your model and predictable results only in your model. Okay? Confidence is a feeling that feels amazing, that inspires action.
So when you create confidence, you create momentum, you create movement, you create action in your life. So it is worth taking the time to learn the skill of creating confidence. Now, many of you, I hear you talking and you'll say, well, I'm just not confident.
I've just never been confident as if it is a gene that you are born with. Confidence is not a gene that you are born with, and there's not some people that are confident and some people that aren't by nature. Confidence comes from what's going on inside your brain and therefore what's going on inside your emotional life.
So remember that it doesn't come from your actions and results. It produces your actions and results. It comes from your thinking.
So let me talk a little bit about my son Connor, who likes to play video games. So if he wins a bunch of video games, he will feel very confident about playing that video game. Now, he will think that his confidence comes from having beaten the game multiple times.
But that's not where confidence comes from. Confidence comes from his thought about his success and what he makes it mean. I've had many other people who have won many video games and still don't have confidence because they think, oh, well, it took me longer than the last guy.
I'm still not as good as this guy. Still can't beat that guy. So they don't feel a sense of confidence in having won those video games.
My son feels a tremendous amount of confidence also in he creates YouTube videos and video game videos. And he gets this frustration when a lot of people don't watch those videos. And I say to him, where does your confidence come from?
does it come from how many people watch your videos? Or does it come from you creating those videos? Or does it come from the way you think about the video you've created?
And it's really challenging for him to understand that his confidence comes from his mind, and it's completely separate from how many people watch it. So if a hundred people watch it, he'll feel differently than if a thousand people watch it. And he'll think that the difference in how he feels is how many people watched it.
But that's impossible. What changes the way he feels about it is the way he thinks about it and what he makes it mean. Okay?
And that's a really, really important distinction. Now, the other thing that's important to notice about confidence is that you can take actions that look like they're inspired by confidence, but are really inspired by fear. And this is where we get into trouble when people say act as if or pretend to be confident, but you're still riddled with fear.
And you know these people that are kind of like bullies that show up and try to control everything. Remember, controlling, trying to control the environment is because of fear, right? You don't have confidence in the environment.
You think you need to control it in order for you to get what you want, and you're afraid you won't get what you want. You're afraid what's meant to happen won't. And so you try and control everything.
That is not from a place of confidence. And trust me, I know this very personally. My control enthusiast tendencies.
But when you come into a situation from confidence, nothing really ruffles you until you don't feel like you have to control the world. I have been on both sides of that emotional rollercoaster, and the actions may look the same, but the results and the energy behind those actions are completely different for the person doing them. So, for example, if I walk into a party, I could be like, hey, everyone, how are you guys doing?
So great to see you, I'm so happy. And I start talking really loud and start talking as if everyone's paying attention to me, and I look at everyone and all eyes are on me. I could do that from a place of really genuinely being excited and confident and just wanting to connect with everyone.
Or I could do it from a place of nobody's noticing me, so I need to be really loud so everybody notices me, right? And you as a person in that environment can feel the difference usually. And you definitely can feel the difference when you are the one who is either confident or not confident.
Okay? So confidence always comes from your own mind, not from your actions, not from your results. Always from your own mind.
Your actions and results may change the way you think, but that is not the source of your confidence. And the reason why that's important is a lot of people will delay their own confidence. They'll say, oh, I'll be confident when I have more practice.
I'll be confident when I have more experience. I'll feel confident when I've nailed it, you know, that triple backflip 17 times. Then I'll feel confident, right?
But the confidence has to come from your mind, regardless of what actions you've taken. So you can decide to believe whatever thought you're waiting to believe. You can believe that now.
And the chances of you nailing the backflip are much higher if you come from a place of confidence versus delaying it until you've actually completed those things. So it's kind of like a mental skill that you need to grab a hold up. If you're having a hard time being confident, ask yourself, if I had all the experience I wanted, what would I be thinking?
If I had all the practice I wanted, what would I be thinking? And then you start practicing that now. So when I looked up the definition of confidence, it said a state of being certain, full trust, and a belief in one's self, which I thought was an interesting way of describing it, but kind of, I don't know, hard for me to wrap my mind around.
What exactly does that mean when you fully trust yourself? What exactly does it mean when you fully believe in yourself? And so I really thought a lot about what I think creates confidence for me.
Like, what is it that generates that emotion? And what I came up with, and what I think is true for me, is that I genuinely am willing to feel any emotion. I know that the worst that can happen is an emotion, and I'm genuinely unafraid of feeling it.
One of my dear friends and colleagues I ran into a couple weeks ago, I didn't run into her, but she was at an event I was at, and we were talking, and she said, I just want you to know how much I admire you. And she said, the reason why I admire you is you just genuinely don't care what other people think of you. Just you genuinely don't.
Like, there's people that pretend not to care, but they really do. But like, you genuinely don't care. And I told her it's true, because I know that what they think of me has nothing to do with me.
I really do know that. So when they have these really elevated opinions of me, that's about them, right? And when they have these very degrading opinions of me, I know that's about them.
I really do genuinely know that. And so it becomes much more irrelevant what people think about me, because there's nothing I can do about it, and it has so little to do with me, that it really just doesn't feel relevant. And I think that is one of the things that helps me think in a way that generates so much confidence.
If I don't have to impress people, if I don't have to show off to people, if I don't have to be any different than I am, then I can just be myself. I find that effortless. I find that easy.
And I know that the people that are meant to be around me and appreciate what I do and learn from me and be my students will be there. And I believe that and I practice believing that because it's so important to me. And so I think when you are willing to feel any emotion, you're willing to take action that you wouldn't otherwise be willing to do.
Okay, so a lot of people delay their confidence in order to indulge in self-doubt and not believe in themselves. And they feel like they're safer in that doubting place. And I've been there so often, and I've felt that so regularly, that I just have decided that it's just not really an option for me anymore.
It's kind of like smoking marijuana.
I'm studying, it's so funny, I'm studying right now so much. I'm creating my course called Stop Over Drinking. I'm right in the middle of creating it.
It's going to be so good. I cannot wait for it. But so drugs are on the mind.
And marijuana to me was never a drug I wanted to use. I don't like drugs that make me feel stupid. I like drugs that make me feel smart.
But it's kind of like marijuana is not really an option for me. I'm not really interested in it at all. And that's how I kind of feel about self-doubt.
Like, it's available to me if I want to experience it. But why would I? Like, what's the upside?
Nothing. The worst that can happen is an emotion. So I'd rather have the confidence to try something and experience the emotion possibly on the other side of that, like humiliation or rejection, versus just feeling self-doubt and pretend like it's protective ahead of time.
I just don't see any purpose in doing that. So the other distinction that I think is important for people to understand, because I think that people are sometimes afraid of stepping out and being confident. I was just coaching one of my students today who has done incredibly well recently in getting a certification and teaching and showing up in her life.
And she finds herself being plagued with fear and self-doubt around her success instead of confidence, right? So it's a perfect example about how confidence doesn't come from your success, because the more success she's getting, the less confident she's feeling, right? So she's feeling like, oh my gosh, my insides aren't matching my outsides kind of thing.
And I think it's just so important to remind ourselves that our confidence does not mean that we are better than somebody else. It's a huge difference. Arrogance means I'm great and you're not.
Arrogance means I'm better than you, right? Now, when you think that I'm great and you're not, I'm better than you, notice that you don't feel good, right? It sounds like it should feel good.
It doesn't. But when you think I'm amazing and you're amazing, then you get to feel good when you think about yourself and you get to feel good when you think about the other person, right? I noticed this a lot with, I hung out with some of my coach friends who are really into Facebook and selfies, which can we just digress for a minute here?
Like, I have people in my life that I feel like if they don't take a picture of it and put it on Facebook, that it didn't happen. I find it fascinating. I'm like, why can't we just enjoy the view standing here and looking at it?
Why do we have to take a picture of it 17 times? Why do we have to take a picture of ourselves in it? Why do we have to post it on Facebook?
If we don't do that, does it mean that it didn't happen? If we don't share it with people, does it mean it didn't happen? So anyway, I think I find that hilarious.
But the other thing I think is interesting is that I've been asked to be in all sorts of selfies all the time and so many people take a picture and then they look at it and they say, oh, that's not a very good picture. Let's change it. Oh, that's not very good of me or that's not very good of you.
And if you've been listening to this podcast, you know that I always love every picture of myself on purpose as if it were my child or my puppy. Like I would never say, oh my god, that's such an ugly picture, delete it of my child. And I would never say that about a puppy.
So I never say it about myself. I always say, make sure I look amazing. And then I always say, I look amazing.
And I really genuinely do believe it. And when I'm in these pictures with other people and they're constantly wanting to retake them, it's so fascinating to me because I think it represents what we're trying to do in our lives, right? We're trying to make everything look good so we can feel good.
We're trying to change the depiction on the external so we can feel good. So it's almost like, well, if the picture makes me look pretty, then I'm pretty. And if the picture doesn't make me look pretty, then I'm not pretty, right?
Or other people won't think that I'm pretty. I don't know what it is. I find the whole thing so fascinating.
I love to love every picture that's taken of me. Even when the lighting is terrible, even when I don't turn my hips sideways like I'm supposed to, to make myself look thinner, even when my eyes are closed, all of it. I take all of it.
I love it. And I think that's what helps me feel confident about myself, is I just know I'm going to love every picture that's taken of me. And I don't think that's arrogant.
I'm not saying, oh, I look at the picture and you don't. I think everyone looks great in every picture. And here's the thing, I never take pictures.
Like, I don't do a bunch of selfies unless someone asks me to. But for those of you who are taking selfies all the time and like deleting half of them and feeling yucky about half of them, I want to encourage you to either stop with the selfies and just be where you are. It still happened, even if you don't put it on Facebook or take my advice and just love every picture and put it on Facebook and watch yourself worry what other people will think.
And here's the other thing, just another little note, as we're digressing, if you go through your Facebook feed and you're like, oh, they don't look good, oh, they look old, oh, they look thin, like if you notice your mind doing that, just notice how you feel. And then notice why you're maybe so paranoid about the picture that you take of yourself to make sure that it represents the best depiction of you that someone else might see versus just being you, just being authentic and knowing that that's good enough. That's confidence.
Like we just took a selfie, we captured that moment. That's what I looked like in that moment. Like I had something in my teeth and one of my eyes was half closed.
That's the truth of the moment. Share it, right? Share it with the world.
I don't care. I don't have a problem with it. Like I don't have to always look great in a picture.
And I think that that's confidence, right? That's I don't have to always look perfect in every moment of my life to make sure that people then see it and think something of me. Because don't we give ourselves the illusion that if we take the right picture, that people will have a certain thought about us, right?
You could take the best picture that you think is you and some of you, and someone may not like it, or someone may hate on you because you're too pretty or whatever. I mean, who the hell knows? So the confidence is we're all amazing, not I'm better than you.
OK, confidence is we're all great all of the time, even in our moments of weakness, even in our moments of confusion, even when we're not bringing our best to the table. Like, let's take a selfie of that. And when we can embrace that selfie, that's when we have confidence.
When we're not afraid of that selfie getting out, that's confidence. There's another thing kind of all over the place today, but look, thought appears. One of my beloved students and coaches showed me something that she thought I would want to see.
It was something of someone kind of doing me wrong, let's say. And she asked me, hey, you didn't hear it from me. And of course, I couldn't leave that alone, because why not?
Why didn't I hear it from you? Why aren't you going to stand behind telling me that? What are you afraid of?
You know, and what I said to her, and I think this is such good advice, is that every action you take, you want to be able to stand behind. And here's why. You don't want to ever be afraid of someone finding something out about you.
I will tell you what, there is nothing that gives you more confidence than knowing that you have nothing to hide. And when I started living my life outside of shame, and being willing to not have any secrets. Now, that does not mean that I tell everyone my private business, but if someone were to figure out my private business, I got nothing to hide.
You know, you may find out more than you wanted to know, and that's fine, but I don't have anything I'm shamed of, nothing that I wouldn't be willing to stand behind. Like I could run for a political office, and I got, everybody knows everything about me already, right? All of my hidden secrets.
And that's just a beautiful place to live, is just knowing that whatever you do, you'll stand behind it. Any action you take, would you be, anything you're willing to say, would you be willing to say it on the news? Would you be willing to say it on my podcast?
Like I do, I just say everything on my podcast, right? Like really think about it. That's where confidence comes from.
You know, some people aren't going to like what you say. Some people aren't going to like that you, you know, told someone else what someone else did to them or whatever. Too bad.
You know what I mean? Like stand behind yourself, stand behind your actions, do what's right and then own it, right? What you think is right.
So here are some of my thoughts I use to create confidence and create the feeling of confidence. I know this matters. Whenever I'm doing something and I think about what I'm doing mattering, instead of what people will think about me, I drop right into a place of confidence.
I know this will help people, takes the focus off myself and gives me confidence in helping people. What they think of me is out of my control, releases me from thinking thoughts about what other people are thinking about me and has me focusing just on what I can control. What I think of me matters.
I matter, what I say matters. Who I am matters. And I think the thing who I am matters, it's like this caveat is it was decided by something bigger than you and me.
So it's kind of like this idea that I matter is really not something I created. It's not something that I decided. It's just something that's true and was decided by something much bigger than me.
And I kind of just put my shoulders up and be like, you know what I mean? Like we matter and there's nothing we can do about it. Okay, so I think that adds a huge sense of confidence to that deeper knowing and that deeper understanding.
And it takes us out of that arrogance, right? Because it's I matter and you matter. Now, why does confidence even matter?
Why is it something that we should strive for and create in our lives? And I personally think that it's very important because with your dreams plus confidence, you create the life you're meant to live, okay? Your dreams plus self-doubt create a lot of resentment.
And so I think it's very important to generate as much confidence as you possibly can. So confidence will really determine the actions you take towards the things you want in your life. That's why it matters.
Feeling confident is a skill. So here's something that I want to share with you that all of you can do right now. There is some place in your life where you feel confident.
sometimes people disagree with me, and here's the example I give them. I say, what about picking up a glass of water? What about it?
Do you feel confident that you can pick up a glass of water and drink it? How confident are you? 100% confident.
I got this. I'm going in. I'm getting that water, and I'm drinking it, right?
100% confident. Now, why? You may say, oh, because I've had a bunch of water before.
I've done it so many times. And that's true. When you repeat something over and over and over and over and over again, and it feels effortless, self-doubt has a hard time sneaking in.
But it's your belief that you can do it. It's your belief that you've got it, no problem. Now, that doesn't mean you're always going to do it well.
sometimes you're going to spill water on yourself, and sometimes the glass is going to slip. You don't make that mean that you suck. You don't make it mean that you're a failure.
You spill water, you don't make it mean that you're losing your abilities, right? You still have confidence that you are a good glass water picker-upper, okay? And so find that area in your life.
Maybe you're a good driver. Maybe you're a good singer. Maybe you're good at proofreading.
Call me if you are. Maybe you're good at public speaking. Maybe you're good at coaching.
Whatever it is you're good at, you have that meta skill of confidence. Now, I want you to really think about confidence as a skill, and the skills that is made up of how you think and how you direct your mind, okay? So when you're able to direct your mind to, I'm going to have no problem picking up this glass of water, then you can practice applying that same skill to something that you're maybe not so good at.
So maybe you're not good at public speaking. So if public speaking were just like picking up a glass of water, how would you think about it? I've got this.
This isn't a problem. I can do this. This is simple.
Even if I fail at this, it doesn't mean anything about me. What other people think about my water drinking ability is not relevant to me. If people like the way I drink water, I don't care.
If people don't like the way I drink water, I don't care. It doesn't matter. And if you were able to think the same way you think about picking up the water, as you were towards the public speaking, you would be dialed.
You guys see that? Okay. So you already have the skill of confidence.
You just need to apply it to that new area. I'm going to give you five final tips. Okay.
Remember that self-doubt is a comfortable habit for most of you. Most of you are in self-doubt because you aren't taking the actions you want to take, and you're indulging in self-doubt without even realizing it because it feels so familiar. Okay.
So first and foremost, pay attention and be conscious of self-doubt. Do you have it in your life? Where, when, how?
Make sure you bring it to the forefront. Make sure you acknowledge that it's a choice. Pay attention to your thought triggers.
So one of the ways that I help myself with confidence is I dress up every day that I come to work. And when I see myself in the mirror, that's a thought trigger, right? And so I'll either think, oh, I look nice today, I look presentable, I look professional, right?
That will trigger my thought. So dressing up and dressing my best and showing up in the best way I can is really helpful in terms of a thought trigger. I really pay attention to my mind hygiene.
I go in, I clean out negative thoughts, and I practice and mentally rehearse positive ones. I treat myself doubt like a caged pet. I pay attention to it, I bring it to my consciousness.
I don't fight it or try to get rid of it. I just put it in its little cage and carry it around with me if necessary.
The fifth thing that I think is so powerful when it comes to generating confidence is giving. The more you give, the more confident you'll be. Marianne Williamson says, the only thing that's ever missing in any situation is what you're not giving.
You go to do public speaking and you focus on giving, you're not going to care about your own self-doubt. You're going to be so focused on what you're delivering. And the last thing I want to offer to you is to acknowledge your achievement.
If you are heavy in self-doubt and low in self-confidence, write down all of your achievements starting with first grade. Literally go through, this is a Jack Canfield exercise from the success principles. If you could get 100 achievements, easiest achievements to the biggest achievements that you've had, you will blow your own mind with thinking about who you are and what you've accomplished.
That will help you. The accomplishments won't give you self-confidence, but thinking about them will. All right, you guys have an amazing, awesome week.
Create some confidence. I'll talk to you next week. Take care, bye-bye.
Thank you for listening to The Life Coach School Podcast. It is my honor to show up here every week and connect with people that are like-minded, wanting to take their life to a deeper level with more awareness and more consciousness. If you are interested in taking this work to the next level, I highly encourage you to go to thelifecoachschool.com/how to feel better online.
It is there that I have a class that will take all of this to a deeper application, where you'll be able to really feel and experience how all of these concepts can start showing up in your life. It's one thing to learn it intellectually. It's another thing to truly apply it to your life.
I will see you there. Thanks again for listening.
