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What you’ll learn in this episode:
Did you know that self-confidence is the super-highway to all the motivation, momentum, and action you want to take in your business?
It’s true, and today I’m going to teach you all about self-confidence, what it is, and how to get more of it.
I’m also going to show you how relying on your past and what you’ve done before, or hanging out in your comfort zone, is not where you want to be, and how living a rich and full life where you can grow, flourish, and build an amazing business is where it’s at.
Here’s a glance at this episode:
- Self-confidence is our willingness to feel discomfort, and to continue to believe in ourselves and our ability and keep moving forward regardless of the feeling
- When we are willing to get uncomfortable, and to feel the discomfort, but continue to believe in what we want and our ability to get it and to keep moving, we build so much self-confidence
- If you’re not willing to get uncomfortable, if you’re not willing to fail and keep going anyway, so you can do the things that you’ve never done before, you will quite literally stay in the same place, doing the same things, you’ve always done
- Entrepreneurship is about doing things you’ve never done before, and self-confidence is a necessity for navigating the journey successfully.
Mentioned in this episode:
Work/Connect with me:
Business and Rejuvenation Retreat
[00:02] Jessica: Well hello everyone! Welcome back! I’m excited to talk to you this week about one of the most important topics related to coaching and building a business. And that is the topic of self-confidence.
Self-confidence is the super-highway to all the motivation, momentum, and action you want to take in your business.
If you want to grow as a person, grow your business, and live an amazing life, you need to build your self-confidence so you can do new things (aka things outside your comfort zone) that you’ve never done before. Because without doing new things, there is no growth.
Now, I want to emphasize that I am talking about self-confidence specifically here, and NOT confidence. I’m talking about the confidence that comes from inside of you, from yourself. And that’s what I call self-confidence.
[01:00] So today we’re going to talk about: What is self-confidence and why does it matter? How does it relate to your comfort zone? And how can I build more or get more self-confidence?
[01:13] So I want to start by asking you how self-confident are you? If you were to give it a rating, or put it on a scale of 1-10, where would you land? And once you come up with the number or rating, I would like you to ask yourself WHY? Why did you give yourself that rating or number? What did you list and where does your brain go when you ask yourself why? I want to offer that most people’s brains go to something outside of them, or to somewhere in the past. They often list the things they’ve done or something they can point to. So when I ask them this question they think of a speaking engagement they did, or their business performance over the past year, or testimonials from clients. But what I want to offer is that self-confidence is not based on things outside of you or things you have done. Self-confidence is based on your own internal barometer. It’s what you tell yourself about you doing the things you’ve never done or the things you want to try and do. This is the opposite of confidence, which is based on something you’ve done or something happening outside of you.
[02:32] So, for the sake of this podcast, let’s define self-confidence. The dictionary defines self-confidence as “a feeling of trust in one’s abilities, qualities, and judgment.” I want to offer that I think self-confidence is our willingness to feel discomfort, and to continue to believe in ourselves and our ability and keep moving forward regardless of the feeling. When we are willing to get uncomfortable, and to feel the discomfort, but continue to believe in what we want and our ability to get it and to keep moving, we build so much self-confidence. And when we have self-confidence, we are compelled to keep going and do things, even if we’ve never done it before and even when we’re scared, or uncomfortable because we’re not afraid of feeling uncomfortable feelings. We’re also not afraid of what will happen or what we’ll think because we trust ourselves that we have our own backs and that we’ll support ourselves no matter what. So there’s nothing to really fear.
Because in reality, our worst fears are really what we think about the things going on around us. What we think are going to happen, or what we think about a certain outcome. And if have committed to feel the discomfort and have our own back, then there’s really nothing to fear except maybe feeling a little crappy or humiliated, and nothing we’re not willing to try. And if it doesn’t work or we feel crappy (or even downright horrified), so what?
[04:10] Confidence on the other hand is something we build up from the things that we’ve already done. For instance, I have confidence that I can run a mile or record a podcast or drive a car because I’ve done it before and I can point to it and say “I’m confident I can do this again because I’ve done it”. So I can look outside myself or into my past for the data to “prove” that I can do something, and thus I feel confident that I can do it. But that type of confidence, although great in some cases, is not the thing that’s going to move us forward when we are embarking on the things we’ve never done. Because when we look around us for the evidence, or look outside of us for the data, and we don’t find it, we immediately doubt ourselves. And that’s when we stall. But with self-confidence, that belief and vantage point comes from within. We get to decide what we want to think about it and what we want to believe for ourselves. And when we believe in ourselves and support ourselves unconditionally, we create so much empowerment and motivation, and this moves us forward to take action. So how does this play out in our real life?
[05:30] I’ll share with you my experience of starting this podcast. When I embarked on this journey of starting the podcast I had no idea what I was doing. It was almost comical. And I had all the mind drama about it. “I’m going to sound like an idiot” “I’m going to screw up the tech” “no one’s going to care about what I’m going to talk about”. And some of it was reality. Like, the first couple of recordings were a disaster. They really were. But I decided that having a podcast was something that I really wanted to do, and so I decided that regardless of what happened I was going to persevere. And I was going to support myself no matter what. And in very practical terms, this mean that first I was going to manage all the thoughts that were flooding my brain and made sure I wasn’t telling myself terrible things about myself (which quite literally would have totally blocked me from my feeling of self-confidence). Second, I allowed the discomfort to come, didn’t resist it or fear it. And then third, and probably the most important part, I committed to being my biggest fan 100% of the time along the journey no matter what happened. That meant that even if I completely failed or crashed and burned, I was going to have my own back. I wasn’t going to make any of those results mean anything about me. Even when I was SO uncomfortable, I was going to tell myself that I was learning and that this was part of the process and I was going to keep going. I doubled down on my self-confidence and belief in myself, and not only did it propel me forward into so much action, but I also built so much more self-confidence along the way. Because what I learned was that no matter how uncomfortable I got, and no matter how many times I failed (and I failed a lot), I was going to be my biggest cheerleader and I was going to keep moving forward toward what I wanted. And with each attempt, and with each failure, I was learning something more about how to get closer to what I wanted.
[07:46] And that is self-confidence my friends. That is the building block for growing as a person, growing the business that you want, and hitting any goal. Because if you’re not willing to get uncomfortable, if you’re not willing to fail and keep going anyway, so you can do the things that you’ve never done before, you will quite literally stay in the same place, doing the same things, you’ve always done. This is the definition, in my opinion, of your comfort zone. This is where all dreams of what you want to do but never actually do, go to die. And without self-confidence, and a life built on just having confidence, you will keep you doing the same things over and over and never venture into the unknown because you will have no external data to suggest that you can do it. And you will lack the self-confidence to grow.
[08:43] So why is this so important for those of us listening to this podcast? Because entrepreneurship is a journey of venturing into the unknown constantly. It’s a journey of failing a lot. It’s about charting your own course, and being your own boss, making the hard choices and decisions you’ve never done before. It’s literally built on a pile of failures (we’ve all heard this before). Success is built on a pile of failures. So then technically, entrepreneurship is a journey of having and building self-confidence.
[09:26] So I want to pause and ask you, where in your business are you lacking self-confidence? Where when you rate yourself are you ranking lower than you want to be?
[09:40] I want to acknowledge here that the hard thing about this concept is that we are not used to failing and having it be a good thing. We quite literally have learned just the opposite. So if you have been struggling with getting out there, finding momentum, and moving forward, and you’re figuring out it’s because of a lack of self-confidence, I get it. I see you. I was there too. And there’s nothing wrong with you. We have been socialized to believe that failing is bad. And thus this is why I see that the biggest blocks for most entrepreneurs is the fear of failure. And I see this all the time with my clients, which is why I teach it in my coaching and I’m talking about it here.
[10:30] So you might be thinking, great Jess, this is all well and good, but how exactly do I go get more self-confidence? “I mean, can I buy some self-confidence someplace?” Well, I’m here to tell you the good news is it’s cheap. And readily available. If you want to build more self-confidence you need go out and fail more. In the practical sense, you need to go out, push yourself intentionally out of your comfort zone, fail, have your back, support yourself, not make it mean anything about you (in other words manage your brain), and then keep going. And when you come out the other side and you see that you’re still standing, you’re still alive and you haven’t died, you will have so much more self- confidence and willingness to do it again.
[11:33] Now, I want to say that often you will feel like you’re going to die sometimes. It will feel terrible. Your brain will be pitching an absolute fit and telling you all sorts of very convincing things and reasons why you should not be attempting the thing you don’t know how to do. So just know that this part of the process quite literally feels super uncomfortable. And know that this is why most people stop moving. Stop going after their goals and dreams at this point. This is where all the doubt floods in. But that’s literally all it is, it’s the doubt and discomfort. And this is where you need to keep going. It’s in this moment where you need to be supporting yourself and telling yourself the thoughts that will boost your self-confidence. In the moments before you try something you’ve never done and after you’ve done it. It’s those moments that are the most important. Because in reality you won’t die from sending the email, or recording the podcast, or making the offer, or doing the follow up. And afterwards you will be so much closer to your dreams by moving through it.
[13:04] I want to also add that in the work that I do as a business coach who focuses on money and mindset, I see this come up most often in sales as it relates to entrepreneurs. So many people that come to me are struggling with how to sell their offers or are struggling to make consistent income.
[13:22] 99% of the time when someone is having trouble with sales, it’s their own lack of self-confidence in themselves and/or self-confidence in their offer that is driving it. When they don’t believe in themselves to help guide someone to get results, or they don’t believe in their offer, no one else is going to believe it either. And you can’t ask someone to do something, to believe, what you’re not willing to believe first. You need to believe in your offers and your business more than anyone else believes in it. You need to believe in yourself more than anyone else believes in you. As I always tell my clients, and I’m going to say it here for you all too, BELIEF BEFORE RESULTS. I’ll say it again, BELIEF BEFORE RESULTS. Belief always comes first. And it’s most powerful when that belief comes from inside of you. From your self-confidence. Because if you make your belief always come from outside of you, if you rely on confidence to sell your products or build your business, and not on the self-confidence, you will always be at the whim of what everyone else says or thinks or does. And on this podcast we’ve learned that you can’t control anyone else, you only have control over you and your thoughts and what you think or do next.
[15:00] So if you’re going to place your bet on someone or something, if you’re going to trust in someone, you best bet is to always trust and believe in yourself. And that way no one can ever take it away from you.
[15:16] So today I want you to give yourself 5 minutes to sit down and think of one thing you can do to build your self-confidence. One thing you’re going to do that you could potentially fail at and/or feel really uncomfortable about. I want you all to bring that rating that you gave yourself, and raise it up as high as you possibly can.
Because if you want to grow as a person, grow your business, and live an amazing life, you need to build your self-confidence so you can do new things that you’ve never done before.
Your whole world is out there in the place of things you’ve never done before.
And if this is something you know you need help with, or if you’re finding yourself stuck with trying to go after your dreams, hit your goals, or make the money in your business, head over to the 10K Accelerator page at the link in the show notes and book a call to chat with us now.
This is one of the core pillars of our program, and we would love to help you master it for yourself. The doors are open for the next round starting on October 6th and seats are going fast, so don’t miss out! We would love to have you!
See you all next week!
