You stop being your own worst enemy, you feel a rise in confidence which leads you to take actions and as you begin gaining new successes due to these confident actions and feeling great, a question of dread pops up in your mind:
What is this confidence is only temporary?
On your journey to increased confidence, there’s a number of stages you will go through.
It’s important to recognize these stages because this will lead to reduced doubts and potential setbacks as you get towards the new version of your confident self.
We must start at your current state, which is often comprised of self-doubt, lack of confidence, past regrets, unfavourable comparison to other people’s confidence, resentment, anger, jealousy, etc.
With a new client, we begin at this stage because we must assess what the current obstacles you’re facing. When looking at these challenges, we often find these 3 things:
1. There’s many layers of experience to the current state of lacking confidence
2. There’s years of repeated behaviour and experiences that have resulted from this lack of confidence.
3. While it might seem counter-intuitive, your lack of confidence has provided you with certain degrees of comfort/avoidance of pain which has reinforced your desire to remain the same.
The first obstacle is thinking that that this will change overnight. In order for you to achieve long-term results, you must take a long-term view of this process because the reality is your current state of confidence is the result of many years of conditioning, so can you undo this…yes and it will take repeated awareness and successes in order to create a new level of confidence for you.
As you begin to regain confidence, it may feel odd because you’ve become conditioned to not having it, so rest easily knowing that this is part of the process.
Many of my clients are thrilled by how their lives have improved from their increased confidence, as they get promoted, make more money, start to enjoy public speaking, etc, but then a feared thought can arise:
“What if this confidence is only temporary and I go back to how I was?”
In my Communicate With Confidence program, we offer a 30 Day Accountability and Support program following the intensive weekend training, so clients are supported when they implement the skills they learn into their daily lives.
It’s very rewarding to see them go through the process of changing their lives and every week I send an accountability report to check on their progress.
Michael (not his real name) asked this question in Week 2 of the follow up component as he had now gained the freedom of not being his own worst enemy, but had the following concern:
This is an excellent question and was the inspiration for this post as once you’ve gained confidence like this, the fear of losing it and how it makes you feel and act can be terrifying.
In the follow 2 weeks, Michael followed the steps I’ve outlined below and started to own his confidence. The fear of losing it went away as it became natural and his successes through taking bold actions continued to increase and he reported that in Week 4, he started to become very assertive in his actions and taking a leadership role when necessary. This was the most rewarding aspect for him, as it not only gave him a clear picture of how he wants to be in the future, but also the skills and actions to make that a reality.
Why you will not lose your confidence once you gained it through the program
1. Once you have gained an understanding of what confidence feels like, you have that base permanently because you cannot unlearn it. It’s like learning to drive, you may not drive for a while and become rusty, but getting behind the wheel, will bring the skills back
2. The awareness you gain of what was blocking/self-sabotaging your confidence provide a clear picture to how you were stopping yourself in the past. Awareness leads to making a decision, where before you were acting from conditioning, now you act from informed decisions and can decide to take confident actions or not…the choice is yours.
3. The Stacking Wins Concept. Stacking Wins, is a concept I train clients in which creates long-term confidence. It revolves around one of the biggest confidence killers…overlooking your successes.
The aversion of people to brag often leads to downplaying your successes everyday under the guise of “being humble.” While a degree of humility is admirable, there’s a dark side to it, where people take this to an extreme and don’t give themselves credit for any accomplishment they achieve and if someone compliments them, they immediately brush it off or deflect credit to someone else.
You can be your own #1 fan or worst enemy…choose wisely
We live in a competitive world, where being overlooked is common, there are countless people out there looking to tear others down to their own feelings of insecurity or lack of confidence, the last thing you need is to be your own enemy
The most effective strategy we’ve found for reinforcing and conditioning our client’s long-term confidence is to celebrate their successes…daily!
At first, they resist, they say they didn’t accomplish anything really important. This isn’t an exercise for you to determine what is or isn’t worthy of being labelled a success, it’s an exercise of celebrating your successes daily, no matter how insignificant they may seem.
Perhaps you ate a healthy meal, spoke up in a meeting, made a confident client call, went for a walk at lunch. Whatever it was, the practice of writing down and celebrating your successes daily conditions you to acknowledge your successes and this leads to you giving yourself credit for your accomplishments.
Exercise: For the next 2 weeks, write down at least 1 success you had every day. Track these and see if you can increase the level of your successes towards the end of the 2 weeks.
Want to increase your confidence faster…great. The best way to do this is to share your successes publicly and you can do this by writing a success you had in the comments section below!
If you’re interested in learning more about our Communicate With Confidence program, so you can have my guidance and support to become confident quicker, click this link: Workshop Info