Know Your Self: The Surprising Foundation Of Real Confidence

Why knowing yourself is the surprising (and often skipped) foundation of real confidence. Plus 3 reflection prompts to help you reconnect with the real you, no hustle required.

Here’s something I used to believe:
If I just worked harder, or read one more book, or took that next course…

Then I’d finally feel confident / have the confidence to do the thing / be finally ready to take the plunge.

I thought the readiness came from just pushing harder, and when I didn’t feel confident about something, I thought I hadn’t tried hard enough, or worked hard enough, just wasn’t enough in some way.

But turns out, confidence doesn’t live at the bottom of your to-do list or the top of your resume. It doesn’t come from pushing harder or punishing yourself more.

It lives in how you see yourself.

It knows the answer to questions like:
Who I am right now? Who am I wanting to be in the world? Who am I becoming & does it feel aligned and good in my body & soul?

Here’s what I’ve learned (through coaching, studying, wavering, rebuilding, repeating…)

If your self-concept is shaky, your confidence will be too. You’ll rise and fall depending on how someone else sees you. You’ll perform instead of express. You’ll chase someone else’s definition of success and call it drive. And then wake up 20 years later wondering what happened.

If you want to build lasting confidence, don’t start with trying to push harder, work harder, to change your behaviour when you don’t know who you even want to be.

Start with (joyfully) discovering your self.

Here are a few places to begin:

1. If nobody was watching you live your life, what would you actually want to do?
   No Instagram. No applause. No expectations. Just you and the day. What would matter?

2. If nothing changed in the next 5 years, what would feel off?
   Let yourself name what’s misaligned. (Not everything needs a fix. But naming is powerful.)

3. What would feel devastating if you could never do it again?
   This one always gets me. It cuts through the noise and straight into the soul.

These are just a few of the prompts from this week’s episode. You can listen to the full 9 minutes here, and if it resonates, make sure to catch the others and follow along in this Self-Belief Series.

Next episode we’ll cover another of the 7 core capabilities of confidence, one that’s very much in our control - Skill.

Thanks for reading & listening,

Amy

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