29. How To Boost Your Confidence With These Simple Techniques

I actually have a confession. Oh, I do have a confession to make I'm really sorry. I actually didn't do I didn't do what I did. And you know what I am really upset about it and like I wanted to do the 100 Day Challenge. But to be honest, I went out on the weekend and and you know, obviously everything that we discussed on the podcast went out the window about getting sleep at night and all that and then you don't really do that very often. And the next day I was I was dancing all night. I was just so sore. I literally couldn't even like pull myself up off the bed. So I actually didn't go out for a walk and then this is this is this is the repercussion of that. Right so because I didn't go for a walk on the Sunday. I also didn't really go for a walk on the Monday. So it was two days but at that point, because I've broken the streak already so you know Yeah, I just said to you that I've done it but I thought being transparent and all that you know, it's always best to be honest. That's what I mean. Sometimes you think oh, well, it's all over now. I might as well not bother but that's the wrong attitude to have. So I'm going to start again so I'm going to be well behind you as long as you haven't broken yours. But I'm going to start again because I do want to do 100 Day Challenge where I do great walking so this is day one for me. How about you Did did you keep up with your water challenge

I did to help me you know I have but I'm definitely I definitely find it more difficult. Now I'm out and about more. Now the weather's really nice. It's really hard to like I don't want to carry around litres and litres of water with everywhere. So I don't really know how people manage to stay hydrated normally when they're not doing this challenge, but I've managed it so far but I've got a holiday coming up. Not this week, but next. So I think that is going to be a real struggle for me because they're going to be just out every day then.

Well, one of us has to not fail this challenge. So if you fail this challenge, you've just blown it. You've blown the whole thing. So let's get into today's topic, because we could probably talk about the 100 Day Challenge until the cows come home. And then some more. Let's talk about our topic today, which is confidence and taking it back. Yeah, confidence is something that a lot of people seem to struggle with in this day and age. Well, they used to struggle with it before I'm sure but I mean, we see a lot more now because of social media. And because we're in contact with people more now over WhatsApp so people feel like they're more able to say that they're struggling with things so I guess in some ways, confidence is a big thing. Here

away. So this study is really interesting. It looks at the impact of self confidence on compromising. So they theorised and proved that the more self confidence you had the greater certainty you'd have in your decisions, so you'd be less likely to compromise and opt for safe choices. And they found this in the study that the people who had more self confidence were more likely to want to sort of take risks and opportunities and they felt better about their decisions afterwards. So I just thought that was really interesting because it just shows how much confidence can spill over into all aspects of your life. Even areas that you might not be aware of it having any impact.

Yeah, that's that's a great one there. Because I think that against self confidence leads to greater opportunity, it leads to more choices. And I think that can be also about your mindset as well which is do you have more of a positive mindset or a negative mindset? And there was this really interesting show that I watched so you know, Darren Darren Brown. Yeah. So he is an illusionist, and he works a lot with human psychology while he did a documentary once and it was about not whether some people are more lucky than other people. If you're a very low confident person, you're more likely to think that you're not lucky so you're more likely to have if you've got low self confidence, you're more likely to have more of a negative outlook on life than if you're very confident you're more likely to have a positive look in life. Now that's not generally for everybody. But that was just what they used in this documentary. So he went to this town where it was like in the middle of nowhere, so he knew that a rumour would spread far and wide really fast. And he said have you heard the story about this lucky dog? And in the graveyard, there was this statue, and it was a dog. And apparently, if you patted this dog, it would bring you luck. And then the people that were, you know, the people that were more confident and the people that were more positive started believing that this lucky lucky dog with bringing them look and then the people that weren't confident they followed them around, didn't believe in the dog didn't get the look and Darren brown presented them with loads of opportunities along the way. And all the people that were more confident and all the people that believed in themselves took those opportunities. And all of the people that weren't, weren't very confident and didn't believe in themselves that didn't take those opportunities. So it just goes to show you that your mindset can have a lot to do with your confidence and that is the reason why you can actually work on it and improve if you believe in yourself a lot more. Sorry, I went a while off topic. Off topic. I don't think we've had a

sparkies monologue for a while. I'm losing the plot and losing. Okay, so let's talk about how you can go about getting your confidence back and the things that you can change in your everyday life to help accomplish that. The first thing is to recognise and acknowledge your strengths. So often one of the reasons that we lack confidence is because we hyper focus on our weaknesses, and that's something that's left over from our caveman days, when it was really important to overanalyze any sort of weaknesses or failures because that was the difference between life and death. Our modern society isn't set up like that, but we still focus on the failures. And what it does, is it noxious self confidence and stops you from believing in yourself. So how you counteract that is make a list write down everything that you're good at everything that you've accomplished things that you feel proud of. So when I've done this in the past, I think a really good way of doing it is to write a list of things that you've achieved. That you didn't think that you would, so things like out of date, maybe learning to drive, passing an exam, that sort of thing, things where you went from a state of not knowing what you were doing to successfully doing something. I think those are all really good ways of improving your confidence. And also it's really good for if you are feeling a bit unsure of yourself, you can pull that list out and read it and remind yourself actually, you're pretty awesome.

Oh, that was that was a nice little end there. You're pretty awesome. I like that. The next one which ties in really nicely, by the way is to push your boundaries. So for example, try something new. And the reason that I said this ties in with what you've just said, There surely is because we've all done things and when we read we recognise that we weren't great in the beginning, but we got better as time went on. So it's important that when you do think about trying something new, that you do remember that it might you might not be great at it the first time. I mean, a great example of this. I mean, if you go back and listen to our first ever episode, our voices are in. I mean I was listening the other day because I was I was put it put in a song for the dog. Episode One came on and I was like, wow, I when we first did this episode, I didn't realise that we were so shaky compared to what to prepare to what we are now. So you're never going to be great at something the first time you know when you first got in a car, you didn't know how to drive a you act to learn and with learning that builds confidence and you also learn to face your fears. If you just got in a car and didn't know how to drive you would be absolutely terrified. But the more and more you learn to do it you learn how to use the car. You get you begin to build your confidence and it just makes it easier as time goes on to face your fears and build that confidence. And it's a great way of building your confidence to keep doing things over and over again, pushing your boundaries and try new things. So just keep an open mind and do try new things when when those opportunities do present themselves. To you.

It's also really important to take care of yourself. This is something that we've touched on episode after episode it keeps coming up but it's so important because you're not going to feel confident when you don't feel well in yourself. You know when you feel tired and you feel sluggish. That's just not setting yourself up in a good state to be confident. I'm not saying that you have to go from being like a couch potato to running marathons. But you need to invest time and energy into your own well being. So you know, you probably know what your own area of weaknesses is, you know, junk food, not getting enough exercise, not getting enough sleep, whatever it is take steps in the right direction to making yourself feel better. And that's just going to set you up in a better place to feel confident and I think tying in with that is about your appearance as well. So when you feel good, you know sort of address the success, then you're automatically going to be a bit more confident. So that doesn't mean you know, you have to make yourself look really fake or anything like that. It's about what feels good to you. You know, like I don't know, wearing your favourite colour. A jumper that you think flatters you, you know a haircut that you enjoy that sort of thing. dyeing your hair, not for us, but not every single time Sparky dyes his hair without fail. He hates it. How long have I known you now like 10 years and literally every single time has a new haircut or a new hair colour and I'm like oh I like your hair or hate it is a mistake. I'm gonna be

The next one is to create a pattern of success through small achievable SMART goals or systems. And if you haven't listened to our episode on goals versus systems, please do go back and listen to that one because we go into massive depth with this one here. And we're discussing what is better SMART goals and systems. But basically when you create a pattern of success, it's more likely to make you feel empowered. Not just in one area but in all areas of your life and it really helps your confidence grow. And if you can create goals and systems that propel you forward to get things done, to overcome things that you find difficult to achieve. It's going to lead to you feeling better, it's going to lead to a lot more confidence going forward. So we do talk in that episode about how you can do that and what sort of examples but just some quick examples for this particular episode. Try and focus on goals that are more specific and realistic to you. If you're going to say something like I'm going to go write a book, it's really big and it's like a general goal. So that might be difficult to achieve. And you will just falter if you if you present yourself goals like that. And if you do fail, that's going to lead to you feeling less confident. So try and think of a goal of something that's a little bit easier. It's more realistic to you. So something like I'm going to write 500 words a day and finish a book in six months. That would be a better goal. And it also gives you the power to do something that you know that you can achieve and move forward.

So the next point that we've got for you is again something that we've talked about before on the podcast, but it's to be aware of your thoughts. So it's really easy to be trapped in our own thoughts, spiralling into negativity and to forget really that our thoughts are just thoughts, we control them, we can change them. And that the key to all of that is initially just to be aware of them and aware of what you're saying to yourself and how you're speaking to yourself. Are you speaking to yourself in a respectful manner? Are you speaking to yourself the way that you would speak to one of your friends? Or are you being quite cruel and harsh to yourself? You know, if you're saying things like, I never get what I want or I'm so stupid. Of course you're not going to feel confident if that is your inner dialogue. You need to be aware of the negativity that you're bringing into your in circumstance.

And that ties in really nicely with the last point which is practice more gratitude, it's to embrace it. We spoken a lot about gratitude on this podcast and we did a great episode about gratitude and the things that you can do to make yourself understand what things you have in your life that you can be grateful for. So the last point is really just to be grateful for what you have and find a way to feel grateful for your mistakes and your successes as well. Those little wins along the way, which is the overall theme of this podcast which is celebrate your wins no matter how small and find the gratitude in those as well as well as as well as the big ones as well. To do this you can you can keep a gratitude journal, or you can just practice gratitude on a daily basis like just just things that you are grateful for on a daily basis. All that will do is remind you of all that you have and not what you haven't got it will it will make you focus on what's important. So