Good a.
Thank you for joining us on Healthy Ish. How are you Hope you are having a fabulous day. This is, of course, the daily podcast from Body and Soul. I am your host of Felicity Haley. What does sexual confidence mean to you? Well certified sex and relationship practitioner Georgia Grace has a new book out. It is called The Modern Guide to Sex, and as a friend of the pod, we had to get her on to talk about it,
in particular to shine a light on sexual confidence. So today she discusses the reasons for it, how to assess your levels, and simple strategies to boost it. Make sure you're listening into Extra Healthy Ish, where we chat about exploring pleasure through fantasies, toys, and non monogamy. You can catch Extra Healthy Ish wherever you get your podcasts. Georgia, welcome back. I'm going to call you a regular and well and a friend of the pod.
Yeah.
I love being a friend of the show. Okay, that's a friend of the show. And congratulations in new book.
Thank you. Yeah, it's really exciting it's finally out. Yeah.
Well, it's good to have you on here and talking about well, one thing jumped out at me when I was leafing through your book, and that was the idea of boosting sexual confidence. I feel like that comes up a lot for especially women female gender, throughout their lives. How would you describe sexual confidence?
Yeah, it's such I don't think it has one definition really,
because it means different things for different people. But often people will describe their sexual confidence as when they're feeling really good or comfortable in their body, when they feel like they can ask for what they want, when they feel like they can try new things and have this sort of air of exploration in their relationships, when they can go into a sexual experience and not need to be an expert in that specific technique or position, be
curious and open. So I think sexual confidence is often about feeling comfortable or safe or grounded or sexy in your body. But again that that is just like so broad and it means different things for different people.
And I think it's interesting to point out that sexual confidence can like it dips and throughout your lifetime depending on what life stage you're at.
Yes, absolutely, And I think that capitalism has got its greedy little fingers into the concept of sexual confidence and it says, oh, you're not feeling great here by this rose scented cream, and this will fix everything for you. Run a bath, do some self care, and that's not going to quote unquote fix or support you in becoming more sexually confident. It is a process, and as you were saying, it can change throughout our lives as well. And that's what I think what we need to kind
of look at. If someone is feeling like they're not as confident as they want to be, or they're sexual confidence has changed, we need to sort of step back and not look at just them or their body as the problem, but look at all the things that are going around around them. And maybe that is also looking at social, cultural, political ideas that are informing how they think and feel about sex and bodies, because it isn't just on the individual. We need to examine the messages
all of us have grown up with. But then we also need to look at what's getting in the way between them and feeling sexually confident, Like, so, what has been going on for them in life, in their relationships, how are they feeling at work? Have they gone through a big life change? Is their body changing? And that sort of supports us in getting closer to working on their sexual confidence and what Yeah.
I guess what it means for them when I just listen to you talk. It can actually change day to day depending on where you are in your cycle and the mental load or whatever else is going on. It's quite a dare I say, malleable thing?
Yes?
Yeah, And so that's why I guess I struggled.
I have this one definition because I think what we need to do is challenge the image of sexual confidence. And often, you know, we see the image of the sexually confident woman on Instagram, who you know, is owning her body and being really central, and that is amazing. Obviously, that is like incredible for anyone who feels great in their skin in that way. But that's just one portrayal of it. And I think everyone is familiar with the fact that it can change on a day to day basis.
And rather than beating yourself up about the fact that you're doing all this work and then you have a week or a month or a period of time where you're no longer sexually confident or you're not feeling as good, that's not necessarily a step back. Maybe we just need to look at all the other things that are going on in life?
So have can we assess our confidence levels?
Yes?
Yeah, so you've got some more questions in your book. Yeah.
I ask a little questions in that book, and I think that that self reflection is really important. So I like to examine the assumptions that we have, and I have a list of questions in the confidence chapter, and that is like looking at what assumption do I have around bodies? How is this serving me?
Is it useful?
What assumptions would I like to adjust or examine or challenge. And that's more of like this top down approach. So and I go through this in the book as well. There's two therapeutic approaches. So there's a top down it's looking at our thoughts, our feelings, our ideas. But then we also have the bottom up approach, and that's looking at how emotions are existing in our body, how our
body is responding. I have this case study of a client in the book whereby they were talking about the fact that they've done all the CBT, they'd done all of the examining their thoughts and feelings, but they found that their body would kind of freeze or tense up anytime they were going into sex and we needed to bring away to this response and to regulate it so that they could then start to approach new sexual experiences thinking that it's normal that I'm feeling awkward or nervous.
This is a part of having sex with someone new. But how can I feel safe and regulated so I can approach it. So it's a really good question, and I think I like to split it into both the top down and bottom up approach so it's more holistic.
So, just going back to that case study, what are some ways you work with her to help her boost it? Do we boost it or do we reassure ourselves? Or what do we do when it comes to sexual confidence?
Yeah, I mean we can use any of those words, I think. So the first would be we examined the thoughts, feelings, ideas, we observe what's happening in the body with this person. What we did was we normalize the feeling of being clunky with this concept that I work with, which is
the learning edge. There's an idea that when to be confident you have to be an expert, but I actually think being confident is being able to approach a situation and recognize that feeling a bit awkward is okay, I agree, because all of us feel a little bit awkward when we go into sex with someone you or we want
to voice a desire. So we actually worked with this concept of the learning edge where I kind of worked with them to normalize the fact that it will feel clunky having sex with someone new, but that's normal, and then we sort of broke it down into more accessible things.
So rather than saying, Okay, I'm going to go have sex with this new person, because that was really actually quite terrifying for them, Instead we developed some strategies whereby they would say, hey, like I want to come back to yours, all I want to do is kiss, or the next time they said, I want to know exactly how you want to be touched, so I have all
the information to support you. So we kind of broke it down into small and more accessible pieces, and they came back to session again and again and said that being able to voice the desire gave them power and autonomy, and they were also really surprised how the people they were having sex with responded to that because they only wanted to go that far as well. So yeah, we did a lot to work with them, but at the
end of the day. It was really normalizing the fact that it's okay to feel a bit clunky.
Yeah, we're all human at the end of the day. Give us a few strategies as to how we can work on increasing our body and sexual confidence.
So there may there's a few other things you might want to do. Examine the people who you're following and the ideas of sexiness because at social media, the algorithm will send these certain ideas of what a sexual person looks like, and that it affects a lot of people they feel like they need to live up to those beauty standards. So examine what you're looking at and how you can diversify the people who you turn to for
inspiration around sexual confidence. You might also want to do something called body mapping, and that is bringing your awareness to the part of your body that you don't necessarily feel confident in or connected to, and that might be you know, through pleasure or touch or awakening sensation. Because when we don't like a part of our body, we often ignore it, we don't look at it, we cover
it up, we hide it. But there's a lot of pleasure that can be experienced in our bodies as well, and then also start to examine these ideas that your body needs to look a certain way in order to
be deserving of pleasure. I did this workshop once. It was in Bondai and it was a bunch of young Irish women and they said that since living in Bondai they felt like their confidence had dropped because they were looking around at all of the people and they saw a very specific kind of body, so they thought they weren't deserving of pleasure. So we started to really examine, like what does it mean to be deserving of pleasure?
Your body is deserving of pleasure because it has all of these rich nerve endings and because it feels good, and you don't need to look a specific way. And also so what is attractive to one person will be completely different to the person.
So I just want to throw one in there that I liked in your book, and it was do things that make you feel uncomfortable. Yeah, yeah, I love that one. Yeah, push yourself out of your cover zone. It's so hard, yes, it is. The reward can be so great.
Yeah. Yeah, It's a really great thing to remember. And it's a tricky one when working with sex because we obviously don't want to push you too far and push your boundaries. But we don't want you to stay in the known and doing things that you're already doing because nothing will change. So yeah, yeah, do the clunky, uncomfortable thing.
Thank you, Georgack for coming on healthy, Thanks for having me well. One thing we can take away from that chat is sexual confidence and not just sexual confidence or confidence can ebb and flow throughout our lives. And George's book goes into that, of course, in more detail. You can grab it now. It is called The Modern Guide to Sex, and I will leave a link to her last chat on anal play in our show notes. You
can listen to that that also did very well. If you did enjoy this, tell us rate and review this episode, subscribe to this podcast anything else. He said to Body andsoul dot com dot you follow Body and Soul on social media. Grab our print edition, which is our your local Sunday paper. Thanks again for listening, and stay healthy ish