Creating Confidence

I can safely tell you that you're wrong about where confidence comes from . I've done a whole webinar on the difference between confidence and self-confidence . Self-confidence is your ability to get up after making a mistake and believing in yourself that you can do better next time . Confidence is generated from the evidence of what you have already created and achieved .

As a set of sensations , confidence feels very good in the body . It's energetic , open , spacious and fuels a lot of actions . Confidence is an emotion and is created through your thought . It is not genetically programmed into you at birth . Just like any other emotion , you have to create it or you have to generate it .

You have to work at it to make it happen . Human beings generally believe that their feelings and emotions are just happening to them , but that is never the case . Your feelings are always being created . Self-confidence does not come from your hard work and the results you've achieved .

It comes from your thinking always , even in the case of confidence , always comes from the thinking when you've gathered evidence . It comes from your thinking always , even in the case of confidence , always comes from the thinking when you've gathered evidence of your achievements .

If I had to put in one line the difference between self-confidence and confidence and again you might not find this definition in popular literature , because it's something I delineate to help my clients create confidence I will tell you that the difference between confidence and self-confidence is that self-confidence is about your trust in yourself for creating something in

the future , getting the task done and accomplishing and achieving it . If you have self-confidence , you will try whatever it takes to achieve the goal , regardless of what the environment is telling you . Confidence is created by what you have already achieved . It is created by what you have already achieved . It is created by a current external stimulus .

They could be actions from our past or achievements from the past . Both confidence and self-confidence are created through your mind , but in case of confidence , you have something solid , something tangible . You have a piece of evidence to drive your confidence from . In case of self-confidence , you're doing it in absence of any external evidence .

Confidence is I have a degree in engineering . It makes me confident in my abilities as an engineer . Self-confidence is I can achieve a degree in engineering with hard work and dedication . Confidence is I've been able to feed my children in the past and keep them alive . I'm pretty confident I can continue to do that in the future .

Self-confidence is I don't have any children , but I'm pretty sure I can keep them alive by feeding them . That's the difference between acting from external evidence and acting from your internally generated self-confidence . People wait for confidence to show up in order to feel self-confident about creating a new future . That is backwards .

Your trust , your ability to create something new , always comes first . Your self-confidence generates the energy that you need to practice a backflip or a handstand . After you've successfully done it . You can generate confidence by thinking I was able to achieve that . I can continue to do that in the future .

Self-confidence is your ability to trust yourself through the process of making mistakes , learning and getting up and trying new things . This always comes first . The reason this is difficult to put into practice is because it would be much easier to not fail , to not have to manage your mind around failures .

It would be much easier to believe that things in the world are rigged against you . It's much easier to believe that your confidence comes from something outside . Willingness to feel the sensations of uncomfortable emotion , the sensations of the failure that come with generating self-confidence that is true bravery . That is true courage .

Because most of us are just escaping these sensations , unwilling to create that courage creates self-doubt . Self-doubt seems like a very safe place because then you don't have to be brave enough to feel the sensations that require courage against failure .

From this place of self-doubt , people come to me and tell me I'm not a confident person , like it was something written for you in a contract . If you're not going to be creating self-confidence , you're not going to be a confident person . You will be constantly indulging in self-doubt as a safe escape , even though you are the one also creating the self-doubt .

Self-doubt is just failure ahead of time . If you're not willing to feel the negative emotion that your brain will generate in light of failure , then you will continue to create self-doubt . It's about your readiness to experience the humiliation , the rejection , and knowing that these are just sensations in the body .

If you're willing to do that , then you will continue to create self-confidence . If you're not willing to experience these sensations , then you will continue to create self-doubt to protect yourself . Create confidence or self-doubt . Either way , you're creating something . The brain is always creating something .

If you do create success because you're willing to muster up some self-confidence , then you might come to a point where you have imposter syndrome setting in , where things from the outside look successful but your inside are filled with self-doubt and the two of them don't match .

This is what our recent podcast host , shazia Imam , was talking about Matching our inside to the outside . Success is our responsibility . One exercise I teach my clients about matching your inside to outside success has to do with how you would talk to yourself if you were an innocent little baby .

For this exercise , you look at a picture of yourself as a child and you can pick any picture from your childhood and ask yourself will I be talking to her the way I'm talking to myself right now ? Sometimes we think so low of ourselves that we devalue ourselves and we do that so much that it becomes common language .

It seems like it's a natural thing to do . It seems like that's how everyone talks to themselves . I will invite you to look at your childhood picture and imagine talking to her that way . Ask yourself would you talk to her in such a degrading manner that you talk to yourself now . Children , in all of their innocence , represent the pure essence .

They represent the purest form of our souls . If you look at a picture of yourself and you start talking to yourself , you don't know what you're doing . How can you be so careless for making such a mistake ? Trust me , looking at that child's picture , you won't be able to find the courage to talk to her like that .

So for this exercise , I challenge you to pick out a childhood picture and stare at it . If you can't find one , just imagine yourself as a child , but make the extra effort to find a childhood picture . Imagine you standing there in front of the child , towering over her and talking to her in a manner you talk to yourself . Now .

How could you not speak up in a meeting ? How could you not find words to defend yourself ? What's wrong with you ? You're always feeling tired . How could you possibly let yourself go in debt ? The language we speak to ourselves , which seems so normal .

I promise you , if you turn that around and you start talking to that innocent child in that language , something inside of you will wake up and tell you this is not right . I should not be talking to her innocent child in that language . Something inside of you will wake up and tell you this is not right . I should not be talking to her like that .

This is the exact language that is a confidence killer . This language does nothing but create self-doubt . We think that punishing ourselves will create confidence , that degrading and debasing ourselves will create confidence . It will somehow teach us how to respond next time when people are inappropriate with us . It doesn't teach us anything useful .

It only creates more shame , guilt and self-doubt . This exercise sometimes is very hard for people because it's uncomfortable . Staring at a child in the picture and realizing that you've been yelling at her for all of your life . It brings up a lot of discomfort and people a lot of times avoid this exercise .

But trust me , if you want something in your life , you have to change the language that you use with yourself . Coming to the realization of how you are treating yourself is a powerful experience .

So then , when you come to me saying I'm not confident , I'm just going to turn around and start exploring the language in your head with you and a lot of coaching is about creating safety around this realization , around this language . When you come to this awakening that you've been creating your self-doubt , then you'll start reading yourself up for this self-doubt .

So then it's my job as a coach to help you understand that that is also optional . Remember looking at that innocent childhood picture ? Will you be talking to that baby this way ? Coaching , and then ultimately self-coaching , is about creating a safe language for yourself .

Another method to creating confidence is that don't take any action that you cannot share with the world . If you can't stand behind what you said or did , then you can never create confidence .

I'm not saying go about publicizing your mistakes Everyone makes mistakes but be able to own them and be able to do what you need to do to improve from the mistakes so it doesn't happen again . If your mistake is supposed to be made public , be able to explain yourself . Be able to stand behind all of your actions .

Don't do anything in private that you'll have a hard time defending in public . That is a huge confidence creator . This recommendation comes with a heavy warning . You don't have to explain yourself to anyone . Most of the time , people that are in the business of exposing you and your mistakes are not interested in your explanation .

So whatever you say doesn't matter anyways , but be able to explain your actions to yourself . That is the warning and that is the most important thing you can say to yourself I didn't mean for it to happen like that . I acted in a moment of weakness or I firmly stand behind what I did and these are my reasons for it .

Be able to answer all of these questions to yourself and , if you choose to , you can explain yourself to others if the need arises . Be able to always stand behind your actions . That will give you instant confidence . Don't take actions based on what you think people will think about you .

That is a total confidence killer because people's thinking is not in your control and for an average person who doesn't know the basic concepts of mind management , their thinking is not even in their control . Their brain is acting like a runaway criminal . So taking actions being afraid of what others will think will only create self-doubt .

Take actions based on your values , based on whether you think what you're doing will matter or not . You will save so much energy when you direct your mind away from worrying about what others think and directing it to focusing on what it is that you can control .

If you don't create self-confidence with the thoughts and the methods I give you in this podcast , you will create resentment by default . You have dreams , but you also have self-doubt that leaves your dreams unrealized . This is the recipe to create resentment . Feeling confidence is a skill .

The childhood picture exercise the standing behind your actions , exercise acting in integrity with yourself , owning up to your mistakes , not worrying about what others will think of you . Using all of these techniques will help you create more and more confidence . With that , I pray to Allah SWT to give us all confidence in our actions of faith .

O Allah , help us generate self-confidence so then we can take actions that are in integrity with our highest values . O Allah , help us stay close to revelation in its purest form so we can create pure values . I hope you guys are working to bring these suggestions that I give you in this podcast into reality , and I pray for your full success .

Please keep me in your draws . I will talk to you guys next time .