You Have Confidence All Wrong

So , if you're someone who feels like you are not fully showing up in your life as the authentic version of yourself , maybe you're hiding , maybe your self-worth and your self-esteem feels lower than you would like it to be , and it's affecting different areas in your life , like your career , your relationships , your social life .

If perhaps you don't have the confidence that you can follow through on things , because every time that you tell yourself you're going to start something or you're going to stick to it , either you never start or you fall through the cracks and fall right back into your old habits so you've developed this notion that you're not confident that you can actually achieve

the things you set your mind to . Well , today I'm going to give you a masterclass on confidence . You're going to learn what confidence really is and how it gets developed , why most people have it all wrong and what it actually takes to start building that confidence in yourself that no one is really talking about . So stay tuned .

Welcome to the Live , unrestricted podcast , a show where you'll learn how to heal your relationship with food and your body so that you can focus your time and energy on more important things like your personal growth .

I'm your host , sabrina Magna , food freedom coach , and my mission is to help make your life happier and healthier , without stress , overwhelm or guilt about food . If you love the show , please do go out and share it , and if you're looking for support with your relationship with food , details about my programs are in the show notes .

Thanks for spending time with me today . Now let's jump in . All right , so this episode is going to be very meta , and what I mean by that is when I sat down to record this podcast it is currently 6 PM on a Friday night and I did not feel like recording a podcast .

To be honest , this entire week it was on my to-do list to record this podcast and I just got super busy and I had other things that took priority .

But I made a commitment to myself that I wanted to record this podcast for you guys this week and I know that confidence comes from consistently sticking to the commitments that you make to yourself and I was dedicated to showing up , because I told myself that I would record this podcast for you .

And then , when I went to go sit down to record this podcast , I had a completely different topic that I wanted to talk about , but it wasn't flowing naturally . Kind of it felt very forceful and so I stopped recording and I was like you know what ? I just need to record what is coming naturally out of me .

And so , instead of talking about the other topic that I had planned , I wanted to talk about how you build confidence , because , like I said , confidence comes from consistently sticking to the commitments that you make for yourself .

And if you think that confidence comes from something outside of you right , maybe I'll feel confident once I look a certain way or I have a certain relationship or I achieve a certain thing Then you're going to constantly be chasing something that's going to be out of your reach , because confidence is a thought process and your thoughts happen on your brain level ,

and if you're going to change the way that you feel about yourself , it needs to happen from within . So when I started my podcast , I didn't have confidence that I would be a good podcaster because I had never done it before .

And the thing about confidence and the thing about growing confidence is that it doesn't happen overnight , and people think that you need to be confident before you start something .

I need to be confident that I'm going to be successful in my intuitive eating journey , and even just saying those words sound so crazy to me , because intuitive eating journey is in the words . It's a journey . It's not your successful or your failure . It's something that you work on consistently .

And that's a question that I've been getting a lot recently is how long does it take for it to all click ? And the thing is that it's it's as if you're going to therapy and you're asking like , okay , how many sessions until I'm healed ? And you're constantly going to be growing .

And I've been doing therapy for the past couple of months and what I know is that there's some weeks where I feel like I'm really making progress and then there's some weeks that are a little bit harder . And it doesn't mean that I'm a failure or that I'm throwing my money away Absolutely not .

I see doing therapy as being one of the best things that I've ever done , because I'm learning so much about myself , and that's exactly what intuitive eating is . It's your learning about yourself .

You're learning about your mindset , you're learning about your habits , you are reconnecting with who you are , because when you're constantly dieting you're so disconnected because you're constantly chasing something that you think will make you feel a certain way Right , if I finally hit a goal weight or a number on the scale , then I'll be happy and then I'll be

confident .

And so you're never actually living in the present , you're never actually there for yourself , because you're always living into this arbitrary future that may or may not exist and a lot of the times , even if you do hit that goal weight , then you feel disappointed because you don't feel the confidence or the happiness that you thought that you would feel .

And it's coming back to that sense of confidence that it all happens in your head , in your thought processes .

And that's why in the Academy , we're always talking about rewiring your mindset , because if you want to achieve the kind of life that you think is really going to make you feel better , you feel happy and confident and successful it all starts from the inside .

So back to when I started this podcast almost a year ago at this point which is absolutely mind blowing to me I for a very long time put it off because I knew that I wanted to launch this and I knew that I wanted to help people and I knew that I had a lot to share . But I had never done it before .

So my fear voice was saying what if you're terrible at this ? What if no one listens Right Like anyone who's ever achieved something big ?

If you think that they had no fear and they have no self doubt and there was no imposter syndrome , then you are living on another planet , because anything that pushes you outside of your comfort zone is going to bring up some fear and some self doubt .

And , of course , you're not going to be confident right away , because people think that in order to become great at something , you just wake up overnight and you're great at it , and they're not willing to be bad at something to become good and then to be good at something to become great .

And so when I first started my podcast , I was expecting to have that confidence that one day I would feel quote unquote ready to do it and then I would launch my podcast . And then , after months and months of procrastinating and my own coaches asking me like , what are you waiting for ?

Because , of course , I have my own coaches when it comes to business , because I'm always trying to grow . And they were asking me , like , what are you waiting for ? And I had no answer and I knew I was getting in my own way and I knew that I was afraid . And the thing is , when it , when I decided to launch my podcast , I was still afraid .

And I did it anyways , because going after your dreams does not mean doing it in the absence of fear . It means doing it with the fear present , but not letting your fear control your decisions .

Same thing when I went to Italy and I pushed myself to expose myself to my fear foods and to stop tracking food and to just expose myself to a completely new way of thinking about food , I was terrified .

It didn't feel comfortable to do it , I didn't want to do it , but I knew that I had to if I wanted to live the kind of life that I said , that I wanted to .

Right , I had all of these values , these values of freedom and of traveling and of relationships and of love , and there was no way for me to actually live by those values If I was going to continue living the way that I was living before , which was in my comfort zone right Comfort zone of tracking my food and obsessing over everything and over exercising .

Our comfort zone is not necessarily comfortable , it's just familiar and it's what we know . And so if we keep waiting for confidence before we start doing something , we are going to wait forever . Because confidence is what we know , because confidence comes from actually doing the thing and working through the kinks and making mistakes and being bad at something .

Your best lessons come from doing something wrong . They come from doing something badly . They come from mistakes . You don't learn much from success . You learn when something goes wrong and you have to go in there and dissect it and see what can I learn from this ? What went wrong ? What do I need to change moving forward ?

And that's exactly the process of changing your relationship with food . You're not going to know what to do from the get-go . You're not going to be confident in your own body , confident in your ability to make food choices right away . You're just not going to because you've never done it before .

And if you keep waiting to be confident to start , you are going to wait forever . You have to stop being so afraid of making mistakes and of doing something badly . The reason why you are so afraid of that is not because of the mistake itself , but about what we make the mistake mean , right ?

So if I am on this journey to heal my relationship with food and I've been and I binge and I make it mean that I'm a failure and that I'll never be able to solve this and I'm never going to be over , able to overcome this , then of course that fear , that thought , is really scary .

But if you're able to change the meaning that you associate to certain events and to certain thoughts and to certain things in your life , instead of seeing a binge as I'm a failure and I'll never be able to solve this and I'm not good at intuitive eating you see a binge , as this is something that I can learn from right .

Let me sit down , let me slow down with this and let me dissect . What can I learn from this , what may have contributed to my binge and the truth is , the hard truth is that most people don't want to do that . Most people do not want to slow down and actually allow themselves to look within .

Let me get to the root cause of this , because it's actually a lot easier to blame our willpower , to blame our self-control and to just say you know what it must be cause I'm not . I'm not good at this , so that's why I keep binging and that's why I'm always going to struggle with my relationship with food .

It absolves us of responsibility , and that is much easier than sitting down and saying I didn't love how this felt and I want to find out why . I want to find out what I'm doing .

When I started going to therapy , I actually went into therapy not knowing what I was going to address .

I just always wanted to go to therapy and I am someone who goes around saying that everyone should go to therapy and I wasn't going to therapy myself and I felt like a hypocrite and I was like I am a woman of my word , so I'm going to go and start therapy .

So I started therapy and as we started working through it , I started working on my relationship with work and setting more boundaries with work , because I am obsessed with my job , I'm obsessed with helping you and I really love what I do , but I do tend to take it to an extreme .

So , working with my therapist , I had to actually sit down and , instead of doing what I used to do , which was just blaming the fact that I'm a perfectionist and an overachiever and a type A personality . I had to sit down and understand where is this coming from ?

Why do I continue to overwork and why do I lack boundaries in work and why do I feel guilty for taking a night off ? That piece is a lot harder because it requires doing the mental work to understand your patterns .

It requires you using your brain and , unfortunately , when I start working with my clients , what I have seen time and time again is that we're never taught how to do that . We're never taught how to look at our brains and how to understand our patterns and how to be at introspective , and you will know if that is your problem as well .

If you feel like you live life on autopilot , if you are in survival mode , if you feel like the day just passes by and you don't really make the decisions they just happen , if your habits have been the same for years and years and you've been trying to break them and you don't know how to stop , if you feel like you're in a rut , or if you're quote

unquote stuck . And if I were to ask you right now to tell me the top five thoughts that go through your mind on a daily basis , would you be able to tell them to me right off the bat .

If I were to ask you the top three emotions that you feel on a daily basis , then would you be able to tell me right now and also what thoughts trigger those emotions ?

Because your emotions are triggered by a thought that you're having and if right now , during this conversation , you're like oh my god , I am living life on autopilot , I don't know why I do what I do and I don't know I don't even know how to stop , then it's okay . You're not alone . 90% of the population lives this way .

We're not super intentional with the lives that we create . We let life happen to us instead of creating a life , being intentional , being the architect of your life and making choices that sometimes feel uncomfortable , but they enhance your growth and they make your life bigger and richer and more fulfilling .

So we need to stop thinking that we are going to be confident before we start something .

If , right now , you're hearing all of this and you might be thinking I have so much work to do , right , if I'm looking at the thought of unpacking my relationship with food , my body image , my years and years of dieting and I don't even know where to start , and just the thought of doing it is so overwhelming so I might as well not start at all because I

don't want to be bad at it . Then you're constantly going to keep delaying finding freedom . It's as simple as that . You need to be willing to not know . You need to be willing to make mistakes . You need to be willing to be bad at something . When I sat down to record this podcast , I literally had no idea what I was going to talk about .

I was just like I'm going to let things flow and I went into it thinking . Number one if it's bad , that's okay . Number two I don't need to have it all figured out , I can just start and see where it takes me . And the same mentality applies to intuitive eating .

Of course , you will be a lot better off if you have support , if you have someone who's walking you through that process , because at least you're trusting that what you're doing is on the right track , right ?

You're really trusting that even if you make a mistake and even if you have a bad day , then you're still going in the right direction and you still have clarity . But you have to be willing to start and to not be perfect , because that is how confidence is built .

If you want to develop confidence in your body and I'm not seeing confidence in the sense of like you look in the mirror and you're like , whoa , I could put on a bikini right now and I look like hot shit that's not what I mean .

I mean confidence that you know how to nourish your body , confidence in your ability to make food choices for yourself , confidence that you can trust yourself around food . That's the kind of confidence I mean . If you want to develop that kind of confidence , you need to start somewhere Right .

And by respecting other people's rules and by restricting and by following meal plans and doing detoxes . That's not going to give you the kind of confidence in your body that you want to have , because all you're doing is you're outsourcing these decisions . You're not doing the hard work to reconnect to what your body is telling you . And it is hard work , right .

If you've been dieting for a very long time , it's not going to happen overnight . But , like I said and I'm going to say it time and time again you have to be willing to be bad at something before you get good , before you get great .

It took me years , years , to really get in tune with my body , to work through my food rules and to actually be able to call myself a true intuitive ear years , because I didn't think that it was going to happen overnight and I was willing to be patient .

And finally , like I said at the beginning of this episode , confidence comes from consistently sticking to the commitments that you make to yourself .

If you have a track record of saying you're going to do something and then pushing it aside or forgetting about it or just deciding that it's not important in this moment , if you feel like your word means nothing because you're constantly saying you're going to do something and that you don't , or if and this is the biggest one if you have a bunch of values

that you say are your most important values , my biggest values I was talking to . I was talking to someone who just joined the program , two days ago , and she was telling me how her biggest value is freedom , which is one of my biggest values too and her biggest value is freedom and growth , and she felt like she was living out of integrity .

And when you're not living in integrity , it means that you have all these values that you claim are important to you , but your actions don't align with it . And so if you're someone who will say I think everyone should love themselves and respect their bodies , no matter what they look like . I think everyone should eat all foods and not feel guilty .

I think everyone should have peace and I think that all bodies are good bodies , if these are the things that you truly believe about other people , but you're not living in alignment with those beliefs , then you're living out of integrity .

And when you're living out of integrity , it's very difficult to feel confident , to have that kind of confidence because you're not sticking to the commitments that you made to yourself . A commitment to a value right , like , I am committed to figuring my relationship with food out , but you keep going back to dieting .

You're not sticking to that commitment you made to yourself . And if you're not taking actions towards that goal and even if you're bad at it at the beginning , right , you're not taking actions towards it Then of course , the confidence is not going to come . So I'm going to wrap things up . I hope this was a interesting conversation for you about confidence .

Like I said , I sat down and I said I'm going to record a podcast and I'm going to see what flows out , and I guess I'll finish with my last message to you Don't wait to feel confident to start . Don't wait to feel ready , because you will wait forever .

And don't wait for someone to make that decision for you to come in and say , all right , today is the day that we start feeling uncomfortable and we start unpacking this relationship with food and we start doing the work to actually move forward in the right direction .

No one is going to twist your arm and do that for you , and confidence also comes from taking ownership of your life , taking responsibility for your life and making a change . Think of the 80 year old version of yourself , who is going to be so fricking proud of you that you decided that enough is enough .

And I'm going to do the work to figure this out once and for all now , so that I can have the next 30 , 40 , 50 years of my life in peace , so that I don't have to keep repeating the patterns that I have been suffering through for the past 5 , 10 years , 5 , 10 , 20 years or maybe even decades . Don't make decisions from your current self .

Don't make decision from your current levels of fear and of self doubt . Make decisions for the future version of yourself . Make decisions from a place of possibility and opportunity , instead of from a place of fear and a self doubt . If your brain keeps going to the worst case scenario , what if this doesn't work ? What if I'm bad at it ?

What if I lose control ? What if I gain weight ? What if , what if , what if ? And your brain is going to oh , it's going to come up with so many reasons why you shouldn't do this , and you can decide to listen to it . You can decide to listen to the fear , but all you know is that it will continue to keep winning until you decide .

I acknowledge that the fear is there and I'm going to do it anyways . All right , have a great day . Have a great day . I'll see you soon .