Happy Monday and welcome to your mental health mini. This is also your mini reminder to vote if you're listening to this on Election Day. This week's guest is Sammy Halverson, and we are talking self-confidence. A lot of times I'll ask girls, I'm like, tell me just five things that you love about yourself. And they're kind of like, is that allowed? And I'm like, how do you not know what you love about
yourself? And it's almost like our brains are trained to think that if we love something about ourselves, then we're going to be arrogant or we're going to be conceded, or we're going to think that we're better than other people. So actually what self-confidence is, is the ability to be vulnerable and open up yourself to negative emotion. Say I'm trying to make some friends, all right? And I am self confident. That means I'm going to go up to somebody and I'm going to say hi.
And I am going to let it be awkward, as awkward as possible, right? And that's what self confident people do is they allow themselves the awkwardness. And even now when I meet somebody, I'm like, Oh yeah, this is awkward. It's it's just awkward. Awkwardness is going to be there. And self confident people, they let it be there.
They let themselves be open to being judged and they let themselves be vulnerable and they let themselves be laughed at. And when we're not self confident, we run away from being laughed at. We run away from the awkward conversations. We run away away from being judged, we run away from being
embarrassed. And so it's not that self confident people don't feel any of those negative emotions, but they allow themselves to feel those negative emotions and they open themselves up to it. So anytime we wanna make friends, it's gonna be awkward. We're going to be judged, People are going to look at us and we allow ourselves that. Anytime that we get up in front of people and we talk, we are allowing ourselves to be judged and we're going to feel
embarrassed. People are going to make comments about us. And the self confident people, they embrace that and they know that. That's part of it. Anything worth having, you have to go through negative emotion to get it. And if that's how it is, the self-confidence, like you have to put in the work to go through all the negative emotion to get yourself confidence. And I think it just, it builds
on itself. You know, the more and more awkward conversations you have, the better you get having awkward conversations. And that's eventually where yourself confidence comes from, right? The more people that laugh about you, about the way that you look, and the more you embrace it and you let yourself be vulnerable, it's like, yeah, that's how you gain yourself confidence by going through all those negative emotions.
I do so much coaching on girls who are always worried about saying the wrong thing or just like overanalyzing and overthinking everything that they say to a friend or text. Whereas if you, if you truly loved yourself and you had really great opinions of yourself, like I'm not expected to be perfect. I'm not going to be perfect, right? Then we allow ourselves to make mistakes and have grace with ourselves and love ourselves instead of like beating ourselves up.
If we constantly have the thought I'm not good enough, then we are going to feel unworthy or depressed or sad. And then when we feel sad or unworthy or depressed and all those kind of emotions because we're thinking I'm not good enough, then we take actions from that place, which are when we're, when we're sad and depressed. What do we do? We avoid and we distract ourselves from living our lives. And we scroll on our phones and we look at all the ways in which we are not good enough.
Our brain is really, really good at gathering all the evidence to support what we're believing. And so when we stay in our bed and we don't live our lives, like our result is that we we don't get out there and we don't expose ourselves to the world and we don't enjoy being who we are, which is such a gift. And people around us don't get to enjoy us either.
And so I just think that when we train our brains to think I'm not good enough, or nobody likes me, or nobody wants to be my friend, or nobody cares about me, we actually end up causing our own result in that sort of way where nobody has a chance to get to know you, nobody has a chance to love on you because they don't ever see you, or nobody talks to because you're
not around. So if we can change the way that we think about ourselves and view our worth and view our value, then we can ultimately change our result, which is enjoying who we are and being the best version of ourselves and letting the world get to know us and letting the world
get to know of our goodness. I just feel like there's so many amazing things about everybody on this earth and we're all so different and we all have so much to offer that if we can believe that the world wants what we have to offer, the world will embrace us. If you enjoyed this week's mental health mini, you can listen to the full episode. It is episode 86 featuring Sammy Halverson, the host of the Teen Life Coach podcast. A link to the full episode is in
the show notes. As always, make sure to leave a review, subscribe, share with a friend or family member, and follow it at She Persisted Podcast. Thanks for listening.