Episode 37: 3 Beliefs That Will Boost Your Confidence

Confidence isn’t something you’re either born with or not—it’s something you believe your way into. In this episode, I’m sharing three specific thoughts you can click on and "buy" inside of your mind and feel the shift almost instantly. If you’ve ever felt paralyzed by fear, self-doubt, or decision drama, these beliefs will help you feel steady, brave, and full of grace for yourself. We’ll talk about what confidence really is—and what it definitely isn’t.

Wanna dive deeper into increasing your confidence? You'll love our recent workshop:  Real Confidence--What It Actually Is and How to Make Yours Unshakeable

Join the Think New Thoughts Academy for immediate accesss to this workshop (and so much more!) 

Or, schedule a free mini coaching session with me and I'll help you think new thoughts so you can feel more confident! 

Full Transcript:

You're listening to the Think New Thoughts Podcast with Emily Ricks, episode number 37. Three beliefs that will boost your confidence.

I'm Emily Ricks and this is Think New Thoughts, a life coaching podcast to help you find more joy in your relationships. In each episode, I'll share a simple idea that will help you see things in a new way so you can love God, your neighbor, and yourself more deeply than you ever have before. If you're ready to literally change your mind, I think you'll like it here.

Hey, how's it going? We're going to talk about confidence today, but first I want to share a review that one of you left for me on Apple Podcasts.

This is from Amber. The title of her review is Perfect Length. She says, I love this podcast so much.

So much information in the perfect length of time. Short, sweet, and to the point every time. Thank you, Emily.

Well, Amber, I'm so glad to hear that you like the length of the episodes and that you're enjoying the podcast. And thank you for taking the time to leave a review. Your reviews, you guys help the podcast show up higher in search results so people can find it more easily.

And your reviews can also inspire people to give the show a try as they see that you have found value in the content. So thanks, Amber, for helping me share these ideas with others. And if you have been enjoying these episodes and haven't left a review yet, here's my invitation to take a minute, type up three or four sentences of what you have found helpful or uplifting, and leave me a quick review.

Thank you in advance for helping me spread the joy. Okay, let's talk about confidence. I'm going to share with you three beliefs that will help you feel more confidence in your life.

So let's start by just reminding that confidence is a feeling, which means it's created by your thoughts. If you've been with me a little while, you know, I love the CTFAR model that I learned at the life coach school. Circumstances, thoughts, feelings, actions, results, circumstances are neutral.

That's the stuff that happens. Thoughts are optional. And then it's our thoughts that create our feelings.

Our feelings drive our actions and our actions or inactions produce our results. So confidence is a feeling and that means it's created by your thoughts. This is really important to remember because a lot of times we think that confidence is created by our circumstances, or we think it's created by actions we take that those actions are going to make us confident, but actually confidence is created by our thoughts.

And that's important to know because if you want to create more of it, you're going to be needing to do that with your mind. Let's also talk about the opposite of confidence. There's lots of different words that we could use.

Here are some of mine, doubt, hesitancy, worry, fear, nervousness, or actually being critical of myself. This is what I have found. One of the biggest opposites to self-confidence is self-criticism.

So just interesting to keep in mind and to think about if you want to feel more confident in your life, here are three thoughts that you can choose to believe. They're available to you right now. They're free to think.

I like to call it my mindazon.com where all of these different thoughts like products on amazon are just available. And any of these thoughts you could think it today, right now. You click on it, you get free two-second shipping.

It goes right to your brain and as soon as you begin believing these thoughts, you will feel more confident. Okay, here's the first one. Number one, I am capable of feeling any emotion.

I love this so much because self-doubt is usually some kind of a question, right? Like what if something terrible happens? What if I fail? What if I mess up? What if they judge me? What if I look bad? What if I don't measure up? Self-doubt is worrying that something might happen on the circumstance line of your model. That's going to create a feeling on the feeling line of your model. That is going to be terrible.

Like maybe I'm going to be humiliated or maybe I'll feel rejected or maybe I'll feel embarrassed or maybe I'll feel disappointed. Maybe I'll feel regret, but this thought I'm capable of feeling any emotion can really increase your confidence because no matter what happens on your circumstance line, you're actually capable of feeling any of those emotions. It's just an emotion.

It's just a vibration in your body. It's not going to harm you. And if you know that the worst thing that could ever happen in your life is a negative emotion, and also that you're capable of feeling any of them, all of them, this is really powerful armor to wear in your life.

Some people think confidence is magically knowing that nothing will ever go wrong, that everyone's going to love me. I'm never going to mess up and things are always going to go the way I plan for them to go. And here's what I want you to know.

That's not actually what confidence is. If you try to believe that everything's always going to go right and nothing's ever going to get messed up, your confidence is based on how other people respond to you based on what happens on your circumstance line. And I promise you that when real life happens, your confidence is going to get rocked because you will mess up.

Sometimes things are going to go wrong. People are going to judge you, but guess what? If you feel humiliated or embarrassed or rejected, you can handle it. I promise you it's just a vibration in your body.

You're going to get through it. You are capable of feeling any emotion and choosing to believe this will increase your confidence from a feeling of confidence. You'll end up taking more risks, sharing more of your gifts, contributing in the world more and creating more in your life.

So that's the first belief that will increase your confidence. The second one is this. All humans are amazing, including me.

Some people think confidence is kind of a Gaston from beauty and the beast, you know, strutting around thinking you're amazing and superior to everyone else. You know, the line where he's about to go ask a bell to marry him. And he's like, I'd like to thank you all for coming to my wedding, but first I'd better go in there and propose to the girl.

Like you could say, wow, that guy's super confident. But what I would say is actually that he's arrogant. I see Gaston as a character who's arrogant rather than confident.

And this is an important distinction to make because arrogance is I'm amazing. And you're not, but confidence is I'm amazing. And you are too.

This is a teeny little detail, but it makes a huge difference. And what I love about this belief, every human is amazing, including me, is that if you truly believe that you are amazing and you know that everyone else is too, if you believe that you are incredible simply because you're a child of God and that everyone else on the planet also has limitless potential and possibility. If you really believe this, then no failure, no mistake, no negative opinion from anyone else will have the power to knock your self-confidence.

This is super important. You are amazing. I'm amazing too.

Everyone has limitless potential, even if they're not performing at their highest level in this current moment. If you really believe this, it will skyrocket your feeling of confidence. Give it a try.

Okay. Here's the third one. All decisions can help me learn.

How confident are you about making decisions? Like when you're vacillating about making a decision, what do you worry about? What do you hesitate about? What are you afraid might happen? I work with women who sometimes do not feel confident about making decisions. And they think thoughts like, what if I make the wrong decision? What if the decision I make turns out badly and I make a mess of things? Or what if I waste money or I waste time on something that I never even should have done in the first place. So this whole belief is really interesting.

It's like, if I make a bad decision, it might have a bad outcome and that will be bad. And it will mean that I'm bad. Now, as a Christian, I do believe in right and wrong.

I believe that it's wrong to cheat on your spouse, to steal, to lie, to kill, things like that. But in another way, I actually don't believe anymore that there are good decisions or bad decisions. I don't find it useful anymore to be worried that I will make a bad decision that will have a bad outcome.

Because what this creates for me is a lot of self-doubt and worry and a lot of criticism of myself, criticism in advance or criticism looking back saying, I should never have done that. I should never have chosen that. It would be better if I didn't do that.

And confidence feels really different than that. People think confidence means, I just know for sure that every decision I make is going to be amazing. It's going to be the best possible one that I could have ever made.

But that's not real confidence because you know, it's not going to, not every decision you make is going to turn out amazing. But confidence means I know that no matter what happens, I'm going to learn from whatever I decide. I can handle whatever outcome there is from my decision.

And no matter what happens, I'm not going to beat myself up for any decision I made. I might evaluate my decision. I might analyze the result it created for me and then decide, you know, Hey, next time I'd like to approach that differently because I don't love this result that I got from this decision I made, but I can feel confident in my relationship with myself because I know I'm not going to beat myself up.

I'm not going to tell myself, Oh, you should have chosen something else because that's pointless and it will get me nowhere. So I can be confident as I make decisions because I know that I will be compassionate with myself. No matter what happens, this is available to you to self-compassion, promising that that's what's going to happen in the future, that you will be compassionate with yourself can help you feel confident now about your decisions, right? I'm willing to make mistakes.

I'm willing to make decisions to use my agency, to seek wisdom from God along the way, but it's okay. If I end up spending my time on something that didn't turn out to be super fulfilling. Now I know it's okay.

If I realize that a parenting decision I made didn't bring about the result I wanted it to. Now I know I can adjust for next time. I promise you, you'll feel so much more confidence in your life.

If you have your own back, as you make decisions, having your own back means you accept your decision. You accept the outcome, even if it's not exactly what you hoped or wanted, and you validate that you did the best you could. If you do this, you're going to have more and more confidence as you make decisions, because all decisions will help you learn.

If you want to think in terms of good decisions and bad decisions, okay, even the bad ones will give you experience and be for your good in the end. Or if you want less drama about the whole thing, you can just decide that there are decisions and they're not good or bad. They just create different results.

And then you can analyze and evaluate the decisions you've made and make adjustments that are going to be better aligned with what you want to create and who you want to be. So if you want to feel more confident, I want to encourage you to make decisions and learn from them. Have your own back and commit to yourself that you won't be mad at yourself if a decision you make creates a situation where you end up feeling disappointed or embarrassed or rejected.

Going back to number one, you can handle all of those emotions, so it's fine. You don't need to insulate yourself from ever feeling negative emotion. And if you believe that, then you don't have to be mad at yourself for making a decision that now maybe you feel a little bit negatively about.

And whatever decision you make, you're going to have experience which you wouldn't have gotten if you had agonized about the decision and not made one at all. Okay, so those are three beliefs that will boost your confidence. You can believe them anytime you want to.

Number one, I'm capable of feeling any emotion. Number two, all humans are amazing, including me. Number three, all decisions can help me learn.

We recently did a 60-minute workshop all about confidence inside the Think New Thoughts Academy. So if you want to go deeper on this idea and get more help increasing your confidence, you're going to love that workshop. When you join the Academy, you can watch the replay anytime and you get a printable confidence self-assessment that I walk you through in the workshop to find out how confident you are in six key areas of your life and what adjustments you can make in your thinking to create even more confidence.

Head to emilyrickscoaching.com/join to learn more about the Think New Thoughts Academy and to access that workshop. If you want to become more confident about your ability to feel negative emotion, or if you want to get better at having your own back when you make decisions, schedule a free mini session with me by going to emilyrickscoaching.com/minisession. And I'd love to help you think new thoughts so you can feel more confidence.