Episode 2: Defining confidence and it's role in your life

Hey all of my beautiful babes!

Thank you for tuning into another episode of the Confidence from the Ground Up Podcast.

I’m your host, Karleigh Saunders. I’m a Confidence Coach and obsessed with all things self love, confidence building, and personal growth.

Before we get started, I’ve got a question for you. What does confidence mean to you? When someone says ‘confidence,’ what’s the first thing that pops in your head?

I’m genuinely curious because this is actually going to have a major impact on how you’re going to perceive the rest of the episode and the next few coming. How you perceive confidence and realizing how you perceive confidence is really important. Having a goal of becoming more confident or having more confidence without really knowing what confidence even is, is kind of a set up for failure. Actually it isn’t even kind of, it’s definitely setting you up for massive failure.

Because what are you reaching for? It’s like saying you want to go to New York but refusing to look at a map. If you don’t live in New York, heck, I live in Washington State. If I tried that, I don’t even know where I would end up. I’d be completely lost.

That’s why it is so important to realize what confidence is and how it’s really impacting your life.

While you’re thinking about confidence, I want to talk about just how confidence can impact your life. Actually, I’m going to start off with lack of confidence.

I don’t want to come off as being super negative, but I think people definitely underestimate the power of confidence and just how much it impacts our lives on a daily, hourly basis.

Lack of confidence impacts the way you see yourself when you look in the mirror, it impacts how you show up in your job, it impacts your relationships, it impacts the risks you take.

When I say ‘risks,’ I mean going outside of your comfort zone. If you’re not confident in yourself you’re not going to go outside of your comfort zone. Therefore, never actually gaining more confidence and keeping yourself in a very dark cycle.

Lack of confidence impacts your family. It not only impacts how they perceive you, but it impacts them as well. It can also impact your friends.

I’m not trying to be depressing but think about it. If you’re struggling with self worth and self confidence, and striving and wanting to be more but feeling like you’re never going to be enough - girl. I’ve been there. I’ve been there and I get it. So I am not trying to bring you down, I’m not trying to be negative. What I am trying to do is bring to light all of the ways that confidence affects our lives.

Without confidence, when you look in the mirror, you don’t like what you see.

Without confidence, you’re not going to show up in your job, career or your business if you don’t believe in yourself.

Your relationships are going to be strained because, as I’ve learned, people notice.

With confidence, it impacts all of those things as well.

Think about it, if you’re confident you’re going to wake up and look in the mirror and say, “heck yea, I’ve got it going on!”

Confidence is not arrogance. Confidence is not never questioning yourself. Confidence is not never wondering if you’re going to slip up. Confidence is not never struggling.

When I say confident, I mean you get up and look in the mirror and you see your rolls and you think you’re hot anyway. Confidence is being presented with something that difficult and knowing that even though you may not be skilled right now, you can make it happen.

A whole new world will open up to you that you didn’t even know existed when you finally begin to cultivate the confidence that is begging to come out.

I know this because it impacted my life that way. I am a completely person than I was two years ago. I honestly think I’m a different person than I was six months ago. The more I learned and the more confident I became, the more I believed in myself.

It made me a better mom, daughter, sister, friend, coach, leader, Zumba instructor.

Because once I became confident, I went from trying to hide in the back of the room to moving up and becoming a Zumba instructor and teaching classes. Even though I don’t have the perfect body, I know I rock it anyway. That is confidence.

And that is why I’m so passionate about women finding their most confident selves.

Before I get into defining it, what does confidence look like for you? What does it mean to you?

First I’m going to start out with what confidence is not.

Confidence is not arrogance or never questioning your ability. Confidence is not having an easy life and never struggling. Confidence is not genetic. Confidence is not something that’s going to be dropped upon you by the heavens while angels sing above you and a ray of light shines. Confidence is not something that appears when you do something. Confidence is not some mystical unicorn that you can catch one day. Confidence is not something that you’ll get after you do that thing.

You know that thing.

That thing when you say, “When I lose 10 pounds I’ll be confident.”

“When I finally publish my book I’ll be confident.”

“When I finally go back to school and get my degree I’ll be confident.”

That’s not what confidence is. Confidence is a skill to be learned. That means that anyone with the desire to learn it, can learn how to become confident. I say this with 100% certainty.

Because all growing up, I was not set up to be confident.

Don’t get me wrong, I had a family that loved me. I’m blessed that I always had food on the table. But I grew up very overweight in a very overweight family. I grew up in a place where women talked negatively about themselves consistently. I grew up in a place where if there was any quiet space, someone’s weight loss or gain filled it. I got the message that your worth was tied into your weight.

I grew up morbidly obese and sucked into a whole lot of messes growing up. The heavens did not bestow confidence upon me. I was not born with it - that’s not how it works.

But what I know, is that if I can learn this skill, and if I can cultivate the confidence inside of me and let it grow, then anyone can. I fully stand behind that statement, “If I can do it, you can do it.”

Cliche or not, it’s 100% true.

Alright I get it, you want to know, what’s confidence? Confidence is, and I stole this definition from my coach, Brendon Burchard. It stuck with me and I want to make sure I give him credit. Knowing what I know about confidence and everything I’ve learned, this is the best definition I’ve seen.

Confidence is believing in your ability to figure it out.

Isn’t that crazy? When you think about it, how does that tie into your definition?

When I think of confidence, I think of going on a date and slaying it. I think about going on a date with a hot dude and feeling fine, enjoying myself. So how does that tie in with believing in my ability to figure it out?

Well, it’s believing in my ability to navigate and figure out a new situation. It’s believing in my ability to figure out how to act and how to feel, how to be the type of woman that I want to be.

Another thing that pops in my head when I think of confidence is having the ability to walk into the weight room at my gym and not be intimidated by all of the guys.

Let me paint a picture here. In case you haven’t seen me, I have long blue hair and an undercut, so half of my head is shaved. I’m a girl, so there are a few things that make me stand out. And I’m overweight. I also lift very, very heavy.

So for a long time, I was so terrified to go into the weightroom and be seen. But once I heard that definition, why was I so scared of going into the weight room? I was scared of being seen and looking stupid. I was terrified of looking stupid. How did I combat that? I learned more about weightlifting and training. I practiced and role played at home in the mirror. I decided that I believe in myself enough to figure it out.

Now, I’m in the weightroom 5-6 days a week. I was making friends with some of the buff dudes that were in there. No one thought I was stupid, and if they did they didn’t talk to me. Probably because they were terrified that I would crush them with weights.

But I started to get comfortable with this definition of believing in my ability to figure it out. That broke confidence down for me in a way that I’ve never thought about it before.

I’ve always been a learner. I’ve always loved to read and dig in and learn more. But it all comes down to your ability to figure it out. And doesn’t that bleed into so many of the other things we think of when we talk to ourselves?

If we think we’re not enough, because we don’t think we can figure it out.

We think we’re too much for someone, because we can’t figure it out.

There are all these different ways that this definition can apply because confidence is a skill, right? And confidence is believing in your ability to figure it out. If you struggle with this now, I want you to really see how awesome this is. This means that you can learn how to believe in your ability to figure it out.

That whole concept completely blew my mind.

I started picking up new books, courses, habits, and skills. I got so excited.

I can’t tell you when it happened, but somewhere along the way I stopped questioning my ability. I believed so fully in what I was learning that somehow I became confident.

That’s what I think is so beautiful about this confidence journey. I do call it a journey because I don’t believe there is a confidence destination. We always are going to have ways to grow and be more. We’re always going to have areas that we’re going to struggle with confidence and that’s ok.

I have plenty of my own that I’m still working on. But overall, I’m more confident now than I’ve ever been. I’ve never excelled more in every aspect of my life than when I found this whole concept of confidence is believing in your ability to figure it out.

So now, I’ve got another question for you. 

Now that you know the definition of confidence, and you can weigh it against your definition of confidence, I want you to really think about it.

What does confidence look like to you?

What does your most confident self look like? What does she do, what vibe does she give off, where is she at in life, what color is her hair?

Begin to really visualize your most confident self.

Once you have that all written down, the next question is, why?

Why does confidence look like that to you?

Why does your most confident self talk that way, do those things, think that way?

Really dig deep and think about why those things are important to you. 

What is holding you back from getting there?

Now that you know the definition of confidence is believing in your ability to figure it out, what’s really keeping you from it?

Really dig into this, make sure you’re writing it down.

How can you combat those things?

Disclaimer: I don’t care what size or shape your most confident self is. The number on the scale or your pants size does not change your worthiness or your ability to reach your most confident self. Maybe you want to lose weight or maybe you don’t, but I know so many women struggle with their bodies.

I understand wanting to hit a physical goal - I’m training to be a bodybuilder. I 100% support you. But I don’t want this exercise to become an excuse to beat yourself up and obsess over your body.

I 100% back your goal as long as it is done healthily.

Example:

My most confident self is very strong, buff, and won some bodybuilding competitions.

What held me back from that? I didn’t know how to do it. I didn’t have a plan.

How do I combat that? By getting a coach and workout plan. And that’s what I did.

My most confident self is also a world renowned speaker.

What held me back from that? I didn’t like the way I looked on stage and I didn’t believe in myself. I also struggle with talking too fast and rambling.

How do I combat that? By becoming healthier and focusing on mindset. I also signed up for courses, found mentors, I started this podcast, I do more video and audio content on social media.

Everything that’s holding you back, there’s a way to combat that.

This exercise will destroy all of your excuses. I didn’t like it either, and sometimes I still don’t.

As much as I love working out and cooking, there are days that I just want to sit down with a gluten free vegan donut and watch Mulan. But my most confident self has won bodybuilding competitions, so I need to work towards making that happen.

It is time to let go of the excuses and all of the nonsense that’s holding us back. It’s time to move forward into our most confident selves. No one can bestow confidence on you and no one can take it away from you. It is only up to us. It is up to us to cultivate it. Now is the time to move. Now is the time to grow.

It’s 2020, y’all. We’re done playing small. We’re done hiding. It’s time to own who we are, we are going to shine our light, and we are going to stop trying to hide it.

I say this to my clients all of the time: I’m not here to make you comfortable, I’m here to help you grow. And sometimes, this is hard. You have to dig deep, put forth a lot of effort.

But I can tell you with 100% certainty that this work is worth it. You’re going to find so many amazing things along the way that are going to inspire you to put in the effort. It’s going to feel less like work and more like an exciting treasure hunt. You have to work to find it, but you know it’s going to be great.

My hope is that you will start your confidence journey. That you will really begin to identify what confidence is to you and how you will get there. Because boo, you deserve a life where you are not constantly questioning your worth. You deserve to go after your dreams and quit wondering if you’re enough. You deserve to go after your most confident self.

I am cheering you on. I am holding your hand and running with you. I’m going to help you up when you fall because I desperately want to see you get there.

You. Are. Amazing.

It is time to step up and step into your potential and find your most confident self.

Thank you so much for tuning into another episode of the Confidence from the Ground Up Podcast. I hope that this hit home for you. I hope with everything in me that this will impact your life for the better. I hope that this will be the first day of the rest of your life.

Don’t forget,

You are strong.

You are capable.

You are intelligent.

You are worthy.

I’ll see you next week.