Practical Magic | An Alchemical Recipe for Confidence
Where do you think confidence comes from? I believe that confidence is the outcome of two subtle internal and external processes. Let me share the magic recipe with you...
Confidence Is an Outcome
Confidence happens when we have done something so many times that we stop overthinking it. Confidence is about being comfortable with a process.
When we see someone confident in public speaking, instead of imagining that they were just born that way, let’s imagine that they have shown up, practised, and worked through their uncomfortable feelings enough times that they are comfortable with that act.
But what happens when we want to step up to speak for the first time? It's not confidence that we can rely on because confidence is an outcome of doing something many times, so what is it instead? I believe that thing is courage. Courage is the ability to lead with the heart. It's the ability to do something with a sensation of, I'm scared, but it's worth it. I'm scared, but I want this. I'm scared, but my desire, my hope, my dream is bigger than my fear.
So if courage is what we can rely on to do something enough times until we develop confidence, where does courage come from?
It Starts With Self-Trust
Self-trust is the first step of the alchemical process of building confidence. And unsurprisingly, it’s one of the hardest, but it's not impossible.
If confidence comes from courage, courage comes from having a foundation of self-trust. And self-trust is the experience of being your own friend, of having unconditional love for yourself. When you have unconditional love for yourself, you trust that you can rely on yourself. Having a foundation of self-trust simply means that you believe in yourself and your capabilities as you try new things.
This comes from building up a bank of trust in yourself over time, and the good news is that you can start building up your trust bank quite easily.
Start with the small things. Start by becoming a friend to yourself. How do we show friends that we love them? We keep our commitments. We keep our promises. We check in with them. We please them. We share experiences that they enjoy with them. This is how you begin to become your own friend and start building up a foundation of self-trust.
For example, you may make a promise to yourself: I'm going to drink eight glasses of water today. And then you do it. And at the end of the day, you’ll see that you took care of yourself and kept your promise to yourself.
I've seen clients have phenomenal results with doing these little self-trust bank building experiments where they start with the smallest self-care promises or the smallest professional or creative promises. And in a short space of time, I'm talking days in a space of 10 days, that self-trust bank begins to fill up again.
Once your self-trust bank begins to fill up, you’ll begin to trust yourself with bigger and bigger things and begin to live a life with less shame, blame, self-attacking, punishment and regret.
Act With Courage and Wholeheartedness
With a foundation of self-trust, you’ll be able to do hard things and feel I'm scared, but it's worth it. I'm scared, but my desire is bigger than my fear and so I'm going to do it anyway. It’s this wholeheartedness that will lead to being able to do things again and again until you get more comfortable, and then you stop overthinking it. You stop having to do it consciously.
That is where confidence comes from.
With this in mind, I invite you to experiment and look out on the world. When you see people who you believe are very, very confident, ask yourself, Am I looking at a true expression of confidence that is coming from courage and a foundation of self-trust? Or am I looking at arrogance? Because when confidence is actually arrogance, it betrays the fact that this alchemical process has not taken place and there is a very, very shaky foundation underneath it all.
If you are someone who has been wondering how to become more confident in order to dare greatly and take on those big creative projects that you've been longing to do, ask yourself:
Do I have a strong foundation of trust? Do I trust myself? Am I my own friend?
If not, that is a very powerful place to begin.
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