Inner Compass – Shalini Sareen – Life & Executive Coach

One just can’t get confident by trying to be confident any more than one can get happy by trying to be happy.
To understand confidence, let’s try and understand what confidence is not. Confidence is not about being insecure or anxious. Going by that definition, it is implied that confidence is then more about being positive, about belief and trust. However, this direct approach to becoming confident often backfires.
So, let’s approach becoming confident by focusing on more of what you should do less of rather than more of:

1. Need for Reassurance: Seeking reassurance is like a band aid which addresses the hurt temporarily without addressing the root cause of the problem. Seeking reassurance helps your brain to practice fear and trains your brain to be afraid of being afraid. Just because something feels scary doesn’t mean that its actually dangerous or that you would not be successful. Practice embracing fear to embrace success is the Mantra here.

2. Worrying About Things You Cannot Control: Instead of worrying about something that you cannot do anything about, and dissipating energy, shift your energies to what you can create. Where attention goes, energy flows and a shift happens. Practice working on areas where you have control.

3. Relying on short term Feelings to Make Decisions: Humans are a feeling being who think and not a thinking being who feel. However, its important to have a sense of discernment between feelings that are transient and lead to short term satiation and feelings that give a sense of authenticity and wholeness to us that brings us closer to the person that we are meant to be.

4. Dwelling on Past Mistakes: Ruminating over past mistakes gets us stuck in fear and erodes our confidence. A knowing and understanding needs to set in that making mistakes are a part of life. Acceptance of the past mistakes and forgiving oneself and others, is the way to move forward. Practice the art of finding yourself and that sometimes comes only from making mistakes. A mistake is a win, if you are accepting and learning from the mistakes and finding yourself in the process. Accepting your mistakes, forgiving yourself and learning from the mistakes, taking the learnings and letting go of the experience, are some of the steps in the journey that you need to go through to ensure that you don’t get stuck in a negative past experience.