When building your confidence — in any area you’d like more of it in your life — it’s critical that we don’t just practice ‘thought’ or ‘mindset’ work: our nervous systems are also deeply connected to our ability to feel confident, grounded, healthy and calm.
Your nervous system and feeling more confident are intrinsically linked.
Your nervous system is your body’s command centre; it’s the connection between the brain and the body. Every day, triggered by different circumstances, our system weaves in and out of different states: fight or flight, and sometimes freeze or fawn, and back to calm again.
Those activated states can be triggered in us by different circumstances, including simple and seemingly non-dangerous events like getting an email from your boss, a judgemental comment on Facebook, your client quitting, or being criticized by a colleague. Different events trigger different reactions in different people. So where does your ability to feel confident come into all of this?
Confidence doesn’t live in a fight or flight state.
When we’re in fight or flight, we don’t have the capacity to relax or feel grounded and calm, and therefore we struggle to feel steady and confident.
If we find ourselves in fight or flight states constantly and without end — say, when we’re working in our business, or at our jobs, or every time we go for interviews — it can feel so hard to access confidence in ourselves.
Confidence lies in a regulated system. That’s where it’s accessible.
That’s when we notice a lot of self-doubt and insecure thinking about what could happen.
That’s not your fault.
Confident thoughts are much less accessible when we’re activated and in fight or flight.
Confidence lies in a regulated system. That’s where it’s accessible.
That feeling — and way of seeing ourselves and all that is possible for us — requires we be regulated first.
It’s why understanding and then attending to and nurturing your nervous system is a crucial part of building up your confidence — wherever in your life you may want more of it right now.
We are not just our minds.
We are body, minds and souls, and we have to take into account all of our pieces with respect and care if we want to function as healthy and confident people in this world.
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