Ep. 18: How to Build Self Confidence and Accomplish Anything

In order to make a pivot or meet any big goal, you need self confidence. But what exactly that is, and how to build it, is something we’re rarely taught. In this episode Coach Stephanie walks through the difference between confidence and self confidence, why that matters when it comes to your goals, and how to create more self confidence so that you can have what you need to go after any, and every, goal you want to achieve.

Hey there, welcome to another episode of The I'm the Problem podcast. I am Stephanie Finigan, I'm a certified life coach and I am your host for the show. On today's episode, we're going to be talking about a topic that is really important and relevant if you are somebody that is going after a big goal, trying to make a big change, or obviously the way that I like to phrase it is trying to make a big life pivot. If you have a big change in mind, it's really important that this concept that we're going to talk about today is something that you are not only aware of, but really practicing.

So the concept is something you've heard of before, I'm sure, which is self-confidence, but we're talking specifically about the difference between confidence and self-confidence as we speak about it in coaching terms. And then we're gonna tie that back to why it's so necessary to understand and be practicing the concept of self-confidence as we talk about it here, so that you can utilize it to help yourself get to whatever goal you are wanting to get to.

Okay, when we talk about confidence in coaching, what we're talking about is evaluating ourselves based on evidence that comes from the past. The simple example I've heard my coach use a million times, you're confident that you can pour a glass of water because you've done it so many times in the past, right? Like you get up in the morning and you go to pour yourself a glass of water or a cup of coffee or whatever it is, and you don't really think about it or worry about it or put a lot of emphasis mentally on it, you just do it because you've done it so many times before, so you know you can do it again. Same with riding a bike, right, or driving a car, or maybe it's the same with giving a presentation at work. If you're somebody that's comfortable presenting in a room or presenting in front of a crowd, or recording a podcast, whatever it is, if you have confidence in yourself when you do it, it's likely because you're drawing on the fact that you have done it in the past, and therefore you know how to do it, so you know you can do it again. That's where confidence comes from.

Self-confidence, when we talk about it in coaching terms, is based internally. It's very different. It's based on your choice to believe in yourself without any evidence or without any history of the thing that you want to do. Another way to think about it is self-confidence is what you think about yourself before you try something. If you want to record a podcast, you've never done that before, but you're thinking, no, I have the capability to do this. I can figure this out. I'm sure I can make it happen. That's self-confidence. You're tapping into self-confidence because you don't have any evidence that you can succeed, but you're choosing to believe that you can anyway. That's what self-confidence is. It's based on your future self, right? So that's the difference.

The key here is if you're always relying on confidence, if you're always relying on evidence from your past, you will just keep doing what you've always done. Or when we're talking about goals and achievement, you will just keep being good at the things you've always been good at.

For example, for myself, I have talked about this before, I'm a runner. I'm one of those very annoying people that runs marathons and then talks a lot about it. So apologies to everybody because I know unless you're a marathon runner, that's pretty annoying, but it makes for great examples when I'm talking about coaching. There's a lot of tie-in between life coaching and marathoning. So, I know I am not a fast runner by any real measure, but I know that I can run a marathon. I know if I just put in the training, do the work, stay healthy, that I will be able to run a marathon because I have done it before.

Here's the thing, I have a marathon coming up in November. And right now, I've got a lot of confidence that I can finish that marathon in a relatively slow time, but I know that I can finish it. And that's fine. I know that because I've done that before. But if I wanna run this marathon in November at a much faster time than I've ever done before, that's gonna require me tapping into my self-confidence. That's gonna require me saying, oh, I've never run a marathon in three hours and 30 minutes but I'm gonna choose to believe I can and then I'm gonna from there take all the actions I need to take to get there. If I don't do that, if I rely on confidence, I'm just gonna keep running relatively slow marathons at much slower times because I'm pretty good at that because I've done that before and I have confidence that I can do it again. So if you want to try new things, if you want to achieve new goals, if I want to achieve a new PR, a new personal record in marathoning, I need to focus on building my self-confidence.

Another one, I coach clients a lot on money. I actually love, I'm not specifically a money coach anymore. I was for a little bit but I really love coaching on money. It's my most favorite topic. And I coach a lot of people that struggle with debt, credit card debt, student loans, what have you. They just feel like they keep paying off their credit cards and running them back up or paying down their debt and then running it back up. I know this, I have done this myself. I, before I got coaching to fix that mindset pattern that was getting me there. And I've talked about that on previous episodes. When I talk to clients, I've got a lot of confidence that I can help a client with that specific issue because I've done it before. I've helped myself, I've helped other clients, I've gotten coaching on it, I've got lots of evidence from my past that tells me I know how to do that.

When I've got a client coming to me with that problem and I'm telling them, no, you can definitely pay off your credit cards and keep the balance at zero. You can learn to live a debt-free life if that's what you want. We can do that together. That's what coaching can help you with. My client doesn't have any confidence that they can do that because they haven't done it before. Everything in their brain is telling them, no, no, you in the past keep paying off your credit cards and running them back up again. So this won't be any different. What they need to do at that point and what we talk a lot about is tapping into their self-confidence, tapping into building the belief that they can pay off their credit cards, they can pay off their debt, or they can remain debt free, even though they don't have a track record of doing that, and they can't rely on their past self and evidence from the past. They have to practice the belief that they can do it, looking at their future, not looking at their past.

So then the question becomes, okay, I get it, Coach. I know I need to be tapping into my self-confidence if I want to make my pivot, if I want to get to my goal. But how do I do that? In order to understand the how, we need to first talk about self-confidence and feelings.

There are two keys here when we're talking about self-confidence and feelings or emotions. I use feelings and emotions interchangeably. So, number one, the only reason we want anything in life is because of how we think we're gonna feel when we get it. That's really important. I think I've probably said that before on other episodes, but it's really key to think about this. We always think like, oh, I want more money. I wanna lose weight. I want a happier marriage. I want a new car. I want, whether it's material or personal or no matter what it is, whenever we want something, we think we want, oh, I want a bigger house. Why do you want a bigger house? Well, because our family's growing. I want more space for us. Well, why do you want more space? Well, because it will feel better when we all have more space. The house will feel better. I will feel like I have some privacy. I will feel like I have a space of my own and that will help me feel calm. My kids will each have their own bedroom and that will help them feel calm or confident or peaceful or relaxed in their house.

Think about it, whatever you want, whether again it's material or personal, anything, no matter what it is, you want it because of how you think you're going to feel when you get it. That's why feelings or emotions are so important when it comes to goal setting, when it comes to thinking about what we want.

And the other thing to keep in mind is that the worst thing that can happen to us is a feeling. So that sounds very dramatic. And every time I say that, there's a kind of a knee-jerk reaction to be like, what are you talking about? The worst thing that can happen to me is my house can burn down. Something tragic can happen to my family. You know, we can lose someone, death, illness. Like you can think of all of the terrible things that could potentially happen to anybody. That's part of the human experience is knowing that it's not permanent and there is risk and fear and all of that. If something happened to someone in your family or yourself or your home or someone that you love, you would have a lot of emotion about it. We don't want to feel loss. We don't want to feel grief. We don't want to feel fear. We don't want to feel anger or resentment. We don't want to feel any of those things. And that's what we mean when we say the worst thing that can happen to us is a feeling. So it's not to dismiss any tragedy or anything that can happen that is scary or fearful for us, but it's to say that you've got a circumstance, a fact that can happen, and then there's a whole bunch of feelings. And that's what we mean when we say that.

It might sound like semantics or I'm being picky or it's like, what does it matter? But it does matter because when we're talking about goals and we're talking about making big life changes, when we're talking about achieving things, what we want to remember is that if you're willing to feel anything, you can literally accomplish anything. That's really important. If I was not willing to feel embarrassed or if I was not willing to feel scared, then I wouldn't be putting this podcast out for critique in the world, right? There's many people who will hear this podcast that won't like it. They won't find it useful. They won't like my coaching. They won't like the sound of my voice. I say like too much. I say um too much. I swear too much. My recording setup isn't top-notch. You know, whatever it is, there are plenty of people that could critique anything that I put out in the world or any of us put out in the world, and certainly people have. And I have to be willing to feel the sting of that, the embarrassment or the shame or the rejection or whatever other emotion comes up. I have to be willing to feel that in order for me to keep moving forward and producing this podcast and for me to continue to move forward and coach. So that's what we mean when we say the worst thing that can happen to us is a feeling, I know I'm not gonna die if I feel embarrassed because I put out a podcast episode that only a handful of people listen to.

This matters very much when it comes to our goals. If you're setting a goal for yourself, there is a certain result that you wanna get. In order to get that result, you have to take the right actions, and probably a lot of them, and probably you have to take a lot of wrong actions in order to find the right ones. You gotta take a lot of actions. And in order to get yourself to take the actions that you need to take to reach a goal or make a pivot that you've never done before, you have to have that feeling of self-confidence. You have to feel that emotion. That's why this is so important.

How do you feel self-confidence? Remember, thoughts create our feelings, feelings create our actions, and actions create our results. So what is a thought that you can think that can create the feeling of self-confidence for you? That's the question to ask yourself. The thought that you think that creates a feeling of self-confidence will drive you to take the actions that you need to take, no matter how many times you need to keep iterating and changing them and trying again, it will keep propelling you forward until you get to success.

The key to this is you have to think of a thought that you believe. You cannot be thinking of a thought that you don't believe because in order to try and generate self-confidence, because your brain will call bullshit on you. Your brain is smart. Your brain will be like, I do not believe that thought.

If I said, okay, my thought is I know I can run a 330 marathon. That's my thought that I'm going to try and use to generate self-confidence in me. My brain literally, as I'm saying those words, my brain is like red alert, bullshit, no way, not going to happen. Remember, I've got no evidence that I can do that because I haven't done it before. I'm needing to tap into the feeling of self-confidence to choose to believe in myself . Even though I've got no evidence that that says that I can accomplish this I need to look to my future and choose to believe as opposed to look to my past to lean on evidence because I don't have any so a thought that I could think. That can get me at least a bit closer to feeling self-confident right now when it comes to that running goal is, I don't know if I can run a 330 marathon, but God damn it, I'm gonna try, right? I don't know if I'm gonna be able to do this, but I know I want to and I'm gonna give it my all. I don't know if I can accomplish this, but I know I really wanna try. A thought like that, a version of that thought actually gets me excited, it gets me motivated, and it gets me starting to believe that it's possible that I could do this. That's the self-confidence. That's the emotion that we're looking to create.

So for yourself what you want to do is think about all right if I can't feel self-confident right now That I know I could pay off the mortgage by the end of the year That I know I could pay off my credit cards by the end of the year I can't feel self-confident right now that I know I could lose the weight that I want to lose or that we could uproot the whole family and move across the country to another city in the next three months. If I can't feel self-confident in this moment that I can make the pivot, what thought could I think that gets me a little bit closer to that? And I love starting with thoughts like, I don't know for sure, but I know it's possible for somebody. Why the F not me? Which is my favorite quote. Or I don't know for sure that this is possible, but I don't know that it's not possible. Let's try. Or I'm so excited to see if this is possible for me. I'm so excited to see if I can do this. I can't wait to give this a try, because I can't wait to see if I can accomplish this. Any thoughts like that, just start playing around, because you're gonna be able to tap into what makes sense for you and what you believe for yourself, but find a thought that you believe that moves you closer to feeling self-confident about achieving your goal if you can't quite feel self-confident yet. And from there, from that place of self-confidence or a little bit, or at least moving a little closer to self-confidence, now what actions do you want to take? Now how do you want to move forward? Now how do you want to proceed towards your pivot? That's what you want to keep doing, and that's how you want to keep tapping into that energy over and over again in order to get you to where you want to be.

All right, so just a final thought. When you really have a genuine desire to accomplish something, anything at all, you can do it. The only thing that you need is self-confidence, and now you know how to get it. Practice the thoughts that help to move you closer to that feeling of self-confidence. It's all about looking to yourself in the future. You can absolutely accomplish whatever it is you want.