On a scale of one to ten, how confident are you that you can pour yourself a glass of juice without spilling a drop? Somewhere around a nine, a ten? Going back in time to your six-your-old self, or even your eight-year-old self, how confident were you? And how much more confident were you at age fifteen? You would just pour the juice without even thinking about the motions. The same can be said with reading, or driving, or catching public transport. Your confidence increased the more you practiced, and the more it became a normalised part of your life.
To say that you are low in confidence is debatable. You have confidence, and plenty of it, just not in certain facets of life. The best way to build new areas of confidence is to go through the motions until it becomes second nature. Just like muscles grow stronger the more you use them, so too can this be said for any skill done repeatedly.
“Well … that is all well and good”, I hear you say, “but I need to give a presentation next week, and I am really, really anxious. Public speaking scares the hell out of me. How can I go through the motions of something like that?”.
The question begs to be asked: why does it scare you? Where has this fear come from? You were never scared to pour the glass of juice. You just opened the refrigerator, grabbed the juice, grabbed a cup, and poured it in. It was just a matter of practice to increase skill, which then built confidence in the activity.
As for those activities that scare us: well, I could tell you that warrior womxn just suck it up. I could repeat the phrases that my peers and I so often heard during our initial military training, such as: “dry your eyes princess” and “go grab a can of harden the f*ck up”. I could say that there are two choices: to either give up or toughen up. That you just have to do it. But none of that would remove the butterflies in your belly.
You know already that bravery is not the absence of fear but acting despite the fear. What is often left out is the fact that most of the fear we experience is self-generated. As a kid, you weren’t thinking about how embarrassing it would be to spill the juice. You didn’t have concerns that you would lose friends because you spilt the juice. You weren’t worried that others were judging you or that mum would kick you out of the house. You just wanted to drink the juice and go off and play. You weren’t scared because you didn’t think yourself into being so.
Fear comes from what we are telling ourselves about an activity. There are plenty of people who can stand up in front of a large crowd without being paralysed by fear. And they can do so because they are telling themselves a different message. Their thoughts over the activity are different.
Confident speakers are telling themselves that everything is fine. That even if they make a mistake, nothing bad will happen. They may have thoughts such as: The audience members trust I know what I am talking about. Plus, they are far more concerned over their own lives, than any mistake on stage I may make. The audience wants me to do well. I have practiced this speech and I am well prepared. Nothing bad will happen if they don’t like what I have to say. I’ve done this before and I was fine, I can do it again.
What else may they be thinking?
I invite you to think of an activity that makes you nervous and then explore what it is you are telling yourself about the activity. Can you challenge your thinking and rationalise with yourself? What do you think someone who is confident in this activity is telling themselves? Could you adopt those thoughts too?
I then invite you to go out there and do the activity. Again. And again. Until it becomes a normalised part of your life.
The Warrior-Womxn's Guild 