Want more confidence?

February 22, 2024 ~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

Your thoughts about you.

How many of us want to have more self-confidence? There’s a difference between confidence and self-confidence.

Confidence comes from experience. If we’ve done something well before, when we do that thing again, we’ll likely have confidence that we can do it. The thought might be, “I’ve done this before and I can do it this time.”

Self-confidence comes from within. Even if we haven’t done something before, our thoughts about ourselves and our abilities can create self-confidence that we can figure something out. Or if we can’t figure it out, we’ll see it as a learning process, and we won’t beat ourselves up for that.

Self-confidence comes from having our own back and what we’ll tell ourselves when something doesn’t go the way we thought it would. The thought might be, “I tried my best, I learned what didn’t work, and I’ll try it again to see what might work differently. I know I can figure it out.”

Confidence and self-confidence are feelings. Our thoughts create our feelings. So if we want to feel confident and self-confident, we’ll need to think thoughts that create those feelings.

Many of us struggle with self-confidence because we’re used to telling ourselves mean and critical things when we think we’ve “messed up” somehow. Thoughts like:

“I’m just not good enough for this.”
“There must be something wrong with me.”
“Nothing ever goes the way I want it to, so why keep trying?”
“This is too hard for me.”
“They think I’m incapable.”

Those thoughts will create a feeling of disappointment, self-doubt, discouragement, or defeat. Are those feelings close to the confidence or self-confidence we want to feel? No. So let’s try different thoughts. Thoughts like:

“I’m figuring this out and I can keep trying.”
“I’m learning what works and what doesn’t.”
“It didn’t go the way I wanted it to this time, but let’s see if this other way works . . .”
“This is hard and I can do hard things.”
“I’m as capable as I need to be.”
“I’m deciding to believe in myself no matter what.”

When we become aware of the thoughts we think about ourselves, we can choose them on purpose. We can choose thoughts that serve us, that are kinder to ourselves than the ones we might be used to thinking.

Your turn: Are you aware of the thoughts you think about yourself? What thoughts about yourself serve you? Which ones don’t? What are some slightly kinder thoughts you could choose instead? What are some much kinder–and still believable thoughts–you can choose instead?

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Work with me: Want to see how self-care is transformative and can help you create the results you want in your life? I can show you how. I offer first-time seekers a complimentary 60-minute exploratory session. Sign up here.

What’s on your mind? It can be powerful to learn from each other and our common struggles when it comes to our practice of self-care–or just being a human being. If you have something you’re struggling with and would like some perspective, share it here. Your issue may be chosen and addressed in the next post–it’ll be totally anonymous.

Good enough, right now

October 26, 2023 ~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

You are.

When I talk about self-care, it’s about more than what we do for ourselves. It’s also about how we speak to ourselves, how we think about ourselves, and how we treat ourselves. Today’s topic relates to how we think about ourselves.

How many of us are familiar with the thoughts “I’m not good enough” or “There’s something wrong with me” or “I’m not worthy”?

These thoughts are usually under the surface of our consciousness, yet they can run the show for us, even if we’re not aware of them.

The thought that was running the show for me for many years was “I’m not good enough” and I didn’t even know it was there. But it influenced many of the choices I made and how I viewed myself.

In therapy, “I’m not good enough” revealed itself to me and I understood better why I suffered so much when my romantic relationships ended. Not only was I devastated that the relationship ended, but I also made it mean that I wasn’t good enough to have a “successful” relationship, which to me, meant a relationship “that lasted” (for as long as I wanted it to). I made it mean that because it ended, I was a failure, I wasn’t good enough. Hence, the unnecessary suffering.

Since that time period in therapy, I thought I’d done a lot of work on dissolving that “I’m not good enough” thought. Yet it came up again recently. Another layer showed itself in a slightly different way.

I recognized that I was believing I had to be better than I am in order to have the things I want. Whether it’s more income, more clients, better health, or a partner. For others, it might be being at an ideal weight, owning a home, getting a new job, starting a business, receiving kindness from others, taking time off, etc.

I saw the thought, “Something is wrong with me and this is why I don’t have what I want.” I thought I needed to be better than I currently am in order to have what I want.

And that’s just not true. Because how will I know I’m “better” than I currently am? That could be an indefinite amount of time getting to some “better” version of myself until I deem myself “worthy enough” to have what I want.

You know what that sounds like? It sounds like, “I have to be perfect before I can have what I want.” And we all know that “perfect” doesn’t exist. Sure, there’s knowledge and skills we can always strengthen, but we don’t have to be “better than” we are right now to believe we are worthy or good enough. We get out of our own way when we let this be true.

So I decided to accept myself exactly as I am, right now. I changed my thoughts to “I’m already good enough, right now, just as I am, to have what I want. I don’t need to be better than I am to have what I want.” And I’m leaning into these thoughts and practicing them.

Because I don’t have to be “better than” I am. I get to be exactly as I am right now and still create the life that I want to have. What will come to me as I am, is meant for me as I am. And I will learn and grow from creating and having those experiences.

Your turn: What limiting beliefs might be running the show for you? A clue could be that if you think there’s some future version of yourself you need to be to feel “good enough” or if you think you need to “fix” something about yourself to feel worthy, what is the belief beneath that? What do you want to believe about yourself instead?

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When you try to do all the things

September 29, 2022 ~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

Be with you.

I’ve mentioned this before, that in the past I used to think I needed to DO all the things in order to prove my worth, because I used to think I wasn’t “good enough.” I wasn’t even conscious of this as a choice I was making–I just thought it was how I was supposed to do things.

I’d do things from a sense of internal pressure–to take classes to learn a certain skill, to exercise only for weight loss, to do activities where I could meet new people, to be on nonprofit Boards, to volunteer my time in other ways. I ended up doing so much in order to feel like I was “good enough” that I ended up exhausting myself and feeling stressed out and overwhelmed.

Only looking back, and through the self-awareness work I’ve done through therapy and coaching, I see that I was “doing” in order to prove myself as worthy and valuable. Because I thought I wasn’t good enough, I thought there were things I could DO to feel good enough.

Now I know that worthiness comes from within, that I can choose to have the belief “I am already 100% worthy.” And that belief is available to ALL of us. We get to choose to believe it (or not).

Sometimes we do things to “avoid” ourselves or “escape” ourselves. Maybe we’re not used to being with ourselves, or we don’t like being with our own thoughts, or maybe we might not like being with ourselves as our only company.

If that’s the case, I want to offer that the most important work to feel “good enough” comes from learning how to like ourselves even more.

To do this, we need to know what we think about ourselves. Are we acknowledging ourselves for who we are and what we like about ourselves? Not what we DO, but who we ARE as people. Many times, when asked about ourselves, we talk about what we DO or the roles we have. But how often do we talk about what we like about ourselves?

Some self-acknowledgements could be:

“I like myself for being generous” / “I am generous”

“I like myself for being kind” / “I am kind”

“I like myself for being understanding” / “I am understanding”

“I like myself for being intelligent” / “I am intelligent”

“I like myself for being ambitious” / “I am ambitious”

“I like myself for being amazing” / “I am amazing”

This is not to say that we’re doing this in order to feel “better than” other people–which for some of us, doing this type of work can feel uncomfortable because we’re not supposed to be “boastful.”

No, this work is for us to acknowledge ourselves and who we are and what we like about ourselves. To feel “good enough” or valuable comes from within ourselves. When we slow down and spend time checking-in with ourselves, we get to know ourselves even more. We start to find out what’s true for us, about us.

And if we happen to see things in ourselves that we’d like to change or improve upon, we can always do so, but from a place of compassion and care for ourselves. Instead of from a place of not feeling good enough.

So now I do things because I want to, from a place of knowing that I have value to contribute–not in order to get a feeling of value from “out there.”

Your turn: What if you stopped doing all the things to prove your worthiness and value and started spending time checking-in with yourself? What’s good about you? (Think about who you ARE, not what you DO, to answer that question.) How can you enjoy being with yourself even more? How can you enjoy being YOU even more?

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Work with me: Want to see how self-care is transformative and can help create a more meaningful life in which you start committing to yourself and show up the way you want? I can show you how. I offer first-time seekers a complimentary 45-minute exploratory session. Sign up here.