As of now, you see, traditionally we have approached confidence as a feeling, are you feeling confident? Do we feel confident? And it intuitively feels right? Because when we are confident, it feels good. So confidence must be a feeling, but there's a challenge. When you approach confidence as a feeling, when you approach confidence as a feeling like any feeling, like any emotion, it becomes something, or we start approaching it as something that you feel in the moment and you don't feel in the moment. It's like you feel happy and you feel sad. And it is a fleeting feeling. You can never really capture it. You can never really tap into it. It would happen as a consequence of activity around you. And it is really hard to harness it. Now, confidence when approached to the feeling becomes a thing that you wait for one day, and hopefully you could get into that feeling state and hence be confident.

But how would that be helpful if let's say you're about to go on stage, but how do we feel confident when it is something that is really important, that is about to happen in your life. Say, for example, you get invited to speak at an event now, right before going on the stage, you want to feel confident, but because it's a feeling, it may be that anxiety shows up or excitement shows up or fear shows up. How do you harness the potential of confidence at this moment while here is why philosophically you need to stop thinking that confidence is a feeling you don't need to feel confident. You need to approach confidence as a skill. You see you harness a skill. You try ideas around a skill and slowly but surely you build a skill. If we approach confidence as a skill, we can now start to work on it.

When we approach confidence as a skill set that can be developed, that can be harnessed, that can be tapped into. Now, we have more control in being confident in the moments when it's most important. So firstly, philosophically, we need to understand that confidence is not a feeling. Confidence is a skill, and we can develop confidence. We are going to talk a lot more about how confidence is a skill later on in this podcast. Before we get there, let's understand some psychological reframes and how to think about confidence. Let's ask ourselves a question. Is it that you are a confident person or is it that you have confidence in certain situations? Let me elaborate. Say, for example, you have had years and years of experience in doing a particular dance move, whatever that dance move is, you have done it for years and years and years. So now when somebody asks you to do that dance move, how confident are you that you can pull it off?

Probably really, really confident. Now let's imagine, instead of asking you to do that dance move, somebody asks you to play baseball, and let's imagine you have never played baseball in your life. How confident do you feel at this moment to go out and play baseball? Not as confident as you were when you had to do that dance move. You see, confidence is situational. Confidence is not a state. Confidence is not a place you get to confidence is your ability to show up with presence with a particular attitude to deliver to the task that is at hand confidence is situational. It depends on the situation that you are in. It depends on your competence level to meet that situation. That preparation confidence is simply your preparation and your confidence in a particular situation. So psychologically we can reframe confidence as something that if preparation meets situation with a level of confidence that is developed because of the preparation, right?

Firstly, that means that confidence can be learned. And secondly, would it be possible that we could borrow confidence in one situation to another situation by reframing the situation and scenarios in a particular way, let me offer another reframe that will help you move towards a more confident state that you can get into a more confident skill level that you can get into. What if we approach confidence, not as a state or a place to get to, but we approach confidence as something that you need to get in action. So you're not seeking the perfection of confidence, but you're seeking the action of confidence or you are seeking confidence in your ability to take action. Let me elaborate. And this is something that I learned from my son. You see, my son is three years old and he is a really confident person, like pretty much any three-year-old.

He decides that he wants to do something and he's very committed to it. And even if he has no physical capability to do that task or mental capacity to understand the task, even he goes at it as if he knows exactly what needs to be done, you see Arianne, my son is confident in action. He knows that he can take action towards creating the outcome that he wants to create and he's least bothered about if he actually gets the outcome, he just simply goes for the action. So if we can create confidence in action, it increases our probability to actually be in action and create more results in our lives. Understanding that confidence is a skill that it shows up based on situation that you need to find confidence in action is vitally important for us to start getting confident. And that is why these are the reframes I invite you to consider.

As we further dive deep into confidence and how to really build a skill of confidence, be more confident, and be able to help our clients get more confident. But before we get into how do we get more confident and create a real strategy around building confidence, get real tools to build confidence, let's understand why is it that we lose confidence? Why and where does it happen? That we lose all our confidence that we all had as two and three and four-year-olds? Well, there are three specific reasons and most common reasons that we feel not confident or we lose confidence in different areas of our life. The first reason is the people around us. You see, when we do something as a child, for example, at 3, 4, 5 years old, we are of course trying to figure things out. We are not necessarily critiquing ourselves, but then there's always that somebody around us that says, oh, you're doing it wrong.
Let me show you how it's done. Or you are silly. You're silly to hope that you can actually do that. You're not competent in doing something, whatever those words that have been told to us that somehow presented to us that we couldn't do something slowly chips away at our conference. And because it's slowly chips away at our confidence one day, we just simply don't try. We just simply believe that we must not take action in the fear of criticism from people around us. The second reason why we don't feel confident or we lose the skill of confidence is because we fail at something and we build a story around it. That becomes a story that actually stops us from taking any further action. Let me tell you a little personal story that may demonstrate this particular scenario for you. And it might be that you have had stories like this.

You see, when I first started Evercoach, I really, really believed that there was no powerful YouTube channel for coaches out in the world. And because of that, I said, maybe I will build that channel. And so I started my journey. I started making some videos, but as I was developing these videos, as I was putting them out, I was not getting any response. Nobody was liking sharing or enjoying these videos. And I was putting a lot of effort to put these videos out. I was writing scripts. I was trying to make them funny. I was trying to make them light. I was doing everything that I possibly could, and it felt like I was going nowhere. It felt like nothing was working out. And I started to make up a story. I made up a story in my mind that maybe people don't wanna see me on video.

Maybe I am no good on video. Maybe I don't look right, or I don't present. Right. Or my language is not accurate. Or maybe I just don't have the right energy, the right momentum that is required for somebody to be able to create videos on coaching on YouTube. Heck, I'm not even a good coach. all of those stories were real stories that I had told myself because I couldn't figure out how to make a YouTube channel work. The worst part was I was transporting these stories in everything in my life. At the time I started to feel like I shouldn't be present on stages. I shouldn't create courses because people are clearly not resonating with me. And while that instance, while that first attempt at making a YouTube channel might have failed and I might not have done a great job with it. What I had forgotten is that I was slowly taking that one small failure and transporting it to other areas of my life.

And I was forgetting that all that happened was that I failed for a short period of time in a small area. In my first attempt, if I would try a little bit more, if I would try for a little bit longer, I could build a solid YouTube channel. Now, thankfully I have these tools I'm sharing with you. Thankfully, I have my own model of self-coaching, which is called the process for myself. And I was able to get out of that hole and be able to get back on stage. And now we have very thriving coaching YouTube channel on Evercoach, which has over 75,000 subscribers at the time of recording this podcast. And hopefully, this podcast is gonna be equally impactful for you. If you're finding this information useful, I highly encourage you to subscribe to those podcast, listen to it every week as we release new episodes, and also leave us a five-star review.

We really appreciate looking at your positive comments below our podcast episodes. And while you go ahead and leave that review, let me come to the third reason why we lose confidence. The third reason why we lose confidence is that we start approaching something as a mistake that we start getting fearful, that what we are about to do, something's going to go wrong. And when we start to create that negative event in our mind and the negative cycle in our mind, guess what happens? We start looking out for evidence that proves that yes, what we are about to do is going to have a negative consequence. It's a mistake. And then we end up making a mistake and we lose confidence. So those are three reasons why you may be losing confidence. You may be losing confidence because somebody criticized something to you and you took it on and you made a story around it.

You could be feeling less confident because you failed a small thing somewhere and you're transporting it over to everything in your life. And the third reason could be that you have started to develop a habit of thinking that everything that you're going to do, or the thing that you're about to do, you're gonna make a mistake and you're gonna fail at it. And so you're sabotaging yourself even before you take action. So those are the reasons why you won't feel confident. Now let's really understand how confidence is really built. How is it that somebody goes from a place of lack of confidence to confidence? And I'm gonna share with you a really popular concept called the confidence competence loop, but there are more nuances to it. So stick with me if you know this concept and let me explain this to individuals who may not know this concept, right?

So the confidence competence loop really suggests that if you wanna develop more confidence, you need to develop more confidence. And as you get more competent, you get more confidence and so on and so forth. So you continue to be more confident as you continue to be more competent, but you can only be more competent when you have enough confidence to get started in that journey or take risk in the journey or an area. So you can find more competence, but without the competence, you don't feel confident enough to take action. You see where I'm going with that? It's like the chicken and the egg problem. So how is it that we go from lack of confidence to more confidence without going through this chicken and egg problem? Well, there's a missing piece when it comes to the confidence confidence loop, especially when you're starting something new.

If you're a new coach, if you're trying to acquire a new skill, if you're getting talented at something, if you're building the skill of confidence for the first time, here is the place where you really start and it's called imperfect action. Now it may seem really obvious to you. It may feel really obvious as I say it, but most of us, when we say we are gonna take action, we try to take the perfect action. We want to get it right the first time we wanna get it right, as much as possible, the first time, instead of starting from a place of imperfect action, starting from a place of imperfect action means that we are expecting what we are about to do to be really, really hard. And we are also expecting that whatever we are going to do, it's not going to work out for a certain period of time.

And because we are expecting that it's not gonna be perfect. It's not gonna work out that it's gonna be really difficult. We are setting ourselves up from a mindset of saying this is going to be imperfect action, which will give me a little bit confidence. And from that little bit confidence, I will find a little bit confidence and then I will continue to take some more imperfect action that will continue to build competence and build confidence until I finally built enough competence that I can keep taking confident action. So the challenge of the confidence competence loop is not that you can't get competent and then get confidence. It is that when you start, when you are new, when you are starting your coaching career, when your client is starting something new, they need to start with the idea of imperfect action. They need to set themselves up for failure.

They need to set themselves up for difficulty and hardship. They need to set themselves up to not get it perfect. And when we do that, and when we put ourselves into the position of taking that imperfect action, it gets a lot more easier for us to continue to move in the direction of more competence and more confidence. So the first way of getting more competence, especially when you're starting out new is to design imperfect action and know that that is the way to just start the journey and then time you will need to not take the imperfect action. So you gotta get past your mindset that may stop you from taking imperfect action. So here is some more rewiring of your thinking pattern that is required for you to start getting more confidence in your life, in different areas of your life. So now that we know that we are gonna take imperfect action, and that will get us started into the confidence competence loop, let's ask ourselves, what is it that may take away as you are taking imperfect action.

And the first thing that takes a great confidence from you as a person is your trust in yourself. Trust in yourself is knowing that you will figure it out, that you may not know the answer, that you may not have the perfect technique that you may not be the perfect coach, that you may not be the perfect person that you hope that you were, but that you trust. You know, that you will figure it out. It's so vital and so critical when you're about to take imperfect action. Because if you are not ready to trust yourself, you may not actually follow through or even start taking imperfect action. So let me give you some fundamentals of trust that you need to develop, and you need to ask yourself and you need to ask your clients to develop and build a habit around so they can start to trust themselves.

Again, let's be cognizant of the idea that confidence is your ability to trust yourself, to do a certain thing, right? So what are the fundamentals of trust? The first fundamental of trust is truth and honesty. Do you tell the truth to yourself? Are you ready to tell yourself the absolute truth about you in that particular situation? Are you willing to have the conversation with yourself to say, Hey, what is the truth about me? What is my truth in this situation? And then ask yourself the question of how is it that I know that I will honor this truth? How is it that I will stay in integrity with this truth, that this is the truth about me. This is the truth about what I believe about a particular thing. This is the truth about my abilities. This is the truth about my competence. This is the truth about why I wanna develop this confidence.

This is the truth about why I wanna develop this competence. And you stay in integrity with that. You stay in integrity by saying that if I commit to this truth and whatever shows up to when I commit to this truth, I'm willing to walk that path. And I'm gonna tell myself the truth every single time, if I commit to doing something and I don't do it, I will tell myself the truth. I'll stay in integrity with myself because the more you tell yourself, the truth, the more trust you have with yourself, you see us feeling and sharing and acknowledging it with ourselves, allows us to trust ourselves. It doesn't take away trust. It actually adds to the trust because it tells us that we are at least honest with ourselves. And that we understand that this is a journey and that failing and not being able to follow through is nothing more than us taking this path and being on this journey.

The second key to building trust with yourself is reliability on yourself. Do you really do what you tell yourself that you're going to do? Or do you falter more often than not? How many times you've committed to something. You knew that you had to do something because you promised yourself that it could have been the self-care time you wanted to give yourself. It could have been the time you wanted to dedicate to learning. It could have been the time you would wanted to dedicate to listening to a podcast or a book. And then you just didn't follow up. Breaking the promise to yourself, telling yourself that you are not a reliable person. The more you show up for yourself consistently. And you do what you say you will do. The more trust you have with yourself, the more self trust you have, the more confidence you get.

And then lastly is accountability. Are you willing to face the consequences that you hold yourself accountable to in case you don't follow through on the honesty that you promise yourself or the reliability that you promise to yourself, when you hold yourself accountable, when you are happy to bear the consequences of you feeling your own truth, it creates new level of trust within yourself. Every single time you honor your word, you build more trust with yourself. Every single time you be honest, you build more trust with yourself. And the more trust you have with yourself, the more confidence you have on yourself. Trust is the foundation of confidence. Think about it like this. If you have a friend, do you feel confident about a friend? When you trust a friend, when you know that the person's gonna do what they say they're gonna do when they're always honest, when they hold themselves accountable or hold themselves accountable to you, if they falta.

Absolutely. Yes, you trust them more. I mean, you trust them more. You have more confidence in them. There's a better relationship between you and them. The second way to rewire yourself for more confidence and build habits and patterns around building more confidence for yourself is to challenge your thinking patterns. You see our brains are wired to get us comfortable and keep us safe. That's really what the wiring is. The wiring is not for confidence and risk and growth and all of that fun stuff that we want. That's not the natural state of our brain. Our brain is trying to protect us. It's trying to keep us comfortable. It's trying to keep us away from all the risks. And that is why our brain tends to remember bad things for bad or negative events. Lot more than positive events. If I would ask you right now, Hey, what is bad that happened today?

You would immediately remember if I would say, what is positive that happened today. If I was to ask you to list five negatives and five positive, it'll be much faster for you to tell the negatives versus the positives. And that's just your natural brain chemistry, nothing wrong with that. The challenges, when you remember more negatives versus more positive, guess what you believe more of you believe more, that things don't work out. That the efforts that you're gonna make are not gonna manifest into anything. But if you start changing your thinking patterns and challenging it to think about more positive events that have happened in your life, places where you made progress, guess what happens? You build more confidence in your abilities. You build more understanding of what you are capable of and because you're capabilities and your competence are now in the highlight. Now they are the stars to show those little things that you remember more, guess what?

You start to build a lot more skill of confidence. You start to show up lot more confidently. So here's my invitation. Instead of letting your brain passively register every negative event that may be happening today, let's actively focus our brain's attention to remember the positive events here is why gratitude journals are so great because they force you to find things that you're grateful for today, which is a way for you to focus on what happened good today. What is it? That was positive day. So go ahead and use that gratitude journal if you haven't been using it lately, but also remember as you use the gratitude journal, take two minutes, maybe to remember all that might have gone as junk in your subconscious, because it wanted to protect you and wanted to keep you safe and look out for those negative feelings and negative events and dust them off and let them go release these negative events out into the universe and let them go.

So they don't stay in your mind in your body, in your spirit. And the only things that stay in your mind, body spirit are those positive, affirmative feelings that you just wrote down in your gratitude journal. These are long term rewiring of confidence. You will rewire your confidence for a long, long term. If you did these practices on building more trust with yourself, if you understood how confidence really works, the philosophy, the psychology of it. If you were able to rewire your thinking patterns, but we are not done yet, I'm gonna give you one key strategy that will help you with everyday confidence, everyday confidence. This is something that you can do day in and day out. This strategy follows what I call the process. The process is the way that I life coach my clients. This is my life coaching modality. You can learn more about it in future episodes, but I'm gonna reveal to you a part of the process.

The process is incredibly useful, incredibly useful way to coach anyone through different areas of life, including confidence. Before I walk you through a part of the process before I get into it, I wanna share with you how things happen in our life. How we develop lack of confidence in any moment you see something happens in our life or a trigger event is what we can call it or an event that happens. And because of that event, we tend to think about it, right? And as we are thinking about it, we overthink about it most of the time. And if we overthink about it, what happens is we are in a loop. It's like you see an Instagram post and you start to think about that person or that chat that's happening on the Instagram post. And now you're thinking about it, thinking about it, thinking about it, it's leading you to now not being able to take action to what's posting something.

So you're getting into inaction. And as you get into inaction, you feel like you're not competent because you're not doing anything to create progress. And so you feel incompetent or lack of competence. And now, because you lack competence, you continue to overthink or stay in inact, putting you into a loop of lack of confidence or putting you into a loop of lack of action. So you're never really developing confidence in this situation. And that is our default, right? This is what is happening probably right now. This is probably what's happening with your clients. This is probably what's happening with you right now. You're staying in a state of inaction incompetence because of overthinking because of an event that you have little to no control over. When you use the process to really code someone here is how this series of events would unfold.

That trigger of event happens. There's something that happened. There's a trigger event. There's somebody said something there's a post or whatever that might be. The moment you are triggered by that event. And an emotion shows up. You find yourself in that heightened, emotional state, and you try to calm down your nervous system and you try to calm down your nervous system by getting really present. They're one of two ways that you could choose. One is you breathe into it. You close your eyes. You meditate for five minutes and you're back into a homeo status state and you're normalize and the emotion is gone. Or you experience that emotion fully. Let it go through your body, let it go through your mind. Let it go through your soul. Again. It might be a five, seven process, especially if you don't keep pondering on that emotion. If you bring your mind to the presence of, oh, I am feeling this emotion, let me experience this fully and you let it pass.

You, let it flow through you. So one of those two things will get you to get back into present. Breathing can help you get back into present. But what you're really looking for is to get out of that emotional state and get into the moment of now, get really present. Because when you get really present, your emotional brain takes a backseat and your rational brain takes the front seat. And as your rational brain kicks in, now you go, oh, this happened. You recognize the event that just happened as just an event, not as, uh, any consequence or any thinking, but simply this event has just happened. And now you have that event awareness that this event has happened. Now you get a choice because the rational mind is in control. After I share this with you, you will be able to do this as well.

Your rational mind is in control. Now you can go, what are the different thinking patterns I can choose? Say, for example, if it was an Instagram post that was triggering you, what you may go is, okay, this post is triggering me. I can choose to think that because this post is triggering me, I must respond to this post and this post is gonna end my world and end my universe. Or this post doesn't mean anything. Or this post is so great. How will I ever create a post that is better than this? That is one thinking pattern. Let's call it thinking pattern one, which this thinking pattern, thinking pattern one that is, will lead you to in action, because you'll be like, oh, this is the greatest post that has anybody has ever made. That means I can create a better post. And so you will never really take any action because you'll never really take any action.

You'll will stay in, uh, lack of competence. And because you'll stay in lack of competence, you're repeating the cycle again again, and that's thinking pattern number two, but because you're in a rational state, you can also ask, is there a better thinking pattern I can choose? Is there a better thinking pattern that I can choose from? For example, you could say, wow, wow, look at this post. This is a great post. Whoever posted. This is amazing. I am inspired. I'm gonna take some time away right now and actually write my three posts for this week, or I'm gonna reflect on this post and see what's my take on it. And I'm gonna write a post about the same topic or a similar topic, and that will get you in a state of action, because now you're actually taking the idea from a third party and saying, Hey, what is my take on this?

What will I believe about this? And so you've taken action. And now you're taking action that builds some kind of competence, because now you have to actually think about that core idea and really come up with your original idea, your original thought around it, that puts you into a state of action. Action will create competence and competence will create further action. And then you will further create competence. And now you established a new habit loop. You've established a new habit, Lou, for every time you have a triggered event that happens. You can get into action by simply challenging the thinking behind that particular event and asking yourself consciously as to what is the more empowered thinking I wanna choose here. What is the more empowered thinking that is more helpful to me here, choosing your thinking will change your next step and changing your next step can further change your confidence.

And so with this everyday practice where you go in and you look at, Hey, what is the event that is triggering me and getting me into an action? Can I challenge that thinking? Can I create a new thinking by getting really present and then creating a new loop, new habit loop for me. Now I can create progress. Now I can develop new habits. Now I can choose to create bigger outcomes for myself. Now I can develop the skill of confidence. So that is how you can choose every day to be more confident. That is how you can choose every day to develop the skill of confidence. That was our deep dive into confidence at master coaching with AJ podcast, this conversation was triggered by a question asked by Laura, Laura. I hope this answer satisfies you. And every listener of this episode, I am sure you've found a way now to be more confident and because you've found a way to be more confident, I really invite you to take some confident action, take some confident action and leave me a review.

Leave me a five star review. Leave me a review below hair on how did you enjoy this episode? And did you find some way to inspire confidence in your client's life or inspire confidence in your own life? This podcast is designed so you can master coaching in your life in your career. I encourage you to share this episode with someone that you feel can use more confidence. Every share. Every download allows us to create even better episodes going into the future. Thank you so much for joining me today. This is Coach Ajit and you're listening to Master Coaching with Ajit.