Confidence is something that can only be felt and seen. It is something that is based in how you feel about yourself and your life.
Being able to build confidence in yourself is a part of the healing journey and will come about at some point within your healing.
Confidence and self worth go hand in hand, with self worth as the foundation for self love, and confidence being the offshoot of that.
Building self confidence will come with that initial choice to love yourself, but it goes one further than that, it allows you to be more radiant and loving of the world, and of life.
Confidence is based around many things, such as knowing who you are, knowing what you will do in life, knowing that you are going to be okay, knowing that you can succeed at your dreams.
There is the foundation of self worth and self love, then comes the courage and honesty to be in touch with your heart, and then to let that start to shine from within you as you play your life.
Confidence and play go hand in hand. When you are confident you will be in a state of play. This means enjoying life, having fun with life, and seeking to interact with your life and the people in it in a way that enthuses joy and passion.
So, what is confidence? I think it is simply being able to play with life. To be able to enthuse joy and passion from your career, your friends, your relationships, your family, your goals and dreams, and with the world.
Sarah Avant Stover has a great quote that I love, it is, ‘Confidence = preparedness + vulnerability’.
This can be used with anything in your life.
You can use this process with anything, from dating and relationships, to performance of music, to your job and career, to doing a presentation, anything you can think of you can use this formula to give you what confidence is.
Being appropriately prepared for a situation, then being able to let go and be vulnerable in that situation will, in essence, create confidence. You will know what you are doing, and because you are prepared, you can then open your heart and be vulnerable.
Confidence is knowing your self worth and expressing that to the world. So being prepared and also being vulnerable, we give ourselves the right amount of ability to be in a state of confidence in any situation we like.
We can even go to being confident in any situation that comes along by simply being prepared for the moment and being vulnerable, and we can do this with life itself, going to the present moment and making sure we are prepared for anything!
This is something that will require deeper work, I believe. We can practice and prepare ourselves as much as we can so we are ready for anything that we want, and then also being able to let go and let the moment touch our heart will bring that natural confident self that loves to play with life.
Because the focus of my website is around mental illness, a big part of our healing will be attending to our trauma and our low self worth, this is the upward climb towards confidence.
I believe it is important to feel our vulnerability as we heal more and more, this keeps us in touch with our deeper humanity. This staying true to ourselves and to our heart helps us along the journey, and when we are ready we can then begin that practice of creating confidence in our selves and in our lives.
Remember Sarah Avant Stover’s quote, memorise it, and then begin to utilise it when you need to. This can look like the first step of preparation for whatever it is that you want to be confident in, and then being able to be vulnerable in the moment that you enter that situation.
Giving yourself time to prepare can really shift how you feel about the moment you enter that situation that you want to be confident in.
There are other things that build confidence in the self, and I believe that doing the deep inner work of healing yourself and entering a state of wholeness will give you the base and foundation that you can build your confidence on.
It is really about loving yourself all out! Not holding any love back from who you are and what you can be! Giving yourself that admiration and praise for who you are and knowing your worth, and then going out into the world and giving of your worth to other people and to life itself.
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