“I am not sure what it means to be confident.”
Building confidence can be a very personal experience but, there are specific thinking, feeling and behaving patterns that are common to people who have a strong belief in themselves.
Most clients finding goal setting around confidence to be difficult. They just KNOW they want to have a greater sense of confidence but have a difficult time being specific or they focus on big quick gains that set them up for frustration.
We often have great clarity about what it is we do not want. We can be very descriptive about what is not going well for us. Our minds easily travel down disempowering cow paths as we review our challenges or shortcomings. It is human nature to regurgitate painful stories (out loud and/or internally).
For many, it can feel like a “mental compulsion” to replay times we have felt weak, insecure or uncertain. For most, this fruitless activity stems from a genuine desire to understand and fix what’s not working. However, the manifested outcome is almost always a hardening of the very path one wants to escape. To create a personal definition of what it means to be confident requires curiosity and a willingness to experiment.
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Terri Lee Cooper MSc. RSW.