Confidence

I was driving somewhere the other day, which is so often when the best ideas pop into my head, there was some sort of programme on radio 4 about confidence and how many of us struggle with it.

I was also thinking about how, in the past, women, in particular, were supposed to be subservient to their husbands and generally in society and were actively discouraged from being confident or speaking out of turn. This is still true for much of the world, and not only for women.

In my line of work we talk about ‘fight or flight’ which is an acute stress response to a threat to our survival, the thing that automatically kicks in and makes us want to run away from anything we feel or think is going to be a real problem, and how has deep roots in our caveman days as humans where we clearly needed to run from anything which could hurt us.

What if this lack of confidence also stems from our historical past, from those times where ‘standing above the parapet’ could literally make us a target.

It makes so much sense to me that we have learnt to keep quiet, not to speak out or to make ourselves heard, and its easy to find recent examples of how this can make us a target, to even be seen as a victim as a result. However, if it is something we have learnt, then we are not born this way, it may not be something that truly benefits our survival in the modern-day, so it can also be something we can unlearn too.

We lose so much of who we are when we bow to others beliefs and values and don’t recognise our own strength and power, to be who we can be, so that when we learn to stand up and be heard, to recognise our own innate value and begin to nurture that little spark of confidence it can be so empowering.

There are so many ways we can begin the process of recognising our own self-worth, which in turn allows us to grow the seed of confidence, to speak out and say ‘Hello, this is me, I have something to say' it doesn’t need to be a big thing or it could be huge, but if you are feeling like you are so much more than you are right now, please do get in touch, I love to help men and women grow into the people that they are hiding inside.