Increase Your Confidence Part 2 – Facing Fear

Confidence comes and confidence goes. I think that’s quite normal, but it’s important to have a healthy benchmark of confidence in all aspects of your life.

For me, confidence in my career abilities has been the biggest hang-up. I had a pretty strong addiction to the self-help stuff, always feeling like I needed to find some hidden answer to feel good and have the life I want.

Until it was pointed out to me that you can read all the books you want, watch every inspiring video there is but confidence comes from taking action on your fears. That one little comment was such a lightbulb moment for me.

Something so little, but so profound. I guess because I’m always taking action and never really considered myself as fearful. I hadn’t seen the obvious.

I always thought fear was some grand thing, like throwing myself out of a plane or something equally as terrifying. I realise now that’s not the case.

That real fear is the little-understated stuff. The heavy stuff that impacts us daily, forms our habits and our thoughts. The stuff that holds us back in our day to day lives.

So I had to ask myself what am I really afraid of? It wasn’t anything big or grand. It was the little things like being afraid to start making YouTube videos again encase they tanked and I felt stupid but knowing I truly wanted to. So, of course, I took action and started again.

It’s putting my well-being 1st when I feel I have a million and one things to do. I know exercise should be a priority, I know meditation will keep me sane, but gosh putting these things before writing a blog post, household chores and general errands terrifies me.

My anxiety will tell me I haven’t got time, but my intuition will tell me to look after myself and everything else will fall into place.

We are all scared of something. Anything that makes us worried or anxious is, in fact, fear and that will affect our confidence.

So whenever you catch yourself feeling overwhelmed, frustrated, guilty, worried, anxious, nervous or competing with another then ask yourself “what are you really afraid of”?

Whenever you feel your self-esteem is low then dig deep because it’s rarely ever about the thing you’re blaming.

See, when I was struggling with Instagram it was never really about Instagram. It was really about the fear of not being good enough and the fear to just trust. I always felt I had to be go-go-go and I was scared to just let go. I had fear about having faith because I had doubt and doubts are simply just fear.

I doubted my self-worth and my ability. I craved validation. Realising that I was able to laugh about it and not get so upset about the whole Instagram situation. I was able to see things for what they truly were.

So now I’m going inwards, stripping it all back and really getting in tune with myself. When I feel myself getting worked up and upset I simply ask myself “what am I fearful of”? Then I take action. I was scared of starting YouTube again so I just did it.

I’ve still felt insecure that my social media numbers aren’t impressive for a blogger, so I’ve been working through that fear daily, by taking inspired action. Doing what I really want to do and not what I hear I should be doing. The truth is confidence doesn’t happen overnight, not for me anyway, it’s been a long and slow process.

What I do know to be true is this, if you’re scared to go to that exercise class, but you wanna go then you need to just go. You want to start a blog, but you’re feeling you don’t have the skills? Then you can guarantee you just need to start.

Whatever you want to do, you need to just do it. You might fail, but worrying about failure is just simply fear again, but let me tell you something, failure isn’t even a bad thing. In fact, more often than not failure is beautiful.

Confidence will come when you just start doing the things you really want to do. You can’t sit around and expect to grow in confidence or to magically get the skills you need to go after what you want.

Confidence grows whilst on the job. Skill is only mastered by working at it. Had I waited to be a good writer before starting this blog then this blog would have never happened, it’s no secret my literacy struggles.

If I’d pushed back doing YouTube videos until my fear that I might look like an idiot was gone I’d of never made a single video. If  I’d waited until I knew how to edit and knew how to be interesting on video then you can guarantee I’d of talked myself out of it. I didn’t wait. I just did it.

I learn as I go. Perfectionism isn’t a good thing. It’s not a badge of honour, but armour we use to protect ourselves. In reality, it actually hurts us. Trying to get everything ‘just right’, when in fact it will never be ‘just right’ is the quickest way to feel crap about yourself.

You can have high standards without being a perfectionist. I spoke about this is one of my very early YouTube videos here. Sure, that’s a terrible video, but I was new to YouTube and I was learning. I’m still learning. There is great beauty in the learning process so don’t be afraid to be crap. You can’t always be great.

See my confidence grows all the time, but where I lack confidence is where I let fear take over and I don’t take action. Ironically I started to feel fear writing this very blog post. I started doubting my writing abilities and that I have anything of value to say and then I realised the irony in that.

See it’s pretty frigging funny, because I know I have a lot of useful things to say because I live what I write, but sometimes I  will experience doubt and that’s really normal. I embrace that sometimes I will doubt myself and I laugh about it because I know it’s all in my head.

So whatever you think you might not be good at please give yourself permission to say “screw it”, then do it anyway.

When I stood on top of this hill half-naked, I felt pretty frigging fearless, because you know something when you don’t let fear take the steering wheel you are pretty frigging unstoppable. Confidence comes from taking daily action.

So whatever you’re doing keep going and just know you’re good enough. I wish you could only know how much I’m rooting for you, just know I’m cheerleading for you.

This post is part of my Wellness Wednesday weekly feature, for more Wellness Wednesday posts click here. Every Wednesday there is a new wellness post at 7pm. Update: this feature no longer runs but there are still loads of blog posts here. 

For part 1 ‘Increase Your Confidence – Celebrating Your Wins’ Click here.