Disclosure: I only recommend products/services I would use myself and feel might benefit you as well. This post contains affiliate links, and I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
As I sat on a call with one of my coaches, Monika Juli, struggling with self-doubt and anxiety about whether I could make my own business a viable reality, I told her that I just needed to be more confident.
“You don’t need to be more confident; you just need to be comfortable in your own skin,” she said.
Whoa… that exact line has stuck with me for several months now.
She went on to further elaborate that I didn’t need to change anything about myself; I just needed to embrace myself as I was. After several months of evolution and growth since this conversation, I wanted to elaborate on it more from my perspective to hopefully help others have the same Aha! moment.
The lurking presence of insecurities
When I had this conversation with Monika, I was hardly feeling crippled by a lack of confidence. I didn’t wake up every day thinking that I wanted to change something about myself. However, the thought that more confidence and less overthinking would be beneficial to me, especially in starting a new venture, was still there.
I thought that if I was more confident, I could dive in to take more inspired actions in my business and feel less like I needed to hedge my bets. I thought having more confidence would wash away anxiety that I had about potentially failing in this new venture.
Furthermore, I’ve always wanted to quell or eliminate the amount of overthinking that I did on a regular basis. The overthinking would also lead to anxiety as well as sometimes preventing me from taking action. Not only detrimental to me, I also worried about how my overthinking was perceived by others.
These insecurities lurked in the background of my daily life but were also actively feeding a vicious cycle.
Which feeds on itself
By focusing on the fact that I wanted to be more confident and overthink less, I was actually decreasing my confidence and increasing my overthinking.
The more I focused on wanting to be more confident, the more I honed in on what I was lacking instead of what I had for confidence. This made me feel I needed to work on changing this aspect of myself, which was a hit to confidence. Additionally, I then would worry more about what others thought of my confidence level because I felt that the less confidence I had (which ebbs and flows for me), the more shy I was coming across in interactions and not my true self.
As you can imagine, overthinking was a similar story. The more I thought about not overthinking, the more I overthought my overthinking. I became acutely aware that I was doing this and wanted to change that part of me so much. I wanted to free myself from it and didn’t want to burden others with it. But that cycle then fed on itself with both overthinking and, as a result, confidence level.
I feel this is true for anything that you think you need to be “more of” or “less of”. You make this determination in your head and, even if it doesn’t occupy a majority of your thoughts, it’s still floating around in your brain and will periodically remind you that it’s there. Each time you focus on this drive to become “more of” or “less of,” you feed the cycle of focusing on what you lack, which snowballs into feeling worse than how you began.
I think this resonates with a lot of people. I had someone tell me once that they generally don’t like most “self-help” books because of this exact reason. They felt that these books that they’d been reading were telling them that they needed to change from who they were and that there was so much wrong to work on that they actually felt worse after reading them. (For the record, I do think there are a lot of great books in the “self-help” genre, but I have come across some that do align with what this person stated.)
Comfort is key
Shifting your mindset from feeling like you need to change to being comfortable in your own skin is a gamechanger. That’s not to say that it happens overnight; it takes awareness, practice, and sticking with this effort since the thoughts of change about yourself may be already deeply seeded.
Being comfortable with the aspects of yourself that you are insecure about doesn’t thwart self-improvement and should not be mistaken for complacency.
Being comfortable in your own skin allows you to begin to heal. It allows you to reframe limiting beliefs that you may have about yourself, allows you to act more in alignment with your authentic self, and reminds you how beautifully unique you are.
Releasing the focus of I need to be “more of” or “less of” something also creates space for you to begin to focus on new areas of your life that will drive you to reaching whatever goals you’ve set for yourself. It begins to wash away paralysis that you may have had by being focused on changing aspects of yourself.
Leaning into this comfort is the first major step to growth.
Growth will follow
Being comfortable in your own skin will naturally lead to growth; this comfort is what begins to break the vicious cycle.
Speaking from experience, the more I practiced being comfortable in my own skin on my own path, the more confidence that naturally came along with that. More than that, this confidence was now rooted inside of me rather than coming from external conditional sources.
The more comfortable I became in just being my true authentic self, the more the overthinking began to subside because I became more secure in the path I was taking. To be transparent and real with you, this is an area that I’m still working to grow into more, but I now have the right tools to keep chipping away at this, and my situational overthinking has vastly improved.
Therefore, being comfortable with and loving yourself is not a breeding ground for complacency but rather a foundation for growth. You will be catapulted not only into growth as it relates to limiting beliefs about yourself but you will also then feel energized and empowered to go out and start taking action towards creating the life that you love.
This creates a whole new beautiful, rather than vicious, cycle. As you start feeling energized, empowered, and secure enough to start taking action in your life, you begin to become more confident and secure through taking those actions and growing through those actions.
If you’re interested in your own transformational journey, reach out to me using the button below to book your free discovery session to see if I can support you along your journey to unlock the full potential of joy, freedom, and strength within your life.
Disclosure: I only recommend products/services I would use myself and feel might benefit you as well. This post contains affiliate links, and I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Disclaimer: This blog should not be construed as providing, or intending to provide, professional financial, legal, psychological, or other professional advice. It is simply meant to share my experiences for those that may find them relatable and helpful.