524. Creating Confidence

Who doesn’t want to be more confident? We all want to be more confident. We all understand that it feels really good to be confident. We all want to help the people that we care about, namely our children or our friends or our clients or customers, etc. We want to help everyone around us be more confident because we understand how valuable confidence is.

But how does one become more confident? What is the path? What is the journey? Today I want to offer to you that it’s usually a four-step process, and I’m going to teach you that process today. This is Better Than Happy, episode 524, Creating Confidence.

Welcome to Better Than Happy, the podcast where we transform our lives by transforming ourselves. My name is Jody Moore. In the decade-plus I’ve been working with clients as a Master Certified Coach, I’ve helped tens of thousands of people to become empowered. And from empowered, the things that seemed hard become trivial, and the things that seemed impossible become available, and suddenly, a whole new world of desire and possibility open up to you. And what do you do with that?

Well, that’s the question… what will you do? Let’s find out.

Sometimes, listening to a podcast is enough. But sometimes, you’ll feel inspired to go deeper. If you hear things that speak to you in today’s episode, consider it your invitation to a complimentary coaching workshop.

On this live, interactive Zoom call with me, you’ll get a taste of the power of this work when applied in real life. You can participate, or be a silent observer. But you have to take a step if you want to truly see change in your life… two steps, actually. Head to JodyMoore.com/freecoaching and register. Then you just have to show up. Your best life is waiting for you. Will you show up for it? JodyMoore.com/freecoaching. I’ll see you there.

What’s up, everybody? I’m back. I’m back for another episode, and I feel like I’m back in my life. If you listened a couple of episodes ago, I talked about my experience of being on a medication for a few months that made me feel not like myself, and I’m just so delighted and happy to feel like myself again. And I’m having so many ideas come to me and just a lot of energy around how to better help and support and serve all of you.

So, today we’re going to dive into this topic that came up earlier this week. We did a full-day coaching intensive that I call the VIP Power Coaching Day. So, those of you who are in The Lab, once you’ve been there for six months or longer, you get to come to VIP Power Coaching Days where you come to San Diego, we hang out all day in a pretty small group so that we can all get really intimate with one another, take pictures, laugh, and all of that. But mostly we do some really deep-dive coaching. And this is a topic that came up that I ended up going on a little rant about, as I do at times, and I could see light bulbs going off for people. So I thought I would offer it to you here on the podcast. And that is, how do we create confidence?

So, I want to back up and tell you how this came up, first of all. So, I was coaching somebody. I want to say we were talking about building their business, but I can’t remember. And so this will apply to those of you who are entrepreneurs, but there’s lots of things we do that we would want to be confident around, right? So, we talked about the emotion fueling her, how she’s feeling, and what that’s creating in the end. And then I said to her, “How do you want to feel? What would be the most useful emotion as you move forward with this goal or this project?” And she said, “I want to be confident.”

And it made me think about this concept that I’ve heard taught by other teachers in various ways. It’s an interesting topic, confidence. I’ve even taught it in various ways, and I still do teach it in various ways because I think at times, confidence is something that you just need to generate. Some people might call this ‘fake it till you make it,’ where you just kind of decide I’m good enough. I’m going to do this. I’m going to show up with energy, and I’m going to pretend to know what I’m doing even if I don’t, to a certain extent. I’ve also taught that confidence is not just pretending to know what you’re doing but to also admit that you don’t know what you’re doing and just not hiding and not having to be fake.

Anyway, I know those two things sound contradictory, and my point is that there’s different times when different ways of thinking about confidence are going to serve you better. And today’s four-step process that I’m going to teach you is, again, useful at times, but maybe not always. And I’m going to tell you after we go through the four steps, what one of the main exceptions is and how you can use this to shortcut your way to confidence. That’s what we’re going to do today. I hope it makes sense. Stay with me.

So, I like to think about, in this process, confidence as being the reward that I’m going to earn by getting really good at something.

So, if you think about it, if I said to you, “Hey, could you go to the store and pick up Diet Coke for me? We’re out of Diet Coke. It’s an emergency. You must go and pick some up, okay?” How would you feel about that? Would you feel nervous or panicked or overwhelmed or uncertain? Or would you just be pretty confident that you could hop in the car, go to the store, and get Diet Coke?

Now my guess is based on the audience that I know listens to this podcast, most of you would feel pretty confident about it. You’d be like, “Sure, give me the keys. I’ll be back. I’m going to go get Diet Coke, okay?” And this is because you’ve done this or something like this many times before. You’ve driven a car many times before. You’ve gone to the store before. You’ve purchased Diet Coke. Even if it’s a store you’ve never been to, you wouldn’t freak out and go, “I don’t know where the Diet Coke is in this store.” You would just decide that you know how grocery stores work in general and that you could read some signs, or you could ask somebody and you would find the Diet Coke. Now, obviously, if you apply this to whatever the thing is that you’re not confident about, like let’s go back to the business example that I think we were coaching on, right? When she was like, “I don’t know how. I’ve never done it before and what if I can’t do it? And what if people laugh at me and what if it doesn’t work? And what if it takes longer than I thought?” All the things that our brains tell us that are the opposite of confidence.

If we apply it to something that you’re already confident about, it’s kind of silly and kind of laughable. You would never think that about going to the store to get Diet Coke. Even though you maybe have never been to that store before, or you’d maybe never driven my car before, and you’d have to take a minute to figure out a couple things about how the car works, like how to shift it into gear, because that’s slightly different from car to car.

Maybe you’re driving to get Diet Coke and there’s road construction. And so the route that you were going to take that your GPS told you to take is not available, and you have to reroute yourself.

Because you’re confident doing this, you wouldn’t probably melt down and get all frustrated and go, “What was I thinking? I never should have told myself I could do this errand. I never should have told Jody for sure that I could do it.” I knew I couldn’t do it.” You’d just, “Okay, I got to find a different route.” And maybe it would take you a little bit longer because you had to go a different route, but you wouldn’t freak out about that. You wouldn’t make it mean you’re not very good at getting Diet Coke. You would make it mean there was an unexpected delay, but you could accommodate for it and you could still get the Diet Coke.

Maybe you get to the store and they’re out of Diet Coke. Again, would that completely rattle your confidence? And would you go, “I never should have set a goal like that.” No. You’d just go, “Oh, darn it. This is inconvenient. I have to go to another store now. It’s going to take me even longer. Maybe I’m going to send a text to Jody telling her I’m working on it, but I have to go to a different store,” but you would still make it work. You would just adapt and accommodate. It doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be some disappointment. It doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be a little irritation, but you wouldn’t let it rattle your confidence. You would still believe that you’re capable of getting Diet Coke. You see where I’m going with this, right?

This is because you’ve earned confidence. Now, some of you are thinking, “That’s okay. That’s cute and all, Jody, but that’s a silly example. Of course I’m confident getting Diet Coke from the store.” But stay with me. You weren’t always, most likely. Or there’s at least many things you do that you’re confident about that you were not always confident doing. You’re probably pretty confident pouring a glass of milk. And if you spilled some milk outside the glass, you wouldn’t let it rattle your confidence. You’d go, “Oh, whoops,” and you’d clean it up, and then you’d pour the milk again. But if you were, I don’t know, a 6-year-old kid learning to pour milk and you spill it, you might let it rattle your confidence because you haven’t poured milk successfully enough times to have earned confidence.

And if you’re a teenager who just got their driver’s license and your mom says go to the store and get Diet Coke, you might not be confident. You might think, “Uh oh, I’m not very good yet at driving on my own. What if I get in an accident?” I remember when some of my kids were learning to drive, they were like, “I can’t go where there’s stoplights. That’s scary.” And I was like, “What? Of course you can.” But then I remembered, “Yeah, you’re right.” They haven’t done that a lot of times. Confidence is something you earn by doing something over and over again and proving to your brain that you can do it.

Okay? So, confidence is earned. That’s the easiest way to build confidence, is to do things and learn to do them and get good enough at doing them that then you feel confident you can do them. So, I’m all for that. But what happens before that? What if I’m trying to build a business? What if I’m trying to be a parent? What if I am newly married? What if I got a new calling at church? What if I want to be confident about these things that I’ve never done before then, Jody? Well, then we simply go back to step one. Confidence is the fourth step in this four-part process I’m going to teach you today.

Step one is just to have courage. Okay? Because if you’re afraid, if you’re nervous, if you’re telling me you want to be confident, it tells me that you’re not confident. That you are somewhat insecure or nervous or wondering if you’re able to do it, feeling like you can’t do it yet. That you’re going to make mistakes, that you’re even going to fail at a lot of things as you work on getting better at it. So, you know what you got to do? You got to have courage. What is courage? We know what courage is, but I just want to remind you that courage doesn’t feel great.

Courage feels scary because if there was no fear, we wouldn’t need courage. So, courage is allowing the fear to be there and choosing to try anyway. Choosing to be brave, to step up and give it a shot, and be willing to be not very good at it. Be extra cautious, pay close attention, get help and support and guidance. I think humility is a big part of courage. “Hey, I’m not very good at this. Could somebody help me until I get better at it? Could somebody go with me to the store and make sure I don’t get in an accident? Could somebody give me some pointers or some tips? Could somebody give me some feedback here and tell me if I’m on track or what I could do better?” All of this requires courage. You got to be vulnerable. You got to be willing to let people see you be not good at it. You got to admit that you don’t know what you’re doing. That requires courage.

Courage is this first step. We be afraid, and we do it anyway. And we ask for help, and we get support, and we’re gentle with ourselves, and we go slow, and we’re patient.

All right. The second step then is commitment. Okay? Now, I’ll tell you, most people start with courage, and then they get a little bit of a ways into it and they realize, “Oh, I’m not good at this. This is hard. I don’t like this feeling of being vulnerable or having to learn a lot. It’s overwhelming. It’s exhausting. It’s not coming as easy and as fast as I thought.” And then they just start doing it halfway. And I’m just saying, if you do it halfway, it’s going to take a lot longer to get good at it. It’s going to take a lot longer to get to confidence. And then they sit back and say… and by ‘they,’ I mean ‘we,’ I do this too, right… we sit back and say, “Well, I’m just not confident because I haven’t had any luck yet. I haven’t had any success yet. It’s not working. In fact, I’m doing a much worse job than I thought I was going to do. People are complaining about the way I’m showing up in my calling, or things are harder than I thought they would be. Some of the obstacles that I anticipated actually haven’t been a problem at all, but there’s a whole new set that I didn’t even realize were going to be hard. This is actually even harder in some ways than I thought. I didn’t expect this.” Okay?

So, commitment is going all in. That’s the part where I want you, if anything, to double down on what you’re doing. Right? If you’re trying to build a business and you’re finding it challenging, most people step off the gas and they try coasting, and they’re like, “I’m trying, but it’s not working.” I’m like, “No, no, no, no. This is the time to double down on what you’re doing. Do twice as much.” Why would I say that? Because you need to get better as fast as possible to get out of the painful state you’re in. And the best way to get better at something is to do it over and over and over again. Okay?

You need to build momentum towards what you’re trying to do. You need to double down on it. Now, if this is about being a parent and raising a new baby or something like that, what does doubling down look like? I don’t know. It’s a little bit tougher to define in certain situations, right? But there are some things, like actually being a parent has built-in commitment because I don’t see a lot of people going, “I think I’m going to just not be a parent anymore. This is too hard.” We sort of don’t have any other choice but to be committed, and most of us wouldn’t want to walk away anyway. We just kind of muscle through it. But there are many things where you do have a choice. Am I going to keep trying to build this business? Am I going to stay in this marriage? Am I going to stay in this calling, or am I going to ask to be released? We had somebody again at VIP Power Coaching who’s trying to learn a foreign language. Am I going to keep trying to learn this language? Or am I going to listen to the part of my brain that’s like, “You don’t really need to. It doesn’t matter anyway. It’s not that big of a deal. We don’t really have to do this.”

You got to be committed. Now, let’s talk about what comes… oh, actually, before we talk about what comes after commitment, I got to say one other thing about commitment. Whenever I say this to people, I see their faces go, “Oh, that’s true.” And it kind of hurts to hear it. And I’m not trying to hurt you by saying this. I just want you to get real with yourself that there’s a difference between being interested and being committed. Okay? So, that’s what I see happen a lot in this phase two. After the courage comes, “I’m interested in doing this thing, but I’m not committed.” Now, I don’t want you to feel bad about it if you’re interested. I don’t want you to go, “Yeah, you’re right. I’m such a loser. Why am I not committed?” I just want you to tell yourself the truth. “Oh, I’m not really committed.” So that way we don’t have to feel bad about not getting good at it, about not making progress, about not losing the weight, about not growing your business, whatever it is. Because you’re not really committed, you’re just interested.

You know how you know that? By your actions, by what you’re doing. If you’re not showing up, if you’re not doubling down on your efforts, then you’re not committed, you’re just interested. That’s okay. Maybe we work on getting more committed at some point. But step one is we don’t act all confused like, “Maybe I’m just not a person who can achieve this thing.” You can. You just have to go through the commitment phase, and you’re not doing that right now. So you’re not really on track. Or you’re doing it the long, slow, painful way.

Okay, now, after commitment comes consistency. Consistency. You got to keep going and do it consistently. Here’s what’s great about this third phase. You start to have some wins. You start to see some progress. You’re getting better at it now, but you have to be consistent. You have to keep going. Consistency does not equal perfection, right? It doesn’t mean you do it perfectly. You just have to do it consistently. Consistency consistently means you do it over a long period of time. And sometimes you don’t feel the progress or see the progress right away, but it’s coming, eventually. If you’re consistent.

This is, again, it feels a little bit better than commitment because we’re having some wins. But sometimes it still feels awful because we do that going backwards thing. We have a few wins, and we’re making some progress, and we’re trending in the right direction, but then suddenly things go back, feel like they go backwards. They don’t really go backwards, but our results go down in whatever way, like maybe you gain weight at some point when you’re trying to lose weight, or your business revenue goes down instead of up, or something like this. And so then, again, that’s another time when people want to quit. They’re like, “Oh, I thought I was headed where I wanted to be. It was working, and now it’s not working, and this is just so hard.” And that’s where I’m like, “Just be consistent.” Consistency just means keep going, keep going.

Commitment is, “I do this no matter what. No excuses. I’m committed.” Consistency is I just keep going. Even if sometimes I have to stop jogging and just walk or crawl, I keep going, and I rest as I’m crawling, and then I start walking, and then I start jogging again. I’m just going to be consistent. And after consistency comes confidence.

Now, here’s the interesting thing about confidence. Sometimes in my mind, I think, confidence feels so great. I love being confident. And at times it does. Like, right after I get through this phase of courage, commitment, consistency, and then I get to confidence, it does feel pretty good. For a moment, right? It’s like, “Oh my gosh, look at me. I did it. I’m doing it.” I’ve achieved some level of success, or I’ve gotten some result that I wanted to get. It feels pretty good for a minute. And then what happens? It’s so disappointing. Why are we wired this way? I don’t know. A couple things happen. Either number one, we just start taking it for granted.

Like if I said to you, “Aren’t you so proud of yourself that if I asked you to go to the store and get Diet Coke, you’d be able to do it without any problems?” You’d be like, “Not really. I mean, I don’t really think about that ever.” It just is something you’ve taken for granted, that you know how to do so many things that you didn’t know how to do long ago. So, it’s kind of boring. And if somebody was like, “Could you teach me how to do that?” you’re like, “Yeah, sure, no problem.” And they’re like, “Do you think I could do it?” “Of course you could do it. What are you talking about?” Anything we’re good at doing, we tend to believe is easy because it is easy now for us. And so we think, of course, anyone else could do it because it’s easy to do. And if I could do it, anyone else could do it. So it sort of becomes just, again, something we take for granted or something that’s kind of boring. We don’t even think about it anymore, right?

The other thing that happens, and sometimes both of these things happen, is now we set our sights on the next thing. There’s another level of success, or maybe it’s about a totally different topic. Maybe that one is good, but there’s something else in our life that we want to be better, another goal we want to achieve, or something else we want to go after. And then we start all over again with needing to be courageous and then committed and then consistent so we can get to confidence.

So, I don’t mean this to be bad news. You’re always going to… it sounds like bad news. You’re always going to be uncomfortable. What I mean is, first of all, you can take a little bit more time to appreciate all the things that you’re good at today that you weren’t good at in the past. All the things that you’ve done. You’ve gone through this process, this four-step process, so many times about so many things. You just now take it for granted. You don’t even acknowledge it.

So, I hope you’ll take time, if you’re feeling a lack of confidence, to stop and appreciate all the things that you’re good at, all the skills you’ve developed, all the attributes you have that serve you well today. Those all came from going through this four-step process, sometimes on purpose because you set a goal, sometimes you had no other choice because life threw you into this funnel and you decided to move through it and get to confidence. Either way, congratulate yourself. Be grateful for it, okay? But the second thing I want to teach you is that there is one exception to when you can actually skip this process pretty much, or at least minimize the amount of time you’re in it or minimize the amount of discomfort you have through the stages of courage, commitment, and consistency, and then confidence.

And that is when the stakes are low. Okay? So, if I decide something like I’m going to start a business and it’s how I’m going to support my family, the stakes might feel very high because I need this income, I need the revenue, and maybe I’m worried about putting food on the table or paying the bills. Or maybe, I don’t know, whatever the goal is. If you’re in a relationship even and you’re like, “My marriage is struggling. The stakes are really high.” Or you’re trying to get healthy and you’re like, “The stakes are super high because I’m at risk of diabetes or heart disease or whatever. I have high blood pressure. My doctor’s telling me if I don’t get this under control, all these things are going to happen.” Stakes feel high, right?

So, if the stakes are low, then we tend to either move through these phases quickly or we maybe even skip over some of them. So, the example I gave you of going to the store to get Diet Coke, the reason a lot of you are like, “Well, yeah, that’s a cute example, but that doesn’t help me with this thing I’m trying to do,” is because the stakes are so low. If I don’t happen to get Diet Coke, it’s no big deal. There’s lots of other things. We could drink water. We could drink something else. It’s going to be okay. The stakes are not that high. But here’s what I want to tell you. What determines the stakes? What determines whether stakes are high or not? I gave you a bunch of examples of things that I think most people would be like, “The stakes are pretty high on that.” But what determines the stakes is only our beliefs or stories.

So, what I’ve discovered is that people get to confidence much faster because they are really fully committed and they’re very consistent and they double, triple, 10X their efforts through those two phases so that they get to being an expert at it, and they get that earned confidence much faster, much easier, it’s much more enjoyable if they lower the stakes in their own minds. And you can do this. This is what I do with clients when I’m coaching them a lot of times. They’re like, “I just have to achieve this goal. I have to make this marriage work.” 

And I’ll say, “Why?” And they’ll say, “Well, maybe it has to do with kids.” They’re afraid that their kids are going to be, you know, have a terrible, messed-up life if this doesn’t work. Or maybe they’ve been divorced a couple times before or once before, and they’re like, “I don’t want to be twice divorced or three times divorced. Like, that would be, oh, what will people think of me? That would just, I’ll feel so bad about myself.” They’re adding stakes. You see how we do this? I have to make this business work because this is how I support my family. We’ve made the stakes so high.

But there’s always 25 other versions of the story available. So, in the business example, I’d say things like, “Or not, because you could just go get a job. You could try something else. There’s so many other ways to support your family.” And this is the way you’ve chosen for a reason. I’m not trying to talk you out of it. I’m just trying to show your brain that you’re making the stakes very high, which is going to make the process of moving through these phases slower and more painful. But if we lower the stakes, then we move through it faster and with more joy and lightness. And we have more immediate success from that place.

Listen, you don’t have to make that business work. You don’t have to lose the weight. Even if your doctor’s like, “If you don’t lose this weight,” or, “If you don’t get your blood pressure down,” or, “whatever, if you don’t get this in check, you’re going to have a heart attack, you’re going to die.” What if the doctor says that, Jody? These are real stakes, right?” I’m like, “Maybe, but is it helping you make the changes you want to in your life to think I have to change this? Because if not, I want to give you permission to lower the stakes in your own mind. Like, “Hey, listen, maybe I’m supposed to die young. I don’t know. But all I know is I’m going to do the best I can to get healthy, and I’m going to enjoy my life. I’m not going to suffer and hate my life in the name of maybe living longer with a life that I hate and I’m suffering and I hate myself and I feel weak and I’m ashamed and all this. I’m going to love myself and enjoy my life. That gives me a better chance of changing my bad habits into good habits.

And sometimes lowering the stakes does require making peace with a worst-case scenario. It requires, like, “All right. And whatever I think is the worst thing that could happen, if that happens, it would still be okay.” You see what I’m saying? So, I’m trying to give you lots of examples to articulate this, but I would love to help you with your specific one if you have specific situations where you want to be more confident. I can help walk you through the stages of courage, commitment, consistency, and confidence, but also, we can lower the stakes to make it all much easier. If you want to come to my free public coaching call at JodyMoore.com/freecoaching. So, come there and I’ll help you personally. But I hope that this gives you a good idea of how to get to confidence. You’ve got to go through all four phases.

So, when I say to, again, the person I’m coaching, “What is the emotion that will most help you?” the answer depends on where they are in the process. If they’re brand new, it might be courage. If they’ve been doing this for a little bit, but they’re just getting up and running, it might be commitment. If they’re starting to see some success but they don’t have as much as they want, it might be consistency. And only after all that do we get to confidence, which is fun for a minute, until we just move to the next thing.

Welcome to being a human being. Thanks for joining me today, everybody. I’ll see you next time on another episode. Bye-bye.

Oh wow, look at that. You made it to the end. Your time and attention is valuable, and I don’t take it lightly that you made it this far. In fact, it tells me you might be like me; insatiably curious about people and life and potential and connection. Maybe you have big dreams but a small budget and no time. You’re tired, but bored. You’re content, but dissatisfied. Sound familiar? Come to a free coaching call and see for yourself what’s possible: JodyMoore.com/freecoaching to register. That’s JodyMoore.com/freecoaching.