470. False Confidence

Confidence is one of the most useful emotions I can imagine for any one of us, and it’s something that requires ongoing work. And yet it seems to come easier to some people than others. I think the more we understand confidence, true confidence, and we don’t fall for what I’m calling false confidence, the easier it is to maintain and achieve.

And confidence makes you not only feel better, it makes you better at everything you want to accomplish. It helps everyone around you. So today we’re diving in and we’re going to understand false confidence so that we can understand true confidence. This is episode 470, False Confidence. Let’s go.

This is Better Than Happy. I’m your coach, Jody Moore. And on this podcast, my objective, just so we’re clear, is to change what you’ve been taught and have likely believed about yourself up until now. Here’s what I believe about you. I believe that what you think is real is mostly imagined And what you imagine is actually creating what’s real. I believe that in the ways you desire to achieve, you 100% have the capacity to succeed.

And finally, I believe that joy, love, and miracles are your God given natural state of being. And any time you feel far from them, the way back is much simpler than you think, but that’s about to change. Are you ready? Let’s do this.

What’s up, everybody? Welcome to the back office. That’s where I work now, in the back office. I have a little office that’s built in the backyard of my house. It’s dreamy and beautiful, and there’s a skylight. So, I have sunshine pouring in above my head and in through the little window which I wish was a bigger window. Maybe we’ll make it bigger one day. But at any rate, so happy to be here talking to you today and just soaking in all the goodness. We’re going to talk about confidence today.

We’re going to talk about false confidence for a lot of this episode, but I’m also going to talk about true confidence. And before we dive into it, I want to talk to you about back to school time. I know, it’s kind of a bummer to have to talk about back to school time, or maybe it’s good news for you. Maybe it’s going to be a relief when your kids go back to school, I know. I feel some of both. But nevertheless, school is right around the corner.

And as our kids go back to school, whether we’re talking about young kids, teenagers or even older kids, maybe heading out to college, there tends to be some anxiety that comes up at this time of year, maybe for you, maybe for your kids. So here at Jody Moore Coaching, we want to help with that. We have some amazing tools that have been really life changing for thousands of parents that I have coached who have had kids who struggle with anything from really chronic anxiety to just nerves and fear. And it’s challenging to know how do we navigate it.

How do we do the best job we can of supporting our kids and teaching them that it’s okay to feel emotions, but at the same time providing support. And meanwhile we have all our own emotions to deal with in the midst of it all, so it’s complicated. So, we wanted to put out a free workshop that we’re going to be offering that is called How to Help Your Anxious Kid. And by kid again, think broad range of ages. I’m going to give you tools and strategies that you can use at all different ages. You just modify them based on the age of the child.

And I’m also going to talk to you about the three mistakes that I see a lot of parents make, that seem like they would help, but actually can potentially do more harm than good, so that we can avoid those mistakes. And again, this is a totally free workshop. It will be on Zoom. I will be there live teaching you, which means I can take live questions and maybe even bring some people on for some live help. I don’t know if we’ll have time for that, but I’ll definitely take questions. Anyway, I want to get you some help as you help your kids.

So, head to jodymoore.com/anxiouskid, anxious is spelled A-N-X-I-O-U-S. Jodymoore.com/anxiouskid. It’s happening on August 9^th. And I would encourage you to come live for many reasons, one being that you can ask me direct questions. But two, I’m going to have some cool freebies available if you’re there live. But also, if you can’t be there live we will be sending out a replay, but you’ve got to register to get it. So again, jodymoore.com/anxiouskid.

Alright, so we’re going to talk about false confidence here. And I want to rewind and state, I’ve said this before, but I think it’s really important that we all remember that what every single one of us wants is to feel better about ourselves, to think that we’re doing okay, that we are okay, we’re doing a good job, that we’re enough. And then ideally beyond that to even think that we’re good and amazing. And not that we need to believe we’re better than anyone else. I don’t even actually think it’s useful to believe that you’re better than anyone else.

But we want to just feel complete, that we’re good, that we’re not in a deficit in some way, that we don’t have something to prove or that we don’t need to earn some kind of worthiness or love. And that is just how we’re wired as human beings is that we have this constant need to be reassured that we’re okay. Now, for some people, that is a more obvious need than for others because of, well, a lot of factors.

But if it feels like a an urgent need to you, that you’re constantly trying to fill or that it never feels filled up, then there is work that we can do to help fill it and some of that’s what I want to talk about today. But for other people, maybe it just comes more naturally to understand it or to be able to fill it or they’ve learned strategies and tools and done a lot of work to get to a place of understanding that they are okay and then it just takes ongoing maintenance.

But every single one of us has this part of us, especially I should say, if we are mentally healthy, that questions that and that wants that. Now, I remember at a pretty young age having this realization and I don’t know if you can relate to this sort of thinking about existential things at a young age or if everybody is fascinated with human behavior like I am. But I remember, I want to say I was in middle school, maybe freshman in high school or something when I remember having this thought, everybody’s just trying to feel better about themselves.

Like people buying fancy, flashy new cars, it’s because they think that they’ll feel better about themself. Maybe because it will impress people or what have you, if they’re driving a fancy car. Or they’re buying a bigger house because they want to feel better about themselves. Or they’re trying to succeed at a job or make more money or go on fancier vacations or look what they would call better in some way, do their hair, makeup, clothes, etc. to try to feel good about themselves.

And in many cases they’re trying to impress other people and make other people think that they’re good and then they give themselves permission to think that they’re good. And isn’t that fascinating that so much of what we’re doing is trying to feel better about ourselves. Now, again, I was pretty young when I had this realization. So, I don’t think I accounted for the part of us that also can be altruistic and giving and generous and not self-focused.

I think I was probably just at an age where I still was pretty much entirely self-focused and as I’ve matured I’ve realized that that work of feeling good about yourself is important work. But it’s actually kind of boring and it’s only half the job of feeling completed as a human. And then we want to feel that we’re contributing and giving and serving and helping others outside of trying to get approval for doing it. But at any rate, I do think that so much of what motivates us is this void in understanding of our human worth and our human completeness.

So, I want to begin with that just because it is a big topic and it is an interesting thing that I hope that you’ll think about as well in your own mind. What I want to talk about today with false confidence is judgment and self-righteousness. And maybe those things are similar or they overlap a lot. But I was thinking about this with regards to some of the coaching that we’ve been doing lately in The Lab. And trying to figure out why is it that it’s so hard to get out of judgment? And why is self-righteousness sort of tempting?

Why is there some kind of energy or validation that we get when we indulge in self-righteousness or judgment, what is that about? Because really, with our prefrontal cortex brains, all of us agree that we don’t want to be judgmental and we don’t want to be self-righteous. And I don’t think very many people would say that there are useful ways to operate from in most cases but yet, it’s tempting and challenging to get out of.

And what I came up with was, it creates a sense of false confidence. And I’m calling it false confidence because I purposely want to differentiate it from true confidence, which I’ll talk about in a minute. It feels powerful to have an opinion about what’s right or what’s wrong or what’s good or what’s bad or what somebody should or shouldn’t be doing or thinking or being.

There’s some kind of powerful hit of validation we get from having an opinion and believing that our way is the right way or believing that we are doing it better. In some way we are showing up the way a human being should show up. There is some sort of comfort that we get that might touch on that void we have of thinking, am I okay. I think it’s temporary. I don’t think it’s long lasting and I think it’s fragile, is why I’m calling it false confidence.

So, let’s just say you have a job and you have co-workers who have the same job. And when you go to work, you do the job one way and somebody else does it a different way. Now, you might say, “No, look at the job description and look at the expectations our boss has given us. I’m clearly doing it the right way and this other person is doing it the wrong way. They’re dropping the ball. They’re not doing it at as excellent of a level or they just have a different approach, maybe.”

And it’s tempting to then move into judgment. So, there’s a part of us that feels justified in our own worthiness when we move into judgment and it feels like confidence in the moment. The reason I say it’s fragile is because if that makes you a better person than that other human being we’re talking about, then that means you might in other circumstances be lower down on the scale of human value.

If there is such a thing as a vertical scale of human goodness, human worthiness, human lovability then me being up feels good to me. But that also means I have the potential to be down. Maybe not in this area, I mean obviously it’s possible in any area, but maybe I’m not worried about it in this area. But it means in other areas there are probably people who are better at certain things or show up better in certain ways that I would like to than me.

So, the whole premise of this vertical up and down scale is fragile and frightening, and allows you to feel good when you’re up, but a part of you knows that you also in other situations could be down. So that’s why I don’t recommend that you let your brain stay on that scale. So how do you get off of it though? If clearly the job description says to do it this way, let’s even say the person is not completing all the things they’re supposed to at your job. Let’s just simplify it.

Let’s say there’s a checklist of steps one through ten, this is how you do this job, and they only do steps one through five and then they go home early. How could we not say they’re doing it wrong, Jody? They’re clearly doing it wrong. So, my question for you is, okay, well, who is to say doing all the steps is the best way? Who’s to say that’s the smartest way, let’s just say?

Because I remember actually having a job where I was on a team, it was a sales job and I worked with a bunch of people who were really fun. And there was one guy who was really funny on my team and another guy on our team didn’t really work very hard. He didn’t sell much but he also didn’t do the behaviors necessary to make sales. So sometimes you have somebody who’s making lots of calls and doing all the follow-up and all the things that we need to do, but they’re not converting. And then there’s people who just aren’t even really trying and he was the latter.

He just didn’t make many calls. He kind of sat around. He was distracted. And yet he was still there. He didn’t get fired. It didn’t seem like there was much discipline happening. So, I’m not saying that we want to be that guy who doesn’t step up and be excellent at things. I’m just saying, he was getting paid as well, and maybe he wasn’t getting paid as much because our salaries were based a little bit on our sales numbers, but he was making enough money to take care of his lifestyle.

And yet he didn’t have to do some of the things that the rest of us had to do. And he got to relax a little more and he had a little bit less stress. So, who’s to say that it’s always necessary to be excellent? Again, don’t get me wrong, I know some of you are freaking out right now. You’re like, “Of course, we want to be excellent. Of course we want to step up.” I hear you. I’m just saying, step back from it for a minute if you find yourself in judgment and self-righteousness and question, hey, maybe that guy knows what he’s doing.

Maybe it’s, hey, I’m going to do what I need to here to get by and keep getting a paycheck, but I don’t have any desire to make more money. I’m going to do the bare minimum in this case. In some cases, it’s not wrong to do the bare minimum. You don’t have to do your best at everything, did you know this? It doesn’t make you a better human being, doesn’t make you more worthy, more valuable, more lovable to do more. It means that there’s more possible for you in your life, that you can achieve more.

Now again, we can get into ethics and integrity and all of that and I hear you. I’m just saying get out of judgment for a minute. Decide, maybe that guy has a really valid reason for not stepping up and doing more. Or maybe he understands how to live life actually, which is to enjoy life and not stress so much and be such a perfectionist. You have to consider other alternatives.

Maybe he’s not wired the same way. Maybe he’s not motivated the same way. Maybe this is not the job for him and he eventually is going to get fired and end up with the job that is for him. Maybe that’s the exact path he’s supposed to be on. I don’t know. I don’t know what anyone else should be doing, what their lives should be like. You see what I’m saying? So, you can get out of judgment, which is a really important first step by recognizing that we’re all here having a human experience, and it’s supposed to look different for all of us.

And we’re all supposed to struggle in different ways. And we’re all supposed to be good at different things. And we’re all great and we’re all a mess in the end. So, we want to get out of judgment because we want to recognize there is no vertical scale. There is only a horizontal scale of differences. We have different people with different circumstances, different brains, different personalities, different strengths, different talents, different interests, different trauma, different fears, just different.

Different circumstances that they’re born into, different family situations, different things they’ve been taught, different socialization, different, different, different. Not better or worse. That is a hard thing for the brain to understand but it is the reality. So, I recommend you spend a lot of time practicing understanding it. Nobody is more valuable than anyone else in the end, regardless of people’s opinions.

Somebody loving you and adoring you and appreciating you or whatever work you do, or valuing you doesn’t make you a better person, it doesn’t. It doesn’t mean that you’re better. It means somebody has recognized your value. Now, can you recognize your value? Here’s where it gets interesting. So, if false confidence can feel like judgment or self-righteousness then true confidence feels more like curiosity, fascination, appreciation at times. And appreciation for people’s challenges, even, not like, oh, I’m so glad you had that challenge but just I can appreciate that must be hard, must be hard being them.

Or I can appreciate for me that this is hard for me and I can have compassion for me when I’m not able to step up the way I wanted to. So, what is true confidence? True confidence is not just having a lot of positive thoughts about yourself, although it will include some of that. It’s not just believing that you’re capable of the things that you desire to achieve, that you can do it. It’s not believing that you’re good enough. It’s believing all of that and embracing your dark side, we might call it.

Embracing that you also have weakness, that you also have shortcomings, that you also have pain or trauma that’s affecting you or health challenges, mental health challenges, limitations. Just downright wrong decisions, bad decisions that you make, temptations that you give into, insecurity that you operate from. You have all of those parts within you. And sometimes you manage those parts well and you don’t let them drive the bus and other days you don’t manage them well and you let them take the wheel. That’s just the reality of being a human being.

I’m not talking about making excuses for your bad behavior. I’m talking about embracing who you are in your complete humanness. So, it sounds a lot like, first of all, acknowledging your strengths, which some of you have a lot of work to do on acknowledging your strengths. I did an episode a while ago on bragging. I’m like, “Well, you should be bragging more.” Maybe not to other people, I mean, you can. I’m not opposed to you bragging to other people about what you’re really good at, but at least to yourself. Dude, you are really good at that, well done.

I think I’ve been hanging around my kids a lot. I’m starting to say words like dude. But anyway, bro, bro, what up? When I start using the Gen Z slang then you can just turn me off. I’ll try not to do that. Anyway, looking at yourself in the mirror and acknowledging, gosh, you’re really good at that. Thanks for doing that. Or you did an amazing job or that was really hard or I’m really proud of what you’ve done or how you handled that, or the way you’re navigating this situation.

Just be proud and grateful and acknowledge your strengths. Yes, I’m all for that. But also, the parts of you that struggle, the parts of you that are weak, the times when you fall short, can you at least accept it and not make your own compassion conditional on not having that part? Because you do have that part, my friend, so do I. We always will have it. We’re going to try to manage it, but we’re never going to get rid of our humanness.

So, it looks like, hey, I got you. I’m sorry, that must have been hard for you. Seems like you had a bad day. Or, hey, that wasn’t you at your best. What happened today? Is everything okay? What do you need? What’s lacking that you’re seeking that you thought you would get by acting out in that way? Because that’s not the way we’re going to get what we want and need. I don’t think we should continue that behavior. I don’t think that’s going to serve us. That doesn’t line up with our values, but you must have had a reason why. What’s going on?

I mean, true confidence, think about it, when you meet someone who’s truly confident. I’m not talking about false confidence. I’m not talking about pride and arrogance and self-righteousness and judgment and one upping. That’s false confidence. I’m talking about true confidence. True confidence sounds very much like humility. It sounds like, hey, so happy to be here today. Here’s what I hope to bring to the table because I’m really good at these things.

And here’s where I’m not good and I’m going to need your help, and I’m going to need suggestions. I’m going to need feedback because I’m terrible at that part. Doesn’t that feel like true confidence? I can tell you from working in corporate America, I worked with people of all types. I’m sure you have too, in whatever things that you spent your life doing. We run into people of all types.

And the people that have to explain everything and be the expert and constantly prove themselves and always be perfectionists and look perfect and act perfect. Those people are not confident. We can feel it. We feel the nervousness. We feel the tension. We feel the fear behind it. Those people who are not open to new ideas or suggestions or willing to be wrong, that is not confidence. That doesn’t feel like confidence to any of us. There’s a reason we’re repelled by that, because it’s not real, it’s pretend, it’s false confidence.

The people who are truly confident are very humble, very teachable, very open and often very successful, very successful. Some of the people that were highest up in the companies and organizations I’ve worked at in the past would say things like, “I never thought of it that way. Tell me why you think that. Tell me more about that.” That’s true confidence.

So, I don’t want you to be hard on yourself if you notice yourself in judgment and self-righteousness. Some of you, especially with certain relationships in your life, have a real habit of going into judgment. I just want you to notice that there’s this part of your brain that’s seeking validation, that’s trying to feel good about you. And it gets a little hit of validation by judging others, especially if you have other friends or people around you who will indulge in that same judgment with you.

When you can say, “You know what? I don’t think people should behave this way or do that thing.” And your friend says, “I agree. You know what? This person did this or I’ve noticed people saying this thing and people shouldn’t do that.” We not only get the validation that we’re good, a false sense of confidence, but we also get to connect with somebody else through it.

It’s the simplest, least common denominator way to connect with another person, to connect through judgment. It’s the easiest, but it doesn’t lift any of us higher. It gives us a false sense of confidence for a moment and a false sense of connection. Well, maybe it’s a real sense of connection, but I would argue that there are better, more long lasting, more expansive, more useful ways to connect with our friends. How do we do that if we’re not connecting through judgment?

To be honest with you, I feel like I’m at a point in my life where I’m barely figuring that out. Not that I don’t consider my friends or I to be super judgmental, but I think in little subtle ways it’s just easier for us to focus on negative and connect through negatives than through positives. One of the ways that I’m experimenting with more myself is through play. And by play it could literally mean you’re doing sports or something, but that’s not really what I mean when I say play.

I notice that sometimes teenagers are better at this than adults or young kids are really good at it. By play, I mean being in the moment and experiencing what’s going on and making some fun out of it, rather than talking about the past or talking about the future all the time. It’s really hard to talk about the past or talk about the future without judgment creeping in over and over again, judgment of ourselves, judgment of the situation, judgment of others.

But to be in the moment, to laugh, to enjoy what’s going on, to be silly and goofy and playful. I see my daughter and she’s got a friend in town this week and they’re laughing and they’re surfing and they’re eating tacos and they’re joking around with one another. They’re not talking, well, I’m sure when I’m not around, they talk about their friends and things. But what I see is an in the moment type of play. And that is an awesome way to connect and something we lose the ability to do as well as we get older.

I don’t know if there’s a vulnerability there we’re uncomfortable with or what. But I would encourage us to find different ways to connect and absolutely focus on building true confidence. It’s easy to be confident and feel good about yourself when you did a good job in whatever way you define a good job. But where you build the skill of it is when you fall short, when you drop the ball, when you don’t show up as the person you want to be, or you don’t feel how you want to feel, or you’ve made mistakes.

That’s your opportunity to connect with you, to have compassion for you. And it doesn’t mean that you ignore ‘bad behavior’. It means you say, “Hey, what’s going on? That wasn’t you at your best, but that’s okay. I still love you, but what’s going on? What do you need? I’m here for you. I got you. I love you.”

Alright, let’s focus on some true confidence, my friends. If you have questions about this or you have some other question about a topic you want me to address on the podcast, don’t forget we have a podcast hotline. You can call in and leave a message. And I have gotten several messages in the last few days. So, I’m going to be doing a couple of episodes coming up where I’m going to answer your questions. I apologize if I haven’t gotten to yours yet, but please feel free to call in at 877 hi Jody M. That’s Jody with a Y and M as in Moore, 877 hi Jody M.

Call and leave me a message if you have any questions on this, otherwise if you like today’s episode, I would be so delighted if you would share it in some way. Easy ways to take a screenshot of the podcast you’re listening to, share it on your Instagram stories, make sure you tag me so I can give you a reshare or just tell your friends. I would love to have you help me spread the word about the podcast.

Thanks for being here today, everybody. Don’t forget we’ve got a free webinar, How to Help Your Anxious Kid, hope to see you there. Take care, bye bye.

If you find the podcast to be helpful you’re going to love The Lab. In Better Than Happy: The Lab we experiment with applying all of it in your real life. Whether you’re in the middle of a challenge and ready for some relief or you’re ready to commit to pursuing your dream goals and making them a reality, come join me in the lab at jodymoore.com/thelab. That’s jodymoore.com/thelab.