life coaching

3 Myths About Self-confidence That May be Holding You Back

February 4, 2020 by Edie Wadsworth Leave a Comment

I’ve spent the last couple days in Seaside Florida with an amazing group of women for a business retreat. Big groups of women can be difficult to navigate, especially if you struggle with self-doubt, comparison, and confidence.

It reminded me how important self-confidence is for how we show up in the world. And it’s something you get from outside yourself, it’s simply the thoughts you decide to think about yourself.

I want to share 3 myths about self-confidence that may be holding you back. As women, we compare ourselves to other people. We have this story in our head that if we were just like her, or if we were better at this, or if I just weighed this or looked like that or had this job. And none of that will give it to you. It’s a gift you give yourself.

And often, Ce often don’t take inventory of what the thoughts are that we have about ourselves, and those thoughts impact our life. Those thoughts you have about yourself become your life.

Myth one: self-confidence is the same as confidence

The first myth is we believe that self-confidence is the same thing as confidence, so we think that we have to have a lot of experience in something in order to be confident in it. Self confidence is just simply your thoughts about yourself, which creates your relationship with yourself.

Here’s what I’ve learned leading and coaching a bunch of amazing women in my Life Mentoring school—we don’t have good thoughts about ourselves. At least most of us don’t.

The scriptures say, “As a man thinks in his heart so is he.”

If you let the negative thoughts about yourself go unsupervised, “I’m no good, I’m not as good as her, I can’t do this,” those thoughts will wreak havoc in your life and you won’t be able to create the life that you want.

For example, I have a lot of confidence when I teach essential oils classes because I’ve taught a million of them.

Self-confidence is different. It’s not based on evidence in my life that I’m good at something. It’s simply knowing that no matter what happens, I can trust myself to feel the negative emotions that come up, even if I don’t do something well. And that is a concept that can change your life.

The reason the thoughts you think about yourself are important is because the way you show up in your life, for the people in your life, very much depends on the way you think about yourself.

If you’ve got a lot of negative self-talk and a lot of junk going on, and you’re not agreeing with God about who you are and whose you are, that is affecting the way you show up. It’s affecting you in a big way, and it’s holding you back. We’re going to talk about some solutions, but the myth is that confidence is the same as self confidence. And it isn’t. It’s very different.

Myth 2: you either have it or you don’t

The second myth is this, you either have it or you don’t. You either have self-confidence or you don’t have self-confidence. And nothing could be further from the truth.

Self-confidence is a skill that you practice, because if you have a lot of negative talk going on in your head about yourself, you’ve got to retrain you brain. You’ve got to be willing to look at those thoughts and say, “Why do I have such negative messages in my head about myself?”

In the past, I had a story in my head about myself that I was scattered and never got anything done. “I have so many ideas but I don’t follow through on them.” And that felt true to me.

But, what happens when I live from that thought?

I show up overwhelmed, not finishing things, feeling overwhelmed and scattered. I make that story come true because my brain likes to be in agreement, so it’ll just make the stories in your head true. You’ll end up acting out what you actually believe about yourself.

Self confidence is not something you just have or don’t have. It’s a skill that you practice.

First of all, take inventory of how you think about yourself and ask yourself, “Does that agree with what God says about me? I’m loved and forgiven and adored. Is the way I’m thinking about myself helping me show up the way I want to?”

Do you think I want to show up scattered and not finishing anything with a million ideas but can’t follow through with any of them? I don’t want to show up like that, so I have to choose to think differently about myself, and when I choose those thoughts carefully, guess what? I show up the way I want to show up. If we are willing to examine our thoughts about ourselves and be aware of them, we can then generate the kind of internal power in our lives that helps us show up in the world exactly the way we want.

Myth 3: Self-confidence means I’m confident that I’m good at things

The third myth about self-confidence is, we think self confidence means, “I’m confident that I’m good at things.” Nope. You know what it means?

I’m confident that I can handle myself and trust myself in hard situations, even when I fail.

I’m confident that I can handle myself in failure. I’m confident that I can handle myself in rejection. I’m confident I can handle my emotions, even the negative ones. I can handle the inevitable disappointment that my life sometimes brings.

And when we decide that we can count on ourselves not to beat ourselves up when we fail or when we’re rejected, everything opens up and becomes possible, because we stop hiding and we stop living in fear.

What do you make disappointment and failure mean? When you fail, do you beat yourself up and think, “Well you dummy, you never were good at anything,” and talk awful to yourself? You wouldn’t talk that way to a friend of yours.

Can you trust yourself with yourself?

Can you trust yourself with your life?

Can you trust yourself with failure?

Can you trust yourself with disappointment?

Self-Confidence means that you become an emotional adult with yourself.

You stop beating yourself up when you fail. You stop beating yourself up when you put yourself out there and you get rejected. You stop making it mean all these awful things.

You learn to trust yourself with yourself.

I promise you, when you get to that point, you really can do anything in your life, because you know you’re NOT going to beat yourself up! You know you’re not going to be mean to yourself. You know that you can trust yourself when things don’t go well, when you don’t do what you thought you would do, and when it doesn’t turn out how you thought it would.

Self-confidence is so much more powerful even than confidence, because confidence depends on external things. Self-confidence depends on you. And you can control you.

Are you strong enough to be kind to yourself when you mess up, when you get rejected, when things don’t turn out, when it didn’t go as planned? Can you really trust yourself with failure? Can you trust yourself with the negative emotions that you sometimes feel instead of making it so dramatic and so awful? Yes, YOU CAN!

Self-confidence is such a beautiful gift that you give yourself and that in turn give everyone around you, because it allows you to show up knowing for everyone else because you’ve already taken care of yourself.

Our thoughts are so powerful.

We need to take every thought captive because remember, “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.” How are you thinking about yourself? What are your thoughts about yourself? You should examine them. You should make sure they agree and align with scripture.

The scriptures say you are loved and adored and forgiven. Yes, you’re a sinner. Yes, you’re going to screw up. Yes, that’s why you need Jesus. But agree with God about who you are and whose you are. Then have the courage to treat yourself well even when things don’t go the way you think they should, even when you fail, even when you get rejected.

If you haven’t yet, go get on the waiting list for my coaching program, Life Mentoring School, where we help women get unstuck, rewrite their stories, and create the life they want!

How to Feel Better – 4 ways to Ease Anxiety

February 4, 2020 by Edie Wadsworth Leave a Comment

I spoke this past December at Arrowhead Church for their women’s night. I was really excited about it and I wrote a mostly new talk for their event. I was more nervous than usual when I got to the church and I had a “moment” in the green room where I felt almost a little woozy.

I knew it was anxiety. My hands were sweaty. My heart was beating fast. I know many of you can relate to this so I wanted to share how I coached myself.

I’m not talking about crippling anxiety that you might need to see a professional for, I’m talking about the anxiety that most of us feel at different times as we’re just living our lives! We live with a lot of anxiety and a lot of stress and there are things that we can do to help ease that, to help manage that better.

Anxiety can be one of the emotions that kind of keeps us stuck and in a loop. If we’re not careful and if we don’t come outside of ourselves a little bit and look at what’s happening, it can overtake us.

Until the last few years, I haven’t had much anxiety in my life. Or if I’ve had it, I’ve been able to almost immediately talk myself into a more productive emotion.

But since I’ve been going through some hormonal changes, it’s not been as easy to do that. (HELLO PERIMENOPAUSE, I’m trying to love you.)

I don’t let it define me. And I just do the thing that I’m doing with a little anxiety with me. It’s fine. It’s okay.

I had to teach myself how to sit with anxiety. How to let it be with me and not resist it. How to name it, describe it and actually feel it.

Anxiety is usually an emotion we feel when we’re resisting the primary emotion.

I was probably afraid my talk wasn’t going to be good, so instead of feeling fear, I pushed that away and then was left with anxiety. But when I let anxiety sit with me for a bit, I was able to redirect my thoughts.

“Of course I’m feeling fearful and anxious. But, I’ve been preparing for this for weeks and I love these women and I know that what I have to share will bless them.”

And that was enough to allow my body and my mind to relax a little.

Instead of avoiding or reacting or resisting the fear and anxiety, I let them be with me. I could breathe them in and breathe them out. I said a prayer. I did some stretching to allow the anxiety to move around and leave my body. I didn’t judge myself for being fearful. I was patient and compassionate with myself.

Then, I focused on the people I came to serve. I thought about THEIR struggles and hurts and needs. I knew I was bringing help and relief and inspiration. I decided to interpret my emotions as excitement, as gratitude for being able to share in this way.

I want to share with you 4 skills that have helped me to feel better, to be more in control of my thoughts and emotions have served me so well!

One-Think it through

If you look up the definition of primary emotions and secondary emotions, primary emotions, most people will list four or six. Fear, anger, happiness, surprise, contempt, etc. There are these basic primary emotions and then there are emotions that we feel about those emotions.

Anxiety is a secondary emotion. It’s kind of a catchall and tends to be vague. We often get anxiety when we don’t know how to deal with the fear, when we don’t know how to deal with the anger, or when we suppress them. Anxiety is often a result of not processing our emotion, of not being willing to feel the emotions that we feel.

So think it through! Ask yourself lots of questions. What am I really feeling and why? What emotion am I avoiding? Right now I’m feeling anxious, but am I afraid? Am I angry? Am I scared?

Asking why is really important because we are going to want to blame our circumstances! It’s never the circumstances that cause our feelings, it’s always our thoughts.

The reason we have stress and anxiety is not because of anything that specifically happened. It’s because how we think about it.

How am I choosing to think about the things that are happening, or what’s giving me the anxiety? That means that there is another way to think about it! What are the thoughts that you’re having that aren’t true? I’m probably not going to die right now. I’m probably not going to forget all the words because look, I have all these notes. So examine your thoughts, really think about what you’re thinking!

Two- Be present

Anxiety is not the end of the world.

Anxiety is a flutter, a feeling in your body. If you’ve had panic attacks before, you may feel panicky, like, oh my gosh, I don’t want this to go to a panic attack. But I want you to remember that anxiety is a normal part of life. We all feel this way, so don’t make it worse by catastraphizing it.

You might feel short of breath, or hot and have sweaty hands. You might feel it in your stomach or your heart might beat fast. We so often have all of these physical things but we don’t put words to them.

What I did was I sat down and allowed myself to feel the anxiety. Just be with it. Just go, oh, this is what it feels like to feel anxious. Oh, interesting. I feel feel a little tight in my throat. Let me take some deep breaths. Let me breathe from my diaphragm. Interesting that my heart’s racing. Let me take some more deep breaths and let me just feel what it feels like to feel a little active.

I moved my body quite a bit so that the anxiety had somewhere to go. A lot of times when we feel anxious and stressed, we almost get paralyzed with our bodies and we carry the stress so tight. So I literally opened up my heart. I did some stretches, bent over and touch my toes, took a deep breath.

Three- Lean into discomfort

A lot of times what we do is we avoid the emotion.

If we don’t just allow it and process it, it’ll be some kind of reaction or some kind of explosion because we can only hold that for so long. But if you sit with anxiety and you let it be there, it usually passes fairly easily, especially if you don’t resist it.

In our society we have such a low tolerance for discomfort. We can almost always choose to not do the hard thing. And we often choose to buffer against it, with food or drink or distractions of some kind.

If you choose to buffer, you’re not going to get to the place you want to get to in your life. In order to get to where you want to get to, the version of yourself that you want to become, you have to be willing to sit with discomfort.

Why do I walk into things that are going to make me uncomfortable on purpose? I don’t have to. Because the best version of me is the version that walks into discomfort, who experiences it on purpose. Because I know that when I share my story and I’m able to connect with people, I am becoming a better version of myself and I’m using my gifts to bless other people.

Four- Look at the physical

There are so many things we can do to support our physical body’s own ability to manage stress and anxiety! Here are just a few:

Diet- One of the very common causes for people who have a lot of anxiety and stress is hormone fluctuation from poor diet. Too much sugar, eating too many calories, always shooting your insulin too high, living with chronic stress where your cortisol is too high all effect how your reacts. Really deciding that for the sake of your body, you’re going to get it on more of an even keel with what you eat is so important.
Gut health is very important. Are you doing probiotics? Are you taking care of your gut? Most of your serotonin is produced in your gut.
Exercise is huge! There are so many studies that show that longterm exercise is as effective or more so than antidepressants for depression and anxiety.
Essential Oils– of course as you know I love oils! I love trying to find natural treatments that really help with this. I have found Frankincense is super helpful, along with Peace and Calming and Stress away. One of the things that I did before I spoke is I took a couple drops of Frankincense and I just breathed it in really deep and I said a prayer of thanks and gratitude that I could be there doing this, that I have the ability to speak into women’s lives.

Anxiety is part of life and I’m thankful to have more understanding around it.

Don’t beat yourself up and don’t judge yourself. I hope these 4 tips will help you feel better! You’ve got this mama!

Want to dive deeper into our emotional and mental health? Get on the waiting list for my coaching program, Life Mentoring School, where I coach women on how to get unstuck and live with more passion and purpose!