Hi guys! Welcome to Episode 291 of the Wildly Successful Lifestyle podcast! Welcome to everyone listening whether you’re new or an old friend, thank you for hanging out with me. I Love you guys and I appreciate you. Don’t forget to leave a 5 star review if you’re loving the episodes!
How often do you feel confident certain and decisive?
I gave it a lot of thought and Confidence comes easy for me. I think the reason why is the definition of confidence is a belief or conviction that an outcome will be favorable. I’m a natural optimist. So, I generally believe that everything is going to work out great. I am also pretty decisive, mainly in my work arena. I can make a decision quick and I generally don’t question it once I make it. Now, I can be indecisive about what or where I want to eat. Certainty is the one that I wasn’t really sure about for me. There are some things Im certain about but they mainly have to do with my personal life, so involving Eric or Molly or my friends, I have a lot of certainty there.
But having confidence, feeling certain and being decisive are valuable traits and they are learnable. In fact there are ways even just in the way we carry ourselves that add to whether we feel confident or not.
So, How about you?
If you don’t feel confidence very often, could it be that your mind is telling you things aren’t going to end well so it holds you back from trying new things?
Here’s the thing, we are creatures of habits, whatever we do regularly, become our habits. So if you consistently hold yourself back, that becomes a habit, if you consistently have a hard time making decisions, that also becomes a habit, a sort of way of life. How many times have you heard someone describe someone as “they couldn’t make a decision to save their life. We can simply fall into the habit of that, but we can also learn how to be better at it.
If you don’t feel confident, or certain or you have trouble making decisions, You may constantly seek other peoples opinions or look to someone else for advice because you aren’t in touch with what you really want or you are afraid to admit to what you really want because it probably won’t happen anyway. And you can’t be certain about anything because there is no plan, there’s no scheduling out your week, life is just sort of happening as it comes to you so you aren’t really making decisions they’re sort of made for you by life just happening.
But you see when I say each of those words confidence certainty and decisiveness. They generate inside of me an inspiration to want to feel them more. Because when you feel confident, and you’re able to make decisions, and you are certain that no matter what happens in life you aren’t gonna quit, that’s a winning formula for success because you can’t lose when you are certain you’ll never quit and you aren’t afraid to make decisions when you know that even if it wasn’t the right one, you learned something and you are one step closer to the right decision, which gives you the confidence to try again.
How can we be more confident? Confidence doesn’t mean always succeeding. Confidence is really built through knowing that whether you succeed at something or not, you will pic yourself up and keep trying. One of the biggest things Tony Robbins attributes to confidence is something we easily control is our physiology and that’s basically how we are carrying ourself. In a ted talks Amy Cuddy says that spending 2 minutes in a power posture will boost your confidence by a huge margin. They actually studied this. Power postures would be like the wonder woman stance, you can google that if you don’t know what it is. I suggest you listen to that ted talks, it’s so good and its only about 13 minutes long. And I will preface this with she got a lot of unusually strong criticism for her studies on power posing, but her science is solid and you can read the thoughts on why it was criticized. My thoughts are anytime women are empowering women, it’s a good thing. I did this recently and I have to say, it definitely help me tap into an inner strength. I suggest using this before you go into situations where you might be nervous. I put myself in a power posture for 2 minutes. Could you use this before your next interview? Maybe you do a power posture before your next Family get together? Its a powerful way to create more confidence and you have complete control of that.
And, How can we be more decisive? Sometimes we are indecisive because we get overwhelmed with the big picture. The best way to become more decisive is to just take the next logical step. My older sister lost her husband who took care of everything. It would be very easy to get overwhelmed with not know all she needed to do, but she doesn’t have to overwhelm herself, sometimes it’s just putting one foot in front of the other to get out of bed. Don’t worry about 10 steps down the road. What’s the next best step you can take today? And When you make a decision, commit to it. Get behind it. Noone is certain all the time. If your decision turns out to be the wrong one, ok, learn from it and pivot. That’s the key to becoming more decisive. Knowing that if its not the right one, you will learn and pivot. And, Sometimes people have trouble making decisions because they focus on what could go wrong, but what about what could go right? Don’t always only consider the negative, also visualize what could be right about it. We paralyze ourselves sometimes by focusing on the negative. Finally realizing that there may not be a perfect decision, makes it easier to choose one. It could just be opening a door you didn’t realize needed to be open.
And finally, How can we be more certain? A lot of times we are uncertain because we don’t have a plan. Or we are going into a scenario where we aren’t certain what’s going to happen or how someone is going to react . There is one thing you know you CAN always be certain of? How YOU act. What YOU do. Visualize how you want to show up in any scenario that might come up. Who do YOU want to be. This past week we were hit with a family tragedy and I didn’t know how things were going to go, but I knew how I was going to show up. Eric and I had an hour and a half drive and during that drive we talked about it, we talked about how we wanted to show up. I knew my older sister was going through the hardest thing she ever has and she needed me to be there to just listen and love her and support her in whatever way she needed and that’s what I did. I knew I was going to be seeing my other sister that I haven’t seen in years and I didn’t know how that was going to go, but I decided I was just going to love and be who I always have been and that’s someone who doesn’t hold resentment, who doesn’t hold a grudge. And that’s how I showed up. You know what? There was not one minute of awkwardness, if there was, I didn’t notice it. I made up my mind in advance so I created certainty for myself in how I was going to be. It felt good going to be certain of how I was going to be even though the situation was uncertain. Sometimes that is all the certainty you need, being certain of how you’re gonna show up regardless.
My challenge to you this week is to google power postures and pick one and do it for 2 minutes and see how it makes you feel, and practice making decisions with small things like where to eat lunch, just pick one and line up with it. The more decisive you are, the more decisive you’ll be And finally you can find certainty every day in knowing how you’re gonna show up, you control that
