How to Become More Self-Confident (When You Have Anxiety) | Ep. 390

Today, we’re diving into a topic on how to become more self-confident, especially if you struggle with anxiety. Self-confidence is a quality we all desire, but for those of us with anxiety, it can seem particularly elusive. Let's explore how to cultivate self-confidence, even when anxiety is a persistent part of your life.

Understanding Self-Confidence

First, let’s clarify what self-confidence actually is. Many people mistake it for arrogance or an inflated sense of self. True self-confidence, however, is a deep trust in your own abilities, strengths, and judgment, even when faced with adversity. Anxiety can often undermine this trust, making us feel uncertain and vulnerable. But self-confidence is not something you’re born with—it’s something you develop over time.

Debunking Myths About Self-Confidence

Myth 1: Self-confidence is Innate

One common misconception is that self-confidence is an inherent trait. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Self-confidence is a skill that can be nurtured and grown with practice and perseverance.

Myth 2: Success Equals Confidence

Another myth is that self-confidence only comes after achieving certain milestones or successes. While accomplishments can boost confidence, they are not the sole source. True confidence is built through the process, not just the outcomes.

Myth 3: Confident People Don’t Have Anxiety

It’s a widespread belief that confident people are free from anxiety. In reality, confident individuals often face anxiety just like anyone else. The difference lies in their willingness to face their fears and grow through the experience.

Building Self-Confidence: Practical Steps

Embrace Challenges

Self-confidence grows from facing and overcoming difficult situations. Initially, the thought of tackling a tough challenge can be overwhelming, but each experience strengthens your trust in your ability to handle adversity.

Practice Feeling Your Emotions

Confidence isn’t about the absence of fear but rather the ability to feel and manage your emotions effectively. By practicing feeling emotions like fear, inadequacy, or shame, you become more comfortable and resilient in facing them.

Identify Specific Scenarios

Pinpoint the situations where you feel least confident. Reflect on what emotions these scenarios evoke and work on becoming more comfortable with those feelings. For example, if public speaking makes you anxious, practice feeling that anxiety in smaller, controlled settings until it becomes more manageable.

Cognitive and Behavioral Strategies

Cognitive Restructuring

Changing your thoughts can significantly impact your confidence. Instead of telling yourself, “I’m going to fail,” try affirmations like, “I’m prepared and capable.” This shift in mindset can reduce anxiety and boost your self-assurance.

Behavioral Exposure

Facing your fears head-on through repeated exposure can be incredibly effective. For example, if public speaking terrifies you, join a group like Toastmasters, or practice in front of friends and family. Repetition helps desensitize you to the fear and builds confidence in your abilities.

Reflect and Learn

After facing a fear, take time to reflect on the experience. Ask yourself, “What did I learn?” This reflection helps you identify areas for improvement and reinforces your ability to handle challenging situations.

Embrace Failure as a Learning Tool

Failure is an inevitable part of growth. Instead of viewing failure as a negative outcome, see it as an opportunity to learn and improve. The more you fail and learn from those failures, the more confident you become in your abilities.

Conclusion

Self-confidence is a journey, not a destination. It involves embracing challenges, feeling your emotions, and learning from both successes and failures. Remember, today is a beautiful day to do the hard thing. Face your fears, practice self-compassion, and celebrate your progress along the way.

Have a great day, everyone, and keep building that self-confidence!

---

TRANSCRIPTION: 

Hello and welcome back. I’m so happy you’re here. Today we are talking about how to become more self-confident, especially if you’re someone who has anxiety. 

Self-confidence is something that a lot of people talk about. It’s something we all want more of. But if you are someone who has anxiety, you might actually find that being self-confident is really, really hard. So I’m here today to talk with you about how you can become more self-confident even if anxiety is here. Let’s do it. 

First of all, what is this thing called self-confidence? Some people think that it’s like thinking really highly of yourself and that you think you’re the coolest—sort of arrogance—but that is not the definition of self-confidence. Self-confidence is a deep trust in your own abilities, your own strengths, your own capabilities, and your own judgment in the face of adversity. I get it. When we have anxiety, it’s very hard to feel that sense of trust. In fact, I think anxiety can sometimes make us feel like we can’t trust anything. We’re in a heightened state of fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. 

What we want to do today is take a look at how we can improve self-confidence in the face of anxiety. Now, in order to do that, we first have to look at some of the myths about self-confidence. A lot of people think that self-confidence is just something that you’re born with, and that could not be further from the truth. Self-confidence is something we grow over time. Other people believe that self-confidence is something you get once you’ve achieved something, like you’ve achieved some success, or you’ve lost enough weight. That was me when I had an eating disorder. When I’ve finished a course, then I can feel confident. Or, when I’ve done enough practice, then I can feel confident. I understand that. However, that if-then statement creates a lot of opportunities for us to feel out of control and like it’s something that we can’t create on our own. I actually want to really take that idea away and lean towards another strategy. 

Another common myth about self-confidence is that some people have it and some people don’t, and that it’s like an inherent piece of who we are—also not true. Anyone can work toward being confident. We have a lot of evidence. You probably know someone who’s really, really confident, and you don’t even think that they are warranted to have that much confidence—again, proof that we can grow self-confidence. It’s something that you can have that doesn’t require a certain accolade or level of success. It’s something that we can take on. Again, we are not using it in a way to hurt other people or to make other people feel bad. That’s actually not self-confidence. That’s usually coming from a place of insecurity. 

Another myth is that confident people don’t have anxiety—also not true. Confident people are as afraid, if not maybe even more afraid, than the average person on the street. I don’t want us to believe that confident people don’t bring anxiety to the table, and we are going to take a look at how we can work with that. 

Let’s now talk about how you can become more confident. Here’s the thing. As I have gone through some very difficult things, at the beginning of going through those difficult things, I too was overwhelmed with thoughts like, ‘I can’t handle it.’ ‘I don’t have what it takes.’ ‘This is going to destroy me.’ ‘This is going to ruin me.’ It’s like I’m just going to implode with this degree of suffering. 

But what I found was that once I had been through that difficult season, I felt more confident. It wasn’t that I succeeded in it, though. It’s not that I conquered all during that difficult turbulence season. There was a different shift towards, again, trusting that I could handle hard things. Often we go into hard, scary things, saying, “If I only had been through this before, well, then I would feel confident.” But that’s actually not true. 

A lot of self-confidence is your ability to feel the feelings you will have to feel when you do that hard thing, not the actual doing of the hard thing. The more we practice feelings of fear, threat, inadequacy, shame, or whatever it might be, the more we’re comfortable, open, and caring in feeling those feelings. That’s how we begin to feel self-confident in any situation, whether we’ve been through it before or not. 

I had a friend who once told me that a very, very dear loved one, actually a child, had been through cancer. I had said to her, “How are you doing?” She said, “Oh, I’ve been through cancer. Nothing can take me down.” But what she meant by that is that it’s not that everything was in comparison to cancer; it’s that she had mastered feeling her feelings as she navigated something really, really difficult. She could go through something completely different. But because she’s already committed and gone through the willingness to have some really uncomfortable feelings, she had a sense of self-confidence, like, ‘I could handle anything at all.’

What I want you to think about here is, what are the things that you don’t feel confident about? What specifically are the situations, the scenarios, and the times in your life where you don’t feel confident? And then I want to ask you, what would you have to be willing to feel, and what would you have to build comfortability feeling in order to feel confident doing that thing? It’s just a question. Sometimes it’s like, “Oh, to be confident doing my exposure, I’d have to be confident feeling uncertainty.” “Oh, to go through seeing my child struggle, I’d have to be confident feeling maybe guilt or maybe sadness.” “Maybe to handle my parents’ aging, I’d have to be able to confidently and willingly feel grief.” Ask yourself these questions because they can help us identify the emotion that we need to practice feeling on purpose. 

Now, when it comes to creating self-confidence, there are two ways we can target it. I talk to my clients about this all the time. We can create self-confidence by changing our thoughts, or we can create self-confidence by changing our behaviors. Let’s talk about creating or changing our thoughts. Let’s say you have something you need to do that’s creating a lot of anxiety. Maybe you have to do a public speaking event. You have a lot of anxiety. You could do some cognitive restructuring by changing your thoughts. Instead of saying, “You’re going to fail and this is going to be terrible,” you could practice saying, “It’s going to go great,” or “I feel like I know my stuff, I’ll be able to do it.” These are great strategies. We could use that. 

Another strategy would be, if you have a fear of public speaking, go and do lots of public speaking, Maybe you would join Toastmasters. Maybe you would rehearse it in front of your family, your neighbors, or your colleagues. You would practice doing this behavior over and over and over again with repetition. 

These are two very good ways to help with confidence building. However, let’s compare and contrast them. Let’s say that before this public speaking event, you spent a lot of time doing cognitive restructuring. “I’m going to do great. I’m going to do great. Nothing’s going to go wrong,” which we don’t actually know is true. But the thing is, when you walk up onto that stage, you don’t have a lot of proof that it is going to go well. You don’t have a lot of proof. If it doesn’t go well, you mightn’t leave there with a ton of confidence. However, if you’re somebody who instead practices facing that fear over and over and over and over again, as you go to walk onto that stage because you’ve changed your behavior repeatedly and you’ve practiced, you actually have trust in your ability. You have trust in your capability to feel fear. You know what fear feels like, you’ve practiced feeling it, and therefore you’re a little bit desensitized, or you’re a little bit feeling a sense of mastery over that feeling, and you are able to walk up onto that stage.

My advice is that the better way, the more superior way to build self-confidence, is to practice facing that emotion as much as you can. In exposure and response prevention, which we use as the gold standard treatment for OCD and many other anxiety disorders, we’ve practiced facing fears over and over. What clients often tell me is, “I actually start to feel confident doing that thing. I start to feel confident taking flights. I’m starting to feel confident going to the post office. I’m starting to feel confident driving my car by actually doing the thing.” 

The real moral of the story here is that confidence comes from repeatedly facing the thing that is hard for you. Identifying the specific emotion that makes it more difficult and practicing being willing to have that feeling.

Now, here is where, going back to that cognitive changing of your thoughts, it might be very, very beneficial, particularly at the end of when you faced your fear. Meaning, after you faced your fear, you can actually stop and go, “What did I learn? What did I learn about facing my fear?” Let’s say the public speaking example. You go up in front of your partner, your mom, or your dog, and you present your presentation. You might say, “I learned that I don’t know the script well enough,” or “I learned that I’m still anxious, but I can handle the anxiety.” “I learned that when I have anxiety, I beat myself up.” Oh, interesting. So we have an opportunity to make another tweak in behaviors because if beating yourself up doesn’t work—PS, it never does—then we might want to change our behavior in that area. The next time we’re going to go and do that presentation, we’re going to work at not beating ourselves up this time. What else did we learn? “I learned that my body didn’t explode when I gave the presentation to my dog and then to my mom and then to my neighbor.” We’re starting to learn things, and we’re starting to change the way we think because we changed our behavior. 

This is a really great strategy for anyone. There’s, again, an important cognitive era that we have that gets in our way of building self-confidence, and it’s this: “I’m a failure if it doesn’t go well.” This belief and this thought could create so much suffering. If I can leave you with one core thing to keep in your back pocket as you practice this, it’s that we need to fail a lot of times to get confident. We need to fail a lot of times to be good at something. That doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with us. 

I create these podcasts and these YouTube videos all the time. I sucked at them when I first started, but I didn’t stop, and I didn’t say, “That’s because I’m terrible at it.” It basically meant I had some learning to do. I had some practice to do, and it’s okay to suck at things until you get better. The only way I got better was by doing it over and over and over again. I got a little more comfortable and a little more confident in myself as I strategized how I could tweak it a little bit to be better and not be like, “When I’m better, I’ll feel good about this.” Again, that’s a myth. Self-confident people still have anxiety. They just bring it with them, and they know in their hearts that there’s no emotion I’m not willing to feel. Again, as we get better at this, we can start to have a sense of mastery over the emotions that we have to feel. 

Another thing I want you to think about here is if, as you do these scary things, you feel guilt, self-criticism, and shame. What we want to do is soften around that emotion, not add to it and be like, “Oh yeah, you’re right. I am the worst. I’m terrible. This is the worst thing ever. I’m bad and I shouldn’t be doing this and all the things.” Instead, we want to soften into it and change our belief around failure and learning and say, “It’s okay. I’m not bad at this. It’s okay that I’m not perfect at this.” 

Everyone starts at zero. The people with a million followers on Instagram originally started with zero followers. The people who win Olympic awards in races were once not the fastest runner. They were once in their school and maybe getting beaten by people in their elementary school, high school, or college. We all start somewhere at the beginning, so give yourself permission to start at the beginning. Don’t let yourself give up trying a couple of times, and expect yourself to feel confident. Confidence comes from the repetition of doing the thing and practicing having the emotion that is uncomfortable in relation to that task or activity. 

That is where I want you to change the way you think of self-confidence. It’s how I want you to change the way you lean into a task and an emotion as you do that task. I also want to remind you that today is a beautiful day to do the hard thing. This is why I say it on almost every episode. Today is a beautiful day for you to do the hard thing. I want you to go on after that thing that you want to do and practice this. Let the anxiety come, let whatever emotion come. I’m so impressed and proud of you for trying. 

Have a great day, everyone.