Rate Your Truth and Discover Self-Confidence.
By Karen Kleinwort — Written on Nov 01, 2011
You know you're confident. Go on and admit it. When you think of yourself and your confidence, you're being honest when you say, "Oh yeah, I'm confident."
Oh, just a second. You didn't, did you? Just tell a little fib? You're really not so confident as you tell others? Oh well, that’s okay since we all do it: stretch the truth, that is. However, if you can’t be candid with yourself, then with whom can you be candid? Knowing your truth is the second critical element to having self-confidence. Your first is making the connection between your actions and reactions to life’s dealings and their impact on your self-confidence. Truth is what empowers you to confidently step out of your comfort zone and take the steps necessary in life.
In "3 Simple Steps to Improve Your Self-Confidence" you were presented with your two major life accounts - integrity and confidence - where all your actions, decisions and experiences either will make deposits into or a withdrawals from. You know both these accounts affect your level of success in your career, your relationships, and your overall personal wellness.
Your confidence dictates how you handle and manage your stress or anxiety. A certain amount of stress is essential in life, but severe anxiety can be harmful. Your intention with managing your stress is to be able to handle yourself during times of crisis as well as you do in ordinary situations. With lower self-confidence it's more difficult to make valuable decisions.
Examples of normal or common, everyday stress can be managing your family calendars, prioritizing how to spend your time, or coordinating the carpooling for your children’s school trip. While working through these situations, your physical, emotional and mental bodies are working as per usual. You may experience emotions like frustration when coordinating other people's availability, but these frustrations are simply worked through and released. There are no feelings hovering around. In other words, you’ve let them go and moved on.
But what transpires as you go through a crisis or heightened state of stress? Using the same situational example as in "3 Simple Steps to Improving Your Self-Confidence": Somebody else has taken acknowledgment for your job well done and management has publically praised him. You congratulated the individual and gave yourself a pat on the back for taking the high road. Did you simply "let go" of the emotions you felt, or are there residual effects occurring in your physical body? Your emotional body? Mentally you’ve let the situation go, right? You aren’t stretching the truth and pretending you’ve let it go when in actuality you’ve only just stuffed it and are trying to persuade yourself that you’re over it, are you? Have you adopted the motto “Fake it till you make it”?
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