Category: Confidence

1. It’s Messy: True confidence can look like you lived through a food fight with your emotions. You often have to travel down some rocky roads and building confidence never seems to look like those lovely movie montages where everything’s resolved at the end of a great song. Cultivating confidence in your life won’t look pretty all the time, so don’t try and hide the mess.

 

2. There is no time limit: I almost hesitated making this list because confidence can’t be achieved in 5, 10 or 20 easy steps. It’s an accumulation of your inner work and the risks you take in life to build your character. Self-discovery is a life long journey. So stop stressing if you aren’t where you want to be confidence-wise in your teens, 20’s or 50’s. It’s something we’ll probably never figure out really, so we might as well enjoy the ride.

 

3. It’s not permanent: It’s tempting to think that once you ‘have’ confidence you can maintain it for the rest of your life. But much like a gas tank for your car, the feeling of confidence must be replenished and filled up over time. It’s normal for even the most confident people to go through bouts of feeling down, defeated and broken. What’s important is not to give up on creating those moments in life where you are learning and growing, because it’s those experiences that actually build your confidence.

 

4. You will HAVE to feel pain: Sorry, but there’s no way around it. Feeling pain is an important part of growing confident. Because it’s when you get to the other side of pain, heartbreak, embarrassment, and fear that you figure out what it means to feel pride, strength, and resilience. And these are the building blocks of truly confident people.

 

5. It’s Ultimately Worth It: Learning to love your own company, discovering who you are in the face of adversity, achieving something you never thought possible, believing that you are worth feeling strong and supported — these are all the benefits of building confidence. It’s a marathon, baby, not a sprint. And we just started running.

So many times we focus on the feeling of confidence or the result of having self-esteem but we don’t talk enough about the sometimes long, often arduous journey of getting there.

 

As you may have seen from my TEDx talk, I’m interested in exploring the role self-discovery plays in the world of confidence.

 

For me, self-discovery is the journey we take to better understand who we are. Independent of labels, relationships, past heartbreaks or future dreams. Self-discovery is the process of learning about…us.

 

It can feel a bit harder to discuss to because everyone’s process of self-discovery is different. And that’s what’s beautiful about this. My road and your road to feeling confident will never look the same.

 

So I’ve asked a few of my amazing team members (all under the age of 30, btw!) to share what self-discovery means to them:

 

Sara, 27: For me, self-discovery has been about learning personal accountability. How being mindful of and taking responsibility for my thoughts and actions has led me to better understand myself and make choices that are authentic to who I am.

 

Alyssa, 24: Self-discovery is a growth pattern of letting go and being open: letting go of what you thought you knew or were, being open to letting your heart and mind be changed.

 

Elizabeth, 25: Self-discovery, to me, is learning about yourself – your likes and dislikes, passions, weaknesses, skills, emotions, even the things you may have been avoiding. It is taking truth and knowledge head on, awakening yourself to the world around you, and reflecting on those experiences. We can only be fulfilled if we know what fills us up.

 

Brianna, 23: To me, self-discovery is understanding the experiences that have shaped me. It’s a process of identifying my beliefs and values and working to live by them. It’s realizing that my personal journey will involve happiness, excitement, fear, and doubt and embracing it.

 

Find us on Facebook and tell us what Self-Discovery means to you…