Things We Dive Into In This Episode:
The experience of visiting your hometown after moving away and how that impacts self-confidence (07:13)
How self-confidence and self-esteem feed into healing your body image (14:06)
Six tools for finding and maintaining unshakable self-confidence (15:09)
šResources
šEpisode Highlights
Six Tools to Find AND Maintain Self-Confidence
Take Risky Action (15:19)
Taking risks doesn't mean putting yourself in danger, it doesn't mean compromising your literal safety, but it does mean taking yourself out of your comfort zone and creating the possibility for failure, creating the possibility for mistakes to be made, and creating the possibility for you to learn.
Risks create the opportunity for you to learn to trust yourself, which helps you become an intuitive eater, intuitive exerciser, and someone who feels good about making their life choices.
What risky action have you been avoiding and what are the risky actions you know you need to take in order to reinforce a sense of trust in yourself and therefore reinforce a sense of self confidence?
You are a human. You're a biological being, not a robot (23:57)
Because we are part of nature, we have seasons, cycles, and human imperfections.
Letting yourself to have cycles and seasons is important because it allows you to stop being so hard on yourself all of the time. You can make peace with what ebbs and flows of life and forgive yourself for being human. We need to be able to love and forgive ourselves for the mistakes we make.
Cycles can look like graduating college, starting a new job, having a baby, starting or ending relationship, the menstrual cycle, astrological cycles, etc.
Allow yourself to just be in that cycle rather than shaming yourself for feeling a different way in each phase of life.
Treating and nurture yourself like part of nature by not expecting too much of yourself. Donāt expect yourself to run on no sleep, no food, no rests, no breaks, no resets, no social nourishment, etc.
You need the things that an animal needs, because you are one, so you've got to treat yourself like a human.
The thing that you often think is unlovable about you is the most special and magical thing about you. (30:01)
That thing that you're hiding or healing from is something that you need to soften into versus trying to like treat it away or push it away or hide it or deny it.
So much of our lack of self-confidence is because we think we need to hide something about ourselves or become something else in order to be loved.
The aspect of you that your parents or your siblings or whoever told you was annoying, needs to be expressed and explored and just held.
Your mess becomes your magic. The thing that you feel is like your biggest mess can actually become the thing that alchemizes into something beautiful and memorable and the thing that helps you be your true self.
Treat your body like your home, because it is your home (35:35)
There is nothing that you have experienced that your body has not experienced.
Your body feels so much better when you tend to it by nourishing yourself in an intentional way, finding and maintaining an exercise routine, sleeping enough, staying hydrated, and practicing embodiment like breathing and tuning into your five senses.
Sitting in front of a screen all day is the antithesis of practicing body care, so itās really important to make a conscious decision throughout the day to drop into your body, take deep breaths, ask your body how it's feeling, adjust your posture, stretch, and just be in your body.
Where do you feel self-confidence in your body? Try to put some extra care into that space.
Stop placing your sense of self-confidence in things that are beyond your control. (40:49)
If we place our sense of self-confidence in something that we cannot control, then our sense of self-confidence becomes conditional.
How do we make it not conditional? By putting yourself on a track instead of putting yourself on a hamster wheel. If you want to get back on track with something, make sure itās intentional by working towards strength, nourishment, having fun, having more adventures, and feeling more alive
Relationships impact your sense of self-confidence and your self-confidence impacts your relationships. (47:39)
There's a bi-directional relationship between your sense of self-confidence and your relationships. How confident you feel is going to have an impact on your relationships and also your relationships are going to have an impact on how confident you feel.
Schedule time with your friends in your calendar and just to seek communities that have shared interests with you.
Relationships should give you energy as opposed to leaving you feeling drained.
Have a lot of fun with yourself! (51:49)
We need to nourish our relationship with ourselves and have fun with ourselves. Both are just as important as social time.
How can you just be with yourself and enjoy yourself and remind yourself that you are good company to keep?
As long as you're able to remind yourself that you are good company to keep, you won't chase the wrong relationship just for the sake of having one and you won't be afraid to lose people when you take the risks and step outside of your comfort zone.
Youāll be less afraid because you know that you've got you, no matter what.
Nurture and nourish that solo time beyond a screen especially.
Thanks for listening! š Stay tuned to my website for more episode updates and other exciting programs and resources.
Transcript
Caitie: If we become confident, then we feel good about what we see in the mirror. Then we feel peace with what we see in the mirror. Self-confidence allows you to make peace with your reflection. Not making peace with your reflection allows you to be confident, right? So it's not like if you change your body to a point where you feel good about what you see in the mirror, then you find self-confidence. No, it's if you cultivate a sense of self-confidence, an unshakable sense of self-confidence and self-esteem, that gives you the path to making peace with your reflection. So I'm not necessarily talking about body image explicitly, but everything that I'm talking about today in relation to self-confidence and self-esteem inevitably feeds into healing your body image.
Welcome to Whole, Full, & Alive a podcast helping you feed yourself, feel yourself and be yourself. I'm Caitie Corradino. I'm a Registered Dietitian-Nutritionist, a body image coach and the founder of Full Soul Nutrition, a method that combines nutrition counseling with a powerful toolkit of somatic healing modalities. I have guided hundreds of clients to freedom with food, their bodies and every aspect of their lives. I've also been through this healing myself, and on this podcast, I want to help you eat with confidence, embrace your body form, aligned relationships and create a life that you're in love with. I'll share actionable tools no bullshit stories and interviews that will remind you why you have everything you need within you to feel whole, full and alive. Are you ready? Let's get into it.
Hey, welcome back to another episode of Whole, Full, & Alive. I am so grateful that you are tuning in today. Thank you so much for plugging this in. I am so excited to be here today for a solo episode talking about finding and maintaining a sense of self-confidence. I asked you on Instagram what you would like my next solo episode to be about, and this was the topic that won, and quite a lot of you participated in that poll. So thank you very much for voting on today's episode topic, and I'm selfishly very glad that this is a topic that won, because this is actually exactly what I wanted to talk about today. I was actually feeling intuitively inspired to talk about finding and maintaining a sense of self-confidence today, and I posted on Instagram stories just to make sure that that was what was going to serve you. I put a few other topics in the poll and this one won by a very high percentage. A sweeping number of you wanted to hear about this, so I am glad that this, hopefully, is what you want to hear about today and I hope that this will serve you today.
Before we dive into today's episode, I want to invite you to take the deepest breath you have taken all day today. Wherever you are, whether you're multitasking or just tuning into this show, roll the shoulders out, away from your ears, relax the muscles in your face. Notice where you're holding tension. Is it in your eyebrows, your forehead, your jaw, your shoulders? Take a nice deep breath in to collect that tension, gather up that tension, and a nice long exhale out to sweep out that tension. One more time. Take a nice deep breath in, exhale, sweep out that tension. Amazing.
And before I dive into today's episode, I also want to remind you that the Whole, Full, & Alive Toolkit is available for purchase on my website. If you love this podcast and you are looking for a collection of journal prompts, actionable tools, experiments, I like to call them, that you can run in your life to help you feel more whole, more full, more alive, please check that out on my website, fullsoulnutrition.com. Whole, Full, & Alive Toolkit is $99. And it is packed. It's packed with resources and things that will help you navigate nutrition. Intuitive eating, creating a morning routine, creating an evening routine, your relationship with exercise, regulating your nervous system all kinds of good stuff in there. I am so happy to have created this resource for you. It's always there for you whenever you need it.
And I also have one space available for one-on-one coaching right now. If you are listening to this in real time in early October 2023, I have one space open for one-on-one counseling to help you feed yourself, feel yourself and be yourself. If you are looking to heal your relationship with food, with your body, and start living a life that feels more energized, more aligned, more authentic to you, please feel free to send me a DM on Instagram or visit my website, fullsoulnutrition.com, to book an absolutely free discovery call. We can connect, I can tell you more about how one-on-one coaching works. And I offer 90-minute intensive sessions also, just kind of like a one-off thing. If you're not feeling like you can make the investment in long-term one-on-one coaching, I should have, throughout the month of October, about two or three spaces open for 90-minute intensives. If that appeals to you, all right, let's dive in.
Finding and maintaining a sense of self-confidence. It's certainly interesting to be having this conversation about this topic from the place that I am speaking to you from today, because I am temporarily visiting my hometown, New York City, slash, New Jersey, for the first time in a while. If you are a regular listener of this podcast, you may or may not know that I am nomadic. I don't live anywhere right now and I have been bopping around the world since early 2022, since early last year, so for well over a year now I have been traveling. I had a temporary home base in Denver, Colorado for a little bit, but the longest amount of time that I ever spent in that little base camp that I created for myself was a month, and I would be there for like a month and then I'd travel and I'd be there for a month and then I traveled. So I gave that lease up in June of this year and I just went back to not having a base camp again, and I am strongly considering setting up another base camp in Lisbon, Portugal, but I haven't yet.
So I'm nomadic. That's part of my life and at this moment in early October 2023, I am visiting, passing through my hometown, and it's just such a reflection. It's such a reflection to visit the place that I grew up. I'm sure anyone else who has moved away from the place they grew up can relate to that feeling of going back and feeling simultaneous gratitude and also a little bit of grief, simultaneous nostalgia, and also a little bit of overwhelm. Simultaneous cozy nostalgia, but also like, oh my gosh, so much is coming up for me right now. So many memories are coming up for me right now.
It's really, really interesting and one of the most challenging parts of it is what my therapist actually described as the glitches in the matrix that happen when you go back to the place that you grew up in, especially when you encounter your parents or your family members. If you get triggered, you tend to glitch into this younger version of yourself for a second. Like for a second. You become like the teenage version of yourself that you needed to be when you were growing up with them, or you become just like the early 20s version of yourself that you needed to be when you were a little more guarded and needed to be protected. And yeah, it's been interesting.
I've experienced some glitches in the matrix, some glitches into the younger version of myself, every couple days or so since I've been here, and I've also experienced an abundance of gratitude for the way I'm able to come back here and be welcomed by so many friends and family, like I never left, and an abundance of gratitude for, like, wow, New York is the place I grew up. Like that's, yeah, it's amazing. It's amazing that this city is the place that formed me into the other person that I am. So grateful, so grateful that such a beautiful, diverse, hustling, bustling, opportunity rich place is the place where I learned so much about who I am and experienced the trials and tribulations of my teens and early 20s and all of that.
And so, yeah, it's just interesting to be giving you this message about finding self confidence and maintaining self confidence from my hometown, because I feel like what I was just saying when you visit, when you visit the place you grow up, and if you still live in the place that you grew up, just when you visit your family and your parents, it's like the ultimate test of your self confidence. I truly think it is because of those glitches in the matrix. You don't need to have had a bad childhood or traumatic childhood or anything like that. I'm not necessarily going there right now to experience those glitches in the matrix. It's just like we're all. We're all a little lost at some point. When we're kids, we're all a little messy. At some point, when we're teens, we're all a little. What the fuck is going on? When we're in our early 20s, and when you come back to the places and spaces that are reminiscent of those very coming of age challenging times, you're so prone to glitch, and it is the ultimate test of your self confidence when you re enter that space. So, yeah, that's where I'm coming to you from, from this space.
I am excited to share six tools for unshakable self-confidence. I don't always feel confident, and I feel confident a really good chunk of the time. I am very excited to say that I feel like I have built my self-confidence muscle to the strongest place it's ever been, and whenever I don't feel confident, I've come to recognize that it's because I have lost track of one of the six things that I'm going to share with you today. I am not a superhuman. I'm not indestructible. I'm not necessarily feeling confident 100% of the time, but what I've learned is that when I don't feel confident, I can pretty much trace back why my confidence is sinking, why my confidence is slipping, and I've learned that the six things I'm going to share with you today are things that have been really really important for my sense of self-confidence, and I've learned that these six things are really really important for all of my clients that I work with. And I've read a lot of books about self-esteem and about body image and about relationship psychology and I've just collected a lot of information about the concept of self-confidence and feeling confident and free and authentic and powerful, and these six tools that I'm going to share with you today are kind of a distilled spark notes version of what I feel is really really key to finding and maintaining a sense of self-confidence.
So I'm going to share these six things with you today. Live from New York City. And, as I'm going through these tools, I want to preface and say that I'm not necessarily talking about body image today. I talk about body image a lot on this podcast because I am an eating disorder recovery coach and intuitive eating dietitian, a body image coach, and so I talk about body image a lot, and these tools that I'm going to share with you today are not necessarily about body image. They're about having an unwavering sense of self-confidence, self-esteem and, that said, they can help your body image. All of these tools because body image and feeling more positive and feeling at peace with what you see in the mirror is a lot about cultivating a sense of self-confidence.
A lot of people get it twisted because of the narratives that were fed in the media and the narratives that the diet industry gives us. We're fed this idea that if we feel good about what we see in the mirror then we're going to become confident. I believe that the reverse is true. If we become confident, then we feel good about what we see in the mirror, then we feel peace with what we see in the mirror. Self-confidence allows you to make peace with your reflection. Not making peace with your reflection allows you to be confident, right? So it's not like if you change your body to a point where you feel good about what you see in the mirror, then you find self-confidence. No, it's if you cultivate a sense of self-confidence, an unshakable sense of self-confidence and self-esteem, that gives you the path to making peace with your reflection. So I'm not necessarily talking about body image explicitly, but everything that I'm talking about today in relation to self-confidence and self-esteem inevitably feeds into healing your body image. I hope that makes sense, that perspective shift. Confidence allows you to make peace with what you see in the mirror. Not making peace with what you see in the mirror allows you to have confidence. All right.
Now, the tools I've been talking for a while. Let's talk about these six tools to find and maintain a sense of self-confidence. Tool number one is take risky actions. It is so important to take risks in order to feel confident. Taking risks doesn't mean putting yourself in danger, it doesn't mean compromising your literal safety, but it does mean taking yourself out of your comfort zone. It does mean really putting yourself out there and creating the possibility for failure, creating the possibility for mistakes to be made, creating the possibility for you to learn and, more importantly this is why it's important for confidence, create the opportunity for you to trust yourself, to learn to trust yourself. If there is, like, one key ingredient for a sense of self-confidence and also for, like, becoming an intuitive eater, a healthy eater, an intuitive exerciser and someone who, just like, feels good about the choices they make in their life, it's a sense of self-trust. And if there's anything that helps you form a sense of self-trust, it's taking risks, it's determining what you value, what's most important to you, and taking actions that allow you to honor those values.
And I just want to say that I have never felt less confident than I did in the times in my life where I wasn't taking risks, the times in my life where I just settled for what felt comfortable. On the very first episode of this podcast, I shared the story of the breakup that I went through in early 2022, the breakup that kind of catapulted me into going nomadic and changing a lot about my life. And whenever I talk about that breakup and that time in my life where I sort of just ended my relationship, gave up my apartment in New York City, started traveling, changed the structure of my business, I talk about it in, I summarize it by saying I had to lose comfort so that I could stop losing myself. I had to lose comfort so that I could stop losing my soul, and that was just a really extreme version of me taking risky action to maintain my sense of self-confidence. But it is one of the most solid examples that I can think of for myself.
I was in a really comfortable relationship at the top of 2022. It was fine and there were some key ways that I wasn't able to honor my personal values in that relationship, and I was also living in New York City at the top of last year and I was comfortable here. I had started a nutrition private practice that was successful and I was getting in a flow here. I had a good network here, but I just it just didn't feel like the life I wanted to be living anymore. I wanted to take advantage of the fact that I was seeing all my clients virtually and I wanted to travel. Travel has always been wildly important to me and I really wanted to find some friends that felt more in alignment with the things that are important to me. A lot of my really good, like soulmate kind of friends were moving out of New York City. I felt a little isolated from people that I could really connect with. I wanted to just, I just knew there was a great big world out there for me to explore and I felt really, really called to explore it.
But in order to do that, I truly had to give up a comfortable life, a comfortable relationship and a comfortable life, and giving all of that up did so much for my sense of self confidence. It was a really risky action. I had to spend quite a lot of money to move out of New York City and to start traveling obviously. I had to go through a breakup. That came with a lot of grief, that was obviously a risk, and I had to change the structure of my business in order to travel as much as I did and bop around as much as I did, and I, you know, wasn't able to see certain types of clients that I was doing like really intense medical nutrition therapy with anymore had to, you know, change the structure of my business and that was, like all, really risky action. And as soon as I took those risky actions, I started to really cement a sense of self trust that really reinforced a sense of self confidence, and I'm so, so grateful for that.
And you know, with that little anecdote aside, I invite you to consider what risky action you've been avoiding and what risky action you know you need to take in order to reinforce a sense of trust in yourself and therefore reinforce a sense of self confidence. What's really important to you? That you're not letting yourself honor right now. Are you in a relationship with someone who isn't allowing you to be the fullest expression of yourself? Are you in a relationship with someone who doesn't honor and love all parts of you? Do you need to walk away from that relationship? Do you need to take the risk of giving up that relationship so you can go find someone who does honor the parts of you that are important to you.
Are you wanting to start a side hustle or a business, or create art or put something out into the world that people might not like, that some people might reject, that not everyone's going to understand. Do you need to take the risky action of putting it out there, of doing that damn thing? Have you been wanting to go on a solo trip? Do you finally have the time and the resources to do it? And you're feeling afraid to take the risk of going on the solo trip because of you know the inevitability of something being challenging in that solo travel. Can you go, do it, and it can be even simpler than all of these things that I'm naming, you know, do you just want to start up a conversation with someone at a coffee shop? Do you want to try a new hobby that you might be really shitty at when you first start it? Do you want to go out to dinner alone and just enjoy the fucking dinner and sit there and risk being judged?
I think a lot of the risks that we're afraid to take are risks that we're afraid to take because of fear of judgment. You know, fear of judgment is a very valid thing that blocks us from doing a lot of the things that we want to do, and it is certainly a risk to be judged and also when we take the actions that feel important to us and that really honor what we want in this life, in the face of risk of being judged, risk of being rejected by other people. That is the thing, the thing that gives us self-confidence. It's like I really can't think of anything more important.
I actually recorded an entire episode just on taking risks that you can listen to if you are someone who is having a hard time stepping out of your comfort zone. I offered some tools specific to risk taking in that episode. It was probably in like April of this year, maybe March, and I also recorded another episode on changing your mind, which is another form of risk, another form of getting uncomfortable. So those two episodes would be good resources for you. If this first tool for self-confidence is feeling sticky for you, listen to the risk taking episode and listen to the changing your mind episode.
Taking risks, I guess, is just about listening to your intuition and noticing where your intuition is asking you to step out of your comfort zone, because that nudge from your intuition to step out of your comfort zone is an invitation for you to grow, an invitation for you to learn and an invitation for you to start trusting yourself, to stop looking for a roadmap from other people, to stop asking people for directions to places they have never been I love saying that. Donāt ask someone for directions to places they've never been and to just start forming your own internal compass.
That's tool number one. Tool number two for finding and maintaining an unshakable sense of self-confidence is remembering that you are a human and because you're a human, you're a biological being and not a robot. You're not AI. You are a biological being. You are part of nature and because you are part of nature, because we are part of nature, we have seasons and we have very human imperfections about us and very human cycles about us. And allowing yourself to have cycles and seasons and be part of nature is also a really important piece of maintaining a sense of self-confidence, because it allows you to stop being so freaking hard on yourself all of the time. If you can make peace with the fact that you're a human and therefore, you're going to go through cycles, through times in your life where you have more energy, times in your life where you have less energy, times in your life where you have a little bit of a brain fart and you make a mistake.
Times in your life where you just act imperfectly and you act based off of defense mechanisms or, like I was talking about in the intro of this episode, where you go home and see your parents and have a complete glitch in the matrix and start acting like the 13-year-old version of yourself. Very human thing, right. If you can accept that about yourself and forgive yourself for being human, that is also really going to help you cultivate an unshakable sense of self-confidence. Right, as we are taking the risks that are necessary for us to take to be confident, we have to allow ourselves to be human along the way, because when we take risks, we're inevitably going to make mistakes. When we take risks, we're inevitably going to fuck up. Sometimes. When we take risks, there's going to be failures. When we take risks, there's going to be moments where we're like, eh, why did I just do that? And we need to be able to love and forgive and accept ourselves, not saying that we should repeat the same mistakes over and over again. We really do got to get an understanding of why we make certain mistakes and also we do need to accept that some of the mistakes we make are simply because we're human, simply because we're part of nature.
We go through cycles, we go through seasons, and the reason I'm framing it in terms of cycles and seasons in particular is because I recognize a lot with my clients that they don't allow themselves to go through cycles and seasons. They might be going through a really big transition time in their life. They're graduating college or they're starting a new job, or they just had a baby and they're like why can't I just be perfect? Why am I tired? Why am I making these mistakes? And it's like can we just look at the context for a second? Can you let yourself be human for a moment?
And for women, for people who menstruate, we go through cycles and seasons like all the time, right, like we don't have the same set of hormones in our bodies every week and we have to give ourselves grace and patience, as we are in different cycles and different seasons and the sense of self-confidence is gonna ebb and flow within those cycles and seasons if you're not allowing yourself to be in that cycle and in that season that you're in, if you're not allowing yourself, for example, to rest a little bit more during your luteal phase or your menstrual phase, when your body is just designed to be like a little bit lower in energy, and you're expecting yourself to be the same person that you were in a different phase of your cycle, then of course your self-confidence is not gonna be good because you're not giving yourself this permission slip to not be a robot that's kind of what I'm saying is like you're an animal, you're part of nature. You're a biological being. Give yourself permission to be that. Give yourself permission to not be perfect. You don't run on an algorithm. And if you're not giving yourself permission to be a human, then it's gonna be really challenging to take the risks that you need to take to be confident, because the risks are gonna be messy. Sometimes the risks are gonna come with mistakes, like I literally just said. I just want to repeat this. So give yourself permission to be human.
That is tool number two for cultivating a sense of unshakable self-confidence is forgiving your humanity, treating yourself like part of nature, nurturing yourself like you're part of nature, not expecting yourself to run on no sleep, not expecting yourself to run on no food. Not expecting yourself to run on no rests, no breaks, no resets, not expecting yourself to run without social nourishment. We're gonna talk about relationships as another tool for self-confidence, but you need the things that an animal needs, because you are one, so you've got to treat yourself like a human.
Tool number three for cultivating and maintaining an unshakable sense of self-confidence is remembering that the thing that you often think is unlovable about you is the most special and magical thing about you. That thing that you're hiding or that thing that you're healing from, is something that you need to soften into versus trying to like treat it away or push it away or hide it or deny it, and I'm gonna give some examples in a second. But I think the main message behind this tool number three is that so much of our lack of self-confidence is because we think we need to hide something about ourselves in order to be loved. We think that we need to become something else in order to be worthy, in order to be loved, and we spend our whole lives trying to push away something, that opinion that you're afraid to express, or explore, that aspect of you that your parents or your siblings told you was annoying, needs to be expressed and explored and just held. And it's not that we have to keep the things that were feeling a sense of stickiness about, like, for example, when I struggled with an eating disorder. You know I used to feel so, so, so much shame about that and I wanted to keep that the most under wraps secret that I could possibly keep. And as soon as I brought it to the surface in therapy and then as I told some of my friends that I was in recovery and then eventually I did recover fully and, you know, started telling clients that I'm recovered fully, it, it became part of who I am. It became a piece of my self confidence, healing from this thing that I used to not want to touch at all, that felt like the heaviest, stickiest, most horrible charged thing ever, the secretiveness of my eating disorder. That was what allowed me to become confident, was softening into the thing that I thought was literally wrong with me and exploring it. And it's not that I kept my eating disorder, but just holding space for it and acknowledging it and healing from it and acknowledging that I was healing from it. And it's not that you have to do what I'm doing and like put it out to the entire world, but just holding it and being with it and not being ashamed of it, and stop trying to hide it. It's your mess kind of becomes your magic. That sounds super cheesy and I don't give a shit. Like the thing that you feel is like your biggest mess actually can become the thing that alchemizes into something so so beautiful and memorable and the thing that helps you become confident.
Another example is that I just used to feel so much shame about the fact that I like to be deep and spiritual and that I'm like into concepts like intuition and I love to talk about mental and emotional health and I like to just go there. And there are certain people that have been in my life family members and otherwise who have Just said to me like Caitie, can we just not right now? Like why do you always have to talk about like intuition and like getting out of your comfort zone? And like you know literally what I'm sitting on this microphone talking about right now? And, yeah, I used to feel like, wow, am I just like, do I just? Am I just like picking at my wounds, like am I just going too deep? This thing must be unlovable about me if I've gotten this feedback from people that I that I go too deep too often, um, but I recognize that that those people just like weren't my people. Those people just aren't my people. I have a lot of friends now who like to hold space for the same kinds of conversations that I like to hold. And it's not that I'm like Doing a big spiritual ritual like 24/7, but I just I like to have certain kinds of conversations about certain kinds of topics. I'm just always trying to learn and explore and understand people better. And you know I'm lately I've kind of been vibing on like astrology, just kind of understanding, that kind of stuff for fun, and that's enjoyable to me and I I used to be ashamed of that side of myself.
I used to want to turn that side of myself off like a light switch. And I'm recognizing now that if I can just embrace that side of myself and soften into it and honor it and not try to just like push it away, hide it, that's what makes me confident because it's just who I really genuinely am. It's just who I am and, yeah, I don't, I don't have to change that. I can embrace that. I promise you. Your people are out there. There's a side of you that you're afraid to express because it's been rejected by people in your life Family, friends, other people. I encourage you to just put yourself out there until you find the people that allow you to express that side of yourself, because the thing that you're convinced is kind of weird or wrong about you is not weird or wrong.
Number four tool for finding and maintaining an unshakable sense of self-confidence is treating your body like your home, because it is your home. I used to say to people all the time you are not a body, you are not a body, and that's, in some sense, something that I still believe. Right, I don't think that the way your body looks is the most interesting thing about you, and also I think it's wrong to actually deny that your body is part of you, because, as one of my favorite body image teachers, hilary McBride, says, there is nothing that you have experienced that your body has not experienced. Right, like you and your body Are going through this life together. Your body is part of you, your body is your home and it is important to treat your body as such. Treat your body as your home. You know the way your home feels so much better and more cozy when it's clean and organized and a soft place to land. Your body feels so much better when you tend to it.
And I'm not talking about dieting and boot camp exercising. Obviously. If you listen to this show, you know my take on this. I am talking about structured nutrition, nourishing yourself in an intentional way. I am talking about finding and maintaining An exercise routine that feels fun and liberating and stress relieving for you and gets the blood flowing and, you know, just feels easy for you to stick with. And there's not like a reward and punishment system around it, it's not super rigid. I do mean sleeping, I do mean drinking water and I do mean practicing embodiment the tools that I've talked about in other episodes that help you just really get into your body breathing, tuning into your five senses, remembering that your body is the home that you move through the world in, and so it is important to practice body care If you want to find a sense of self-confidence.
Sitting in front of a screen all day is the antithesis of practicing body care. Right, because when we sit in front of a screen all day, we're living in our head all day long. Everything that we engage with on a screen is processed in our head. Everything that we're doing when we work these remote nine to five jobs is like happening in the head. So it is really important to make a conscious decision throughout the day to drop into your body, drop below the head, drop from the shoulders down as much as possible, take deep breaths, ask your body how it's feeling, adjust your posture, stretch, tune in, be in your body.
I was in a workshop recently that was led by a friend of mine who is an art therapist and she asked the group when do you experience self-confidence in your body? Thought that was an interesting question and my immediate answer was I feel self-confidence like in my heart space. Like, if I try to feel into a sense of self-confidence, I feel like my shoulders are rolled down my back and I feel just like an openness kind of in my heart space. And and it kind of makes me think about how, if I'm caught up in my head for too long and not tuning into the needs of my body, I tend to round my shoulders forward and have tension in my neck and feel kind of this like rounded upper back and not that sense of like open-heartedness that I can lean into when I in moments when I am feeling more confident, and I do think that there's a little bit of like a Hack here. It's like the more you relax in your body, breathe into your body, get the blood flowing in your body, the more you start to feel more positive thoughts, the more you start to feel more confident.
I think we can stay in our heads all day long trying to reframe and trying to say I feel confident, I feel confident, I feel confident. But the truth is that a full, authentic sense of self-confidence is going to come from being in our bodies more than it's going to come from being in our brains. We need to go out there and live and experience the world by being in our being, in our bodies, not by being in our heads. We can think whatever we want to think, but until we're able to sense and feel, I really think that a sense of self-esteem is a sense. It's like a thing that you feel in your body, and so the more you can take care of your body in a way that is non restrictive, not focused on the pursuit of weight loss, but is nourishing and focused on the pursuit of health and well-being, the more you can sense into self-esteem, the more you can sense into self-confidence, because I really do think it's a, it's a sense, it's a feeling, it's something we can feel in our bodies.
Tool number five for finding and maintaining an unshakable sense of self-confidence is stop placing your sense of self-confidence in things that are beyond your control. There are certain things in life that we have a sense of agency in and there are certain things in life that are beyond our control, that we cannot exactly decide, that we cannot totally manipulate the outcome of. If we place our sense of self-confidence in something that we cannot control, then our sense of self-confidence becomes very, very conditional, because the second that thing changes, there goes our sense of self-confidence. So, for example, if we place our sense of self-confidence in a certain number on the scale, in being a certain particular body shape, body size, if our body fluctuates, there goes our sense of self-confidence. And even if we're like, oh, but my body's not going to fluctuate as soon as I get it to this certain body shape and size, it's going to like stay there. Even if it does, for whatever reason, your self-esteem is still standing on a very rocky foundation. It's still standing and teetering on this very conditional place and you're telling yourself, if I wasn't this body, shape and size, I wouldn't be confident. And I don't think anyone's explicitly telling themselves that. But if you are placing your sense of self-confidence in your body, shape and size, you know when you're kind of doing that, even if that's not the thing that you're explicitly telling yourself.
Another example is if you place your sense of self-confidence in your relationship status. Okay, I need to have a partner, a boyfriend, a girlfriend, a partner in order to feel confident. I only feel confident when I have this. Okay, well, what if that person walks away from you? What if the relationship needs to end because that's the healthiest thing? Then you've got this really conditional sense of self-confidence. What if we place our sense of self-confidence on the money in the bank? Like, okay, now we're just keeping ourselves on a constant hamster wheel just in pursuit of keeping our money at a certain level in order to feel self-confident. And again, I don't want to deny that a sense of safety is important. It's totally important that we have a certain amount of money that helps us feel safe. But if that amount of money that we have in the bank is what we place our self-esteem in, then, yeah, our sense of self-esteem becomes very conditional. So we need to make our sense of self-confidence less conditional. And how do we do that?
I mean, the way I like to simplify it is by putting yourself on a track instead of putting yourself on a hamster wheel. So a lot of people say, like, I got to get back on track. I got to get back on track and that's cool. If you want to get back on track with something, let's do it, but let's make sure you're on a track that's actually going somewhere. You know, whenever I suggest that people let go of the pursuit of weight loss or the pursuit of, like, total control over something, some people think that I'm saying we should let go of the pursuit of anything at all. But, like, let me be clear, I love a good pursuit, I love a good pursuit, I love a good track. But let's get on the track towards strength, towards having fun, towards having more adventures, towards feeling more alive. Let's not get on a hamster wheel.
You know, the pursuit of trying to control something that we cannot control is a hamster wheel, but the pursuit of, you know, feeling more alive, feeling stronger, feeling healthier, that's a track and you can assume that your sense of self confidence is going to increase based on whether or not you're on a track. So, am I on a track towards feeling more energized? Am I on a track towards finding relationships that remind me of my worth and that I am special and that the things that are unique about me are lovable? Am I on a track towards a life that's in alignment with my values? You know, you can place your sense of self confidence in whether or not you're on the track, but you can't place your sense of self confidence in things that you ultimately cannot totally control, because placing your self confidence in that stuff makes your sense of self confidence very, very conditional and it puts you on this hamster wheel, this never ending hamster wheel. You know and maybe I'll do a whole episode on the track versus the hamster wheel but I hope that that, I hope that that makes sense.
I think I used to definitely be in a place where I was placing my sense of self confidence in how much money I was making and, honestly, at the end of the day, we can only control how much money we're making so much. You know, there are certain things that we can do to make sure that we have a job and have a salary and have the resources that we need to feel safe. But beyond a certain safety point we don't have all that much control over what's going to happen to our finances. You know, sometimes we are going to have to inevitably pay a medical expense that's going to cause the amount of money in our bank account to drop. We're going to have to accommodate inflation, we're going to have to pay some sort of expense, and if your sense of self esteem is contingent on the amount of money you have in the bank, then your sense of self esteem dips when you have an unavoidable expense, and that's not fair. That's not fair to you. And so it is important to place your sense of self esteem in things that you actually can control and things that you and things that you actually do get to decide, and not in how the economy is doing, because the economy is beyond your control. And so now I try to place myself confidence more in things like am I doing the things that I really enjoy? Am I putting myself out there and pursuing relationships? Not whether or not I find a partner, but just whether or not I'm pursuing a healthy partnership and learning about what that looks like and pursuing relational health and, yeah, doing things that allow me to honor what's most important to me. I hope that lands with you.
The next tool for finding and maintaining an unshakable sense of self confidence is remembering that your relationships impact your sense of self confidence and your self confidence impacts impacts, your relationships. There's sort of this bi directional relationship going on there between your sense of self confidence and your relationships. How confident you feel is going to have an impact on your relationships and also your relationships are going to have an impact on how confident you feel. We are social creatures. We are humans. Kind of relating to the other tip I gave you, we need nourishing relationships in our life. We need to schedule time to be social with people who see us, with people who hold space for us, with people who have a sense of nervous system regulation themselves and we can kind of sit with them and feel a sense of grounding from their energy. It's important, even if that only even if the only super grounded person in your life is like a therapist or a provider or a mentor right now, that's okay. You need to make time to be in relationship with that person. It's important, when you're scheduling your life, to schedule time with your friends in your calendar and just to seek communities that have shared interests with you. This is an important piece of finding and maintaining an unshakable sense of self confidence.
As someone who has been traveling solo a lot, I can honestly say that the best part of it is the people I meet. Yes, the views are nice. Yes, it's cool to have a nice new food and it's beautiful to explore different aspects of different cultures, but nothing is more impactful than the people I have met, the friends I have collected, the relationships I have started in the time that I have been traveling. There's truly, truly, truly, nothing more meaningful than meeting people all around the world and forming relationships with people all around the world, and I do think that the risk of traveling is something that helps me cultivate a sense of self confidence, and I do think the fact that it's something that honors my values and what's important to me helps me cultivate a sense of self confidence from travel, and I truly believe that the relationships I've formed since I started traveling were also something that really contributed to my sense of self confidence.
So remember to water the relationships in your life and to water the relationships that reflect your sense of worthiness back to you. Don't water the relationships that make you feel really triggered. Don't water the relationships that you feel like you have to keep, or you should keep. Water the relationships that you want to water and that might feel a little risky sometimes, right, like maybe you're not sure if someone wants to have the same type of friendship with you as you desire with them. But take the risk, take the freaking risk of trying to water a new friendship, of trying to form a new friendship, of reaching out to someone and just saying like, hey, you want to be friends. The same way you might reach out to someone that you wanted to date. It is important, it is really really important. We run the risk of rejection when we go out on a limb for a relationship, and that's exactly why we've got to take risks to be confident. Right, we have to take risks to be confident, because the reward that can come from the risk of forming a relationship with someone is so boundless, it's endless, it's infinite. Relationships make our life worth living.
Now I actually do have one more tool that I want to share with you, and I think I said that there's going to be six tools. I, honestly, have been talking for like 35 minutes and I can't remember. I can't remember if I said six tools. There's actually seven, fam, but we can just call this a bonus tool if I had said six at the top of the episode, and this tool might sound counter to the one that I just shared. It's not, though. The last tool I want to share with you is have a lot of fun with yourself, and that's not me negating the importance of relationships, because relationships are important and necessary, absolutely necessary for self-confidence, and, in addition to nourishing healthy relationships with other people, we need to nourish our relationship with ourselves and have fun with ourselves, with ourselves. Both are true. Fun solo time is just as important as fun community time and identifying your favorite way to have a good time with yourself, just with yourself.
Right, you're not just on your phone and you're scrolling like you're technically kind of launching into other people's stuff. How can you just be with yourself and enjoy yourself and remind yourself that you are good company to keep? Because as long as you're able to remind yourself that you are good company to keep, you won't chase the wrong relationship just for the sake of having one, you won't be afraid to lose people when you take the risks and step outside of your comfort zone. You won't be less afraid because you know that you've got you, no matter what and when. You trust the company, you keep and you can make peace with your own, your own quiet energy, your own company, you just you feel good doing the other things that you need to do to form a sense of self-confidence and you feel more motivated to practice the body care and you feel more trusting of the fact that your mess is your magic and you cultivate a sense of self-forgiveness for the periods of time that you are a human, for the moments of time that you're just a messy human.
You know, my favorite ways to have fun with myself are to dance, to blast music in my apartment and dance to it unapologetically, fully, and freely and just yeah, pick the playlist myself and just go at it, especially while I have like a face mask on and my favorite robe and sleep shorts and it's just a, it's just a vibe. There's a reason why that's a cliche scene in sitcoms. Like I love doing that. It's so much fun, it really is so much fun. I also love to read and I love to journal and I love to create art. I write random little poetry that no one's ever gonna see and I make collages that no one's ever gonna see.
I'm recording this podcast alone right now and it's kind of fun. It's kind of a creative project that I'm doing on my own. I am talking to you, I think, but I might not be, I might be talking to no one right now, and that's cool. I'm having fun and I love a good walk and I love a good solo dinner date, a good solo coffee with myself. Just have fun with yourself and enjoy the company you keep. Sometimes it's really important to nurture and nourish that solo time, and nurture and nourish that solo time beyond a screen is even more important.
Those are my, those are my tools that I want to offer you. I hope that they support you and I want to know what questions they inspire for you If you want me to expand on any of this stuff. I managed to talk for a while, but I think that I could dive deeper into each and every one of these, and I think I could find fabulous guests that could dive deeper into each and every one of these, but this is just this is just what I've learned about cultivating a sense of self-confidence.
When I get into a period of time where I feel like shit about myself, it's usually because I am avoiding taking a risk that I know would really serve me to take. I'm trying to stay in my comfort zone and in a cozy zone a little bit too long, or I'm not forgiving myself for being a human. I made a little mistake, didn't show up with as much grace as I wanted to in a certain scenario, or I am not trusting that something that's a little messy about me, something that I'm healing, is a magical thing if I could just give myself space to hold it. Or I'm not taking care of my body you know, I haven't eaten well for a few days or I haven't moved my body, or I'm dehydrated. Or I'm trying to control something that I can't control and placing my sense of self-worth in it, or one of my relationships is getting funky. Or I'm spending too much time with a dude who doesn't really appreciate me for who I am, or I'm spending too much time with someone that just triggers me and maybe isn't a good match for me, or I've forgotten to have fun with myself. I've forgotten that I'm pretty good company to keep. Yeah, those are the things that throw me off my sense of self-confidence. Those are things that really disconnect me from my sense of self-confidence, and when I reconnect with one, two or all of them, I start feeling myself again.
And I hope that you can connect with one, two or all of these things and start feeling yourself again. I think, if you can connect with all of them, that is like the ultimate juju to start really feeling yourself again. Yeah, I'm going to wrap it up here. I hope that you have a beautiful, peaceful, fabulous, whatever you need, rest of your day. Thank you so much for tuning in.
If you enjoyed this episode. I would appreciate so very much if you could leave a five star review on Spotify or a five star review on Apple, a written review on Apple, or share this show with someone who you think could benefit from some of these messages, or just share something that you took away from this episode with someone else. That is the real ripple effect that I hope Whole, Full, & Alive has, that there was just like a little nugget here that inspired you, that you can share with somebody. That might help them, that might just feel good for them. That might pull them out of a tiny moment of rut, or whatever it is. Yeah, thanks so much for being here. I will see you again for a guest episode in two weeks. Bye.
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