How to have more CONFIDENCE

Alright, let's rock and roll. Five steps to having more confidence in your life. Number one, decide you need no reason whatsoever to be more confident. Just make the decision to be confident. You don't need a reason. You don't need 50 people to tell you you're amazing or you're beautiful or we love you. You just have to say, you know what, today I'm gonna lift my head up a little bit. You know, today I'm gonna give myself a little bit of credit. Today I'm just gonna be confident, I'm gonna walk into this room, I'm stand tall as if I was an incredibly confident person for no other reason then that's my intention right now. That's it. That's the power of intention. It's the power of the self directed human being that we just get to choose how we want to feel. You could be happy right now for no reason, right? For no reason at all. You could just say, you know what, I'm decided to be happy in my life. You don't need 50 things to make you happy. Just sense the moment, feel grateful for life, you're good to go. We over complicate these things and we think we have to have some big long psychological story and build up to suddenly one day wake up and be more confident. No we don't. We have to wake up one more day and say today I'm going to be confident. Just like we decide when we wake up. Have you ever had a day where you just, I mean you just crushed it, you know, you got so much done. You were like, wow, at the end of the day you're like, man, I just crushed it today. That happened because when you woke up in the morning you said, I'm going to get some stuff done today. You had the intention to be a productive human being that day. So why not set the intention to be a confident human being that day? Why not set the intention to be a loving person or an ambitious person, or a fun person, or a flirty person, or a sexy person or whatever kind of person that you want to be, just decide you don't need a bunch of stuff. People really get this one wrong. And what happens is if you don't have the intention in the moment to say I'm going to be confident, I'm just going to allow that to come up. I'm going to going to feel that sense and feeling what confidence is for me and express that genuinely and real for myself. In the vacuum of intention arises impulse. And often from that impulse, through Our brainstem. Up comes worry, concern, fear. The paying attention to what is wrong so that we can fix it or flee or escape, right? So we have to have the intention of who you are and what we're going to be. It begins with you. Simply deciding to be a confident person changed my life when I did that. I realized this was way back in college for me. I just thought, I want to be a confident person. How's this going to happen? Do I have to wait till I'm 50 after I've achieved everything? I've made some money or maybe people like me somewhere. Come on, get over it. We should get over our stuff and one day just realize. Real confidence is simply having the ability to genuinely express who we truly are and to pursue things that we truly desire. That's confidence. Confidence doesn't have to mean you're leaping over tall buildings. Confidence means you're being who you are authentically for no other reason. No one gave you permission. You just decided to be who you are. You decided to chase your dreams. That's confidence, right? Believing in yourself and believing where you're going, that's confidence. It doesn't take a whole lot of magic. That's confidence from that decision to be confident. Just because. Just because we want to feel that sense of strength in our own bodies, that sense of energy and joy of expressing who we are, chasing what we want. Everything rolls from there. You know, the human develops in its psyche. We develop a real sense of competence or confidence coming from a sense of integrity for ourselves. You know, integrity is. I know who I am and I am being that consistently. I know what I want and I am chasing that. Consistent integrity. Being aligned with who you are, your values, your beliefs and your dreams. Having integrity, that gives us confidence in self, right? That our self can stand on its own and be itself and do what it desires. That gives us a sense of confidence. So how have you been doing that department? Have you been really demonstrating who you are to the world? Have you allowed yourself to do that? Because if you do that over a period of time, the self, and I would argue the soul, senses a coherence. You know, there's a cohesive sense of identity that comes from being consistent to the best of who we are. Confidence comes from that. And that too is will. It is decision. It is a desire to want to be a person of integrity, confidence. And that's where it stems from. I think if you decide to be confident, you have integrity in who you are being and what it is you're seeking in life. And your values. I think the third one from there, it really comes down to competency. I mentioned that word earlier, competency, which means, you know, psychologists often call it the confidence, competence loop. As you become more competent in something, you. You learn how to do it, you're more confident in doing it. As you learn how to ride a bike, and you rode the bike more and more and more, you became more skilled at it, you develop more confidence in your ability to ride the bike. Any area of your life, you're going to go into for the first time, be okay with being uncertain, Be okay with being uncomfortable. Be okay with not knowing how it's going to turn out because it's your first time, but stumble into it anyway. Because as you stumble into it, you develop skill, you develop comfort with it. And then suddenly one day you wake up and say, I'm pretty confident doing this. Nothing changed in who you are. What changes your level of competency? Knowledge, skill, and ability. That's what competency is. Knowledge, skill, ability and talent. And so when we finally realize, oh, wow, I just need to learn a little bit more here. I'll be more confident. I just need to apply this a little bit more here. I'll be more confident. As you develop skills and abilities in your life, in your unique areas, you become more confident. To do that, it requires the fourth thing. And that fourth thing is momentum. You know, momentum is key to confidence. When we stop having any momentum in our life, we often feel lost or confused or down. You know, we start losing that connection with our strength and our self. And so we have to take more action to develop more confidence. That means we have to say, what is it I truly want? And start moving towards it on a consistent basis before we know the whole plan. Off it. A lot of people think that your decision is your destiny. And sometimes I'm like, I don't know about that. A lot of people decide to lose weight. A lot of people decide to be a loving spouse. A lot of people decide to do something good, but they don't. It's disciplined action that is your destiny, right? And often some of the best decisions in your life come after you have momentum at something, and then you've gained some more perspective, right? But a lot of us are waiting for the perfect plan, the perfect time, the perfect person, the perfect thing to pursue our goals or our dreams. And it's that waiting that often dampens our confidence because we're at the external. We're sort of at the whim of the world a little bit. Maybe we get lucky. Maybe that person comes in, maybe the funding comes through. Whatever it is. We have to instead say, what can I do to begin this? What can I do now to begin? Because even if you begin and you're not sure, you don't have to know the whole path, right? Sometimes the whole stairway is not lumen until you take that first step. As we learned from Martin Luther King, right? It's like, what is that? Sometimes it's that first step, and then the staircase emerges, then we can see. And so for yourself, soon as you take that first step, that says in your mind, hey, you know what? I took a step. Good for me. And then you start making better and better decisions because you're able to see more often. You don't know where you're going in life until you start jogging towards something. So just run in place, run somewhere. But as soon as you run, you start, things open up to you. Say, oh, look at this, look at this, look at this. People often say, I wish I had more vision for my life. Brendan, I said, it's hard to have vision for your life if you've never seen anything. Get outside of the house, turn off the tv, turn off the computer, go see the world a little bit. You'll gain a little bit more vision, and with more vision and momentum towards the things you want, you will have more confidence. So he begins with deciding, really, you need nothing to be more confident. But if you need something, go with integrity. Be more of who you truly are. Chase what you truly desire. Be smart enough to know that you have to, have to, have to have to have to develop more competency at the things that you're interested in. More competency, more confidence. You have to realize, oh, my gosh, there is no reason in the world that you cannot yourself, with very simple moves, gain more momentum, more momentum, more progress, more progress, more confidence. And finally, the fifth thing of confidence, community. You know, we all need people around us who are supportive and positive and buoyant and who appreciate our sense of aliveness and joy and happiness in life. And if we don't have that, you can't sit there and be a victim. Oh, I just have a bad set of parents and I got a bad set of friends, and I guess I'm destined to be around a bunch of duds. No, go find a new peer group. Go to a seminar, go to the church. Go to, you know, a volunteer meeting. Go get around people who are positive and who are amazing. You know, a lot of people tell you, hey, you know what? Just get rid of all those negative people. But sometimes your negative people in your life are your, you know, your mom or your dad or your lover or your spouse or one of your kids is just a little tyrant. You know, you can't just open the door and say, get out of here, you little bastard. It doesn't work like that. It's not about cutting loose all the negative people, right? Of chopping off people and getting rid of them. Maybe there are some people you need to say, I don't need to associate with this person as much in my life anymore. Or if I do, I don't need to get so hooked up and trapped into their pools of pessimism. What you have to do is say instead, okay, if I don't have the supportive peer group, let me go create that. Let me go find those people and get around them. Because as people are cheering you on, you gain more confidence. As people are saying, hey, you're doing a good job, you say, yeah, I am doing a good job. And you allow yourself to feel that sense of success and that sense of integrity when other people recognize it in you. Sometimes our greatest confidence has come from having a community of supporters. And so you don't have to wait for those supporters to show up. Go find them. Go mix. Go mingle. Get outside of the house. Live life again. As you do that, as you live life again, what do you notice? More integrity, more momentum, more competency, more good people. And suddenly that thing you were hoping one day you found that you found confidence. No. One day you wake up, you found created it.