74: 8 Tips to Boost Your Confidence | Dr. Zoe Shaw

Grab a cup of tea or listen as you go, ladies. This is your hour with Dr. Zoe, your life and relationship coach. With encouragement, on-point insight, inspiring guests, health tips, and advice, Dr. Zoe helps busy women keep their mind in the game by redefining your superwoman. You're listening to the Dr. Zoe Show.

Welcome to the Dr. Zoe Show, Redefining Your Superwoman. I'm your host, Dr. Zoe. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist with a doctorate in clinical psychology. I'm a life and relationship coach and a motivational speaker, and I can work with you virtually to help you get unstuck. My passion is helping women find their superpower, learn to embrace it, and share it with the world. Connect with me by texting the word JOIN to 38470 or go to my website at drzoeshaw.com. Today's topic is about confidence, 8 ways to kill it in the self-confidence realm. But first, my win and my fail. So my win, I'm super, super excited. My baby boy auditioned at Cal Lutheran for a college scholarship for theater and he killed it. He got it. And that's a win for a mama. Of course, a lot of my wins are my kids' wins because, you know, I do kind of invest a lot of time in them and they are kind of a part of me. So their wins are my wins, which also means their fails are my fails, which sucks in the mama department sometimes, but is true. So yeah, my baby auditioned and got a scholarship. So proud of him. I'm telling on my husband here, but it was kind of funny because I have literally been preparing for a year for this process. I started letters to my senior, which Some of you guys know about, where I'm helping other moms prepare for their kids to go off to college, really documenting the senior year. So I've been ultra prepared. And after my son auditioned, my husband realized, I guess for the first time, that he was going to college. And so he's like, so when is he leaving? And I said, Well, probably like August, September. My husband cried all night long. I shouldn't be laughing, but it's kind of funny because he's like, did you realize this was gonna happen? I'm like, yeah, this is what we've been doing all year, talking about preparing, but somehow it's just like gone right over his head. So my hubby's crying, but I'm so super happy for my baby and I'm sure I will be boohooing in just a couple of months. So my fail. This is real, y'all. No matter how minimal it is, this is real. I have been struggling on my eating game and I haven't really lost all the weight that I was supposed to have lost after my Christmas eating and it is March. Ah, so I am very disciplined with my workouts, with my eating and my health, and somehow I have just not gotten on the ball. So I need to make some adjustments. And I'm frustrated. So that's, that's a fail. It's just a reality. I gotta figure out what I need to tweak to fix this. I am sure a lot of you women get it. So those are my wins and my fails. And on to the topic, confidence. So I'm kind of excited to talk about this topic because it's going to really go in line with the course that I'm developing. My very first course that I'm going to be putting out into the world, which I'm really excited about because women contact me and some people, they just can't afford me and they want to know, do you have a course about this or something else or a program that can help me instead of doing one-on-one? So for women who can't or don't have the time or really just want to focus, hyperfocus on one issue instead of entering into therapy or life coaching with me, I am starting my courses. So I'm excited. So this program, it's not even titled yet. I just started working on it, but it's going to be around self-confidence and really how our internal voice, our self-talk affects our ability to accomplish our goals or not, really how it can be a barrier. This course was built out of actually a poll that I asked my Instagram followers. So I polled my Instagram followers about what do you guys want to change or what do you what area do you really wanna grow in in 2019? And self-confidence, self-love was an area that overwhelmingly won over other ones like marriage and dating. And I don't remember the other one, but there was another one too. So I'm gonna start out today by just giving you women some tips to boost your self-confidence. And I don't really know any woman who couldn't use a little bit of a boost. Social media, we all know our confidence takes a hit. I've talked to you guys about Getting rid of, muting, deleting accounts that affect your self-confidence. But it's pretty hard to be a woman in this society and not have some hits to it. But low self-confidence is not a life sentence. Self-confidence can be learned. It can be practiced and mastered just like any other skill. And once you master it, everything in your life will change for the better. And basically, it all kind of comes down to one simple question. If you don't believe in yourself, how in the world do you expect anybody else to believe in you? Once we believe in ourselves, we risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit. That's a quote by E.E. Cummings. Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit. spirit. And one of the things that really keeps us from pursuing our dreams and our goals is failure. And our fear of failure is all twisted up in a lack of self-confidence. And so we need confidence to overcome the fear that we can't do something. So of course, how do we overcome that fear? And we do it by working on our self-confidence and our self-esteem. And everybody will always have some level of fear. So, you know, no matter how brave you are, if you're a skydiver, if you're a risk seeker or a thrill seeker, you will always have that little twinge of nervousness, the butterflies in your stomach, and there is nothing wrong with it. That's our intelligent self saying, hey, this is a little scary, this could be dangerous. It's using those butterflies as energy. It's using it in a positive way that helps people to really leap into doing things that are fearful and mastering their fear and becoming and feeling successful. So here are some tips, little things that add up that you can do to boost your self-esteem. So one simple, very obvious one is stay away from negativity and bring on the positivity. So staying away from negativity really boils down to What lifts you up and what brings you down? Simple. So identify the things in your life that bring you down, that make you feel negative about yourself, whether it is a friend, whether it's a magazine, whether it's a feed on social media, whether it is a family member or a class you're taking. Pay attention to the things that bring you down and work on eliminating them from your life. And pay attention to the things that lift you up and work on increasing those in your life. You know, there's been some talk about the benefits of increasing our strengths instead of working on increasing our deficits. I've talked before about that whole aspect of where your time is spent. So you could spend a lot of time trying to increase a deficit, or you could spend a lot of time trying to maximize your strength, and you're gonna get a lot a lot further when you maximize strengths. So it kind of goes in line with that. That's tip number 1. Tip number 2, change your body language. Our body language speaks so much to other people about how we feel and think about ourselves. And I've worked with women, especially when we're doing things like trying to get promotions and raises, really paying attention to power posing, body language. So paying attention to body language is so very important. This is where your posture, your smiling, your eye contact, and speech— speaking slowly— comes into play. And really, just the simple act of pulling your shoulders back gives other people the impression that you're a confident person. You can Google or look on YouTube, power posing, ways to hold your body to show. And the thing is, it doesn't just show other people confidence. It actually creates confidence in yourself when you hold your body in a confident way. So if you're getting up and speaking to somebody, if you're going up and approaching someone, anytime you're interacting in your environment and you know that confidence could help you in that situation, work on your posture and your power posing. It doesn't only make you feel better, it makes other people feel more comfortable around you. Imagine a person with good posture and a smile, and you will be envisioning someone who is self-assured. Confident. It makes a difference. Number 3, don't accept failure and get rid of the negative voices in your head. My course that I'm going to be launching is going to be getting deep into your negative self-talk, how it affects you, reframing it, creating new stories, going even way back to your childhood and understanding the foundation of it, because it's those negative voices that we carry from childhood that Really can wreak havoc on our self-esteem and our ability to accomplish our goals in the present as adults. Yes, those things that happened to us are really stories that are told to us about who we are. So don't accept failure. If you look at all the, quote, successful people, many of them talk about how much failure had to happen to get to where they were. So when I say don't accept failure, don't accept it as an absolute. You fail once, you fail twice, you fail 10 times, it does not mean that you are a failure, and it does not mean that you will continue to be a failure. Reframe failure as the next stepping stone to success. Number 4, be prepared. Now, I've experienced this in my life so much, especially when I give speeches. When I have a speaking engagement, I know The way I can get on that stage and be the most confident is if I have overprepared. So when you are feeling the least confident about something, you want to overprepare because that being overprepared gives you that feeling of mastery of the material, whatever in the world it is, and it will help increase your confidence. When you know you haven't really prepared for something, you're nervous. You don't feel good about it because you kind of know, I don't know how this is going to turn out because I haven't prepared. So Overprepare for things, especially things that are super important to you, and that will help increase your confidence. I mentioned earlier when I talked about body posture, speak slowly. People who speak super quickly, which I sometimes do, not necessarily because I'm not confident, but especially on Instagram, I've had people say, oh, you're speaking so fast. Well, Instagram only gives you a minute. So I'm literally trying to spew out all the information I can give in a minute. But what is true and what we know in psychological studies is that people who speak slowly tend to be perceived as more confident. People who speak faster and at a faster rate tend to be perceived as probably nervous or anxious, not as confident. Number 6, get active. Body awareness gets created when you move your body. So just the act of exercising actually increases your body confidence and increases your self-awareness. awareness, and it increases your overall confidence in yourself. When we humans look at people who have a good mastery of their body, and that goes back to body posture, but also you can look at somebody and tell how well they take care of their body, that indicates confidence. So when I say get active, I'm meaning move your body, learn about your body, get in touch with your body in whatever way you need to do that, because that breeds self-confidence. Number 7, stop procrastinating. And procrastination is fear-based. It's not just because you're so busy. It's because you're using your busyness as an excuse to get done what you are fearful of getting done for whatever in the world reason. Who knows? Ask yourself when you notice that you're procrastinating, what am I worried about? What am I fearful of? Be honest with yourself because doing something is better than doing nothing. When we procrastinate, we sabotage ourself. We aren't prepared, so we're not gonna do as well. Our confidence is gonna plummet, or we don't get it done, or we're rushing. All of those things create a decrease in our self-confidence. So stop procrastinating. And you do that by first immediately asking yourself, what am I scared of? Address Embrace that fear. Go to worst-case scenario. Figure out how you can fix something in the worst-case scenario and then move forward even with those little bit of butterflies in your stomach. Last, it's so important to remind yourself how freaking awesome you are. You are. Sometimes we forget. You know, I do that same thing. And that's why I try to go back and look at what were my goals this year, this month, this week, this day? How many of them did I accomplish? If I accomplished any of them, I am that much further. And so you have to remind yourself how awesome you are by writing down all the amazing, wonderful, even little tiny accomplishments you have had in this year, this week, this month, this day. Reminding yourself of how far you've come helps you to be confident about the fact that you can continue to move on and do all the things that you need to do to be successful. If you are low in self-confidence, it is possible to do things that will increase it. Your self-confidence is actually in your control. It's not genetic. You don't have to be reliant on other people to increase it. If you believe that you're not very competent, that you're not smart, that you're not attractive, whatever it is, it can be changed. You can actually become someone, a woman who pursues what she wants despite the haters. And yes, I know the haters are out there. And you do this by taking control of your life and taking control of your self-confidence. By taking concrete actions that improve your self-confidence, your self-image, you can increase your confidence without the help of anyone else. You don't need anybody else to do it. It is all about your own thoughts. Your own behaviors. You can do this. If you think that you might be struggling a little bit in this area, send an email to me. Let me know that maybe you're interested in my course. I'll be launching it as a beta product so that people who get in early can get a much reduced price and you can help evaluate my program. It's a 6-week program. Like I said, I'm just getting it started, but send me an email and I can get you on the list. Next up, Real Talk. This is Real Talk, where I answer questions from my listeners and share my own musings and encouragement. Please reach out if you have some questions you'd like me to address on the show. All questions are anonymous. I take your confidentiality seriously as if you were my own client. You can email questions to Zoe@DrZoeShaw.com or connect with me on any of my social medias. This next question was curated from my column at the Grit and I have suffered from fear at night my whole life. I love sleeping, but falling asleep is the worst part for me. I'm always nervous that there's someone in my house or someone will break in while I'm sleeping. This has never actually happened to me in my 24 years of living, but it's been an absolute fear since I can remember, about 6 years old. I've told myself for years that I'll be fine when I'm an adult. Well, I'm married now and still haven't changed one bit. What are some ways I can start getting over this? I don't want to be a mother who's more scared at night than her children, and I feel like if I keep going the way that I am, then that will actually happen. My fear starts off as just a worry in the back of my head, and then it turns to anxiety to the point where I can't sleep with my back to the door. Thanks for all your help. This podcast has been a huge blessing for me. Okay, so it can seem like your fears come from nowhere, but they never really do. People who have panic attacks, they don't come out of the blue. Although they do feel like it. You mentioned that you've had this fear since you were about 6 years old, and something happened to create this fear. It might have been a movie you watched, a story that was told to you, or a traumatic event that happened before you even developed your iconic memory. And the iconic memory is the memory, you know, that you remember now. So maybe the only thing that happened is that your anxiety needed a place to land, and this one seemed like an excellent runway. But there is a reason. You may be surprised to know that you're describing symptoms that are consistent with a specific phobia called nyctophobia, which is a fear of the dark or nighttime. So remember, this is just advice. I am not treating you, so please note that I'm also not diagnosing you, and you probably need to seek treatment from a licensed professional for that. But the good news is that simple phobias are rather easy to treat, and what you're describing is actually not severe. I know it's uncomfortable for you, but it's not super severe. So 19 million people in the US have a phobia, and you're not alone. Most people can easily avoid their phobia, and that's where it gets tricky for you because you can't exactly avoid nighttime. So you've got to get this under control. I used to actually have a fear, a pretty moderate fear of the ocean, which I was able to avoid. But I actually, if you guys have been listening to me for a while, I purposely work on facing my fears. And so I've done scuba diving and fun stuff like that. So children whose parents have phobias are more likely to develop a phobia themselves. Parents can actually pass down their phobias to their children. This is not a genetic thing. It's really an environmental thing, though. So for that reason, among others, I'm so glad that you're reaching out right now to prevent this cycle before you even have children. Good job. Remember, phobias are irrational fear reactions, which means that you're scared of something that is not actually generally or immediately dangerous. So even though you know your fear is irrational, you can't control the fear by simply telling yourself that it's all going to be all right Or that there's nothing to be afraid of. And the fear of the dark is a natural human fear of the unknown. So most kids get this. It develops between the age of 3 and 6, and it's really protected us for centuries from things like going into dark caves, you know, because predators could have been hiding. Most people develop out of this fear, so they grow out of it, but some get stuck, as you have, for various reasons. And researchers also have found that the phobias are linked to the amygdala, which lies behind the pituitary gland in the brain, and the amygdala triggers the release of the fight-or-flight syndrome, which you've probably heard about, and that causes your body to get ready for danger. This adrenaline rush is what keeps you on alert, scared, and it disrupts your sleep at night because your body thinks it needs to run or fight. You don't really need to figure out what the trigger is to get help. That's the good news because you'll probably never figure it out. You just need to learn to pair your trigger with a different association, which will eventually reduce your fight-or-flight response. And a behavioral therapist can do this. I hope that made sense, but you don't have to continue to suffer. So please reach out to a behavioral therapist who's trained in treating specific phobias. She'll help you work on reducing that fight-or-flight response so that you can have some peace and calm sleeping at night and won't pass this on to your eventual kiddos. You've got this. I hope that was helpful. Thank you for tuning in to The Dr. Zoe Show. New shows go up on Tuesdays. Subscribe so you don't miss a show and if you're interested in coaching or therapy or you just want to get a little more help, go to my website at drzoeshaw.com or any of my social medias at the handle @DrZoeShaw. Join my free newsletter by texting the word JOIN to 38470 and I look forward to speaking with you wonderful ladies on social media throughout the week. Have a super week.

You've been listening to the Dr. Zoe Show, redefining your superwoman with your host, Dr. Zoe Shaw. Don't forget to sign up for her monthly newsletters to get encouragement, tips, and skills for keeping your mind in the superwoman game. Connect with her now at www.drzoeshaw.com. Tell your friends and And subscribe to her podcast on iTunes. Join us next time for another edition of— The Dr. Zoe Show.