What Really is Confidence and How Do I Build More of It?

What is confidence really? 

We know that it has something to do with our ability to command a room, set boundaries, attract people and just generally get what we want in life. 

But what makes some people confident and others struggle with confidence and how do we build more confidence? 

Our sense of confidence directly equates to our sense of self-worth. Really, our confidence is based on our self-worth, how valuable we believe we are. 

At our core, free from intergenerational trauma, the painful events and family dynamics of our history, free from cultural norms, hurts and disappointments, we are fully confident in ourselves - we have fantastic self-esteem. We feel perfectly valuable deep inside - and if we lived in a vacuum or utopian world, we wouldn’t even question our value or where we lie on the many hierarchies of power and value that we place ourselves now, in our current life.

However, with intergenerational traumas & patterns, the history of our life and relationships, the toxic aspects of our culture, we build pain, we lose confidence and we place ourselves on these hierarchies of power and value. 

As young children, when we experience pain, we blame ourselves. We blame ourselves when our caregivers are struggling to treat us kindly and compassionately - because of their own shortcomings, unresolved pain and projections of cultural expectations. I believe this phenomenon, of blaming ourselves as children for our caregivers' hurtful behavior, is a primal mechanism we use to stay connected to our caregivers for survival, even when our caregivers are perpetrating abuse, or simply just causing emotional pain. As young children, whenever someone treats us poorly, we make up some kind of story about how it is our fault. And the most wild part about this is that we often still subconsciously believe these made up stories as adults. 

They can be really silly beliefs, like “I am unlovable for being enthusiastic,” “I am unlovable when I express emotions,” “I am unlovable when I feel angry,” “I am unlovable when I need attention.” Beliefs that we would never want to impose on a child, but allow to exist in our own psyche and when it comes to our own lives. And of course, they only exist because our caregivers didn’t know what to do with that aspect of us, it was their baggage, not ours. 

And these beliefs, each of them lowers our self-esteem. Because we feel wrong or bad when these aspects of ourselves want to surface. That shame, the feeling wrong, gives a general sense of being less than others. We believe this is something inherently wrong with me and that others that don’t have this thing are more valuable. 

These beliefs often even attach to aspects of ourselves that we have very little or no control over, like how we look, our weight, our ability to be good at or skilled in a certain area (like Math or a school subject), our ability to function (for those with ADHD or other “disorders”), the color of our skin, our gender, etc. These beliefs about our value relate to the way our current culture perceives worth.

Each of these beliefs impacts our sense of confidence. And when there are many or a belief has A LOT of unresolved pain surrounding it, it will more significantly impact our sense of worth and confidence. 

For example, as a child, I was not socially skilled. My parents rarely set up playdates or we really didn’t spend time socializing with other families outside of school/work hours. I wasn’t able to learn to socialize beyond school time and during school, I was often dismissed and outcast because of my poor social skills. I developed a deep wound around being disliked because of my not-so-great social skills. My sense of self worth suffered significantly. And despite many many years of work on that wounding, I still have to remind myself that I am not less than others in social settings. I could offer many many other examples, we all have a laundry list of hurts based on cultural expectations and our history. 

Your sense of self-worth, your confidence, impacts everything you do. 

As we touched on at the beginning, your confidence impacts everything you do. The more confident you are, the less barriers there are to success in every aspect of your life - your career, your dating/relationships, your income, your lifestyle choices, your ability to attract what you desire. When you don’t feel good about yourself, you will guard against allowing other people to see how poorly you feel about yourself in a plethora of different ways. You may make yourself small, you may lash out, you may isolate, you may check out or dissociate. You will struggle to be present and calm, you will struggle to get  things to go the way you want them to. 

So what the heck do you do about it? How do you build your sense of self worth?

The path to self confidence is two fold: 

• Recognizing that your wounds are simply reflections of other people’s (and our made up cultural expectations) unresolved issues and hurts that targeted you. And you don’t have to buy into them anymore. You have control over your beliefs. 

• Doing the embodiment work (because talking about it will take AGES to change things) to heal the wounds, release the beliefs and start living YOUR TRUTH instead of what everyone else has expected you to be and live. 

The more work you do to let go of each and every wounding, dynamic and cultural expectation, the more you can connect with your individual truth and integrity - your value system. The more you can let go of any hierarchy you have internalized about worth and buy into true equality. It requires relentless prioritization and work towards centering you and your healing. And as you do, not only do you build confidence and alignment, you also build compassion for others, forgiveness, generosity, magnetism, strength and abundance. And the closer you get to your essence, after peeling those layers, the more space you have to craft the life you desire and generously create the change in this world that we need you to. 

At your core, you are 100% worthy and valuable. All the BS you have lived through is just that, history. You are actually 1000% confident inside. You just have to peel away the layers of pain others have inflicted on you to find that confidence. 

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Comments? Feedback? Connect with me at kim@kimmassale.com!