Episode 280 Minisode: Are you more worried about how you look than how you feel?

00:00

Let’s talk about confidence, not the kind that comes from likes and compliments or approval, but the kind that lives quietly inside you, the kind you can trust even when somebody else doesn’t. Most of us spend our lives trying to manage what other people think, how we’re seen,  whether we’re liked, if we said the right thing,  or we looked the right way. But that’s not confidence, my friends. That’s control, and that’s exhausting.

00:29

So in this episode, I wanna help you stop outsourcing your self-worth and start coming home to yourself. You have to learn how to recognize that moment your anxiety flares as an invitation, not a flaw, so that you can shift from managing everybody else’s opinions to just managing your own mind. Because confidence isn’t something you earn with external validation. Confidence is what you feel

00:58

when you remember who you are.

01:05

My name is Colleen and I’m a mindful drinking coach helping high achieving professional women permanently reduce their alcohol consumption by 80%. Join me each week for evidence based holistic strategies  to regulate your nervous system,  balance your dopamine  and activate the growth mindset that makes you so powerful in other areas of your life  so you can stop worrying about losing control  and trust yourself again.  Get happy, not sober,  it’s not about the alcohol.

01:41

If you identify as someone who is insecure or struggles with confidence or has a lot of social anxiety, I want to remind you that feelings are a product of thoughts. And when you realize that you are more concerned with how you look or what other people think than you are about how you feel, then that is a call to action.

02:09

Your brain is telling you that something needs to be fixed or changed or controlled in the outside world. So you want to manage other people’s opinions.  You want them to validate or approve of what you’re doing. You want them to think certain things about you, like you’re flexible and fun and easygoing and smart and intelligent and also pretty and maybe fuckable too.  Like you’re  busy, your brain is directing you.

02:37

to manage other people’s thinking.  And that’s one way to respond to the call to action  of the anxiety, the feeling in your body that  something needs to change. But what actually needs to change is you need to start managing your own thinking  and realize that your thoughts  about other people’s thoughts  are still your thoughts. And so  becoming aware of the thinking habits that are driving the anxiety  is kind of ground zero.

03:08

If you wanted to feel differently, you would have to think differently. And so instead of trying to change your thoughts,  just like you’re trying to change the outside world or make sense of your thoughts or ask questions like, why am I so insecure?  Why am I always so self-conscious? Why can’t I just relax? Wrong questions. What you want to do is decide, how do I want to feel? And what would I need to be thinking in order to feel that way? I want you to imagine.

03:37

going away for a weekend all by yourself and going to a place like, let’s say, a cabin in the woods where there are no mirrors  and no other people. And it’s just you.  And you get to explore and experience  life from the inside out.  When you train your brain to focus on your own experience,  it will crowd out.

04:07

all of the other thoughts.  You just have to constantly redirect thought patterns and become grateful for the feelings of anxiety or insecurity or self-consciousness when they pop up  because they are calling you to pull your focus inward. What am  I experiencing?  Just imagine going through an entire weekend  where you cannot see what you look like, you cannot receive feedback from other people about

04:35

what you’re doing well or what they need from you or what they think of you. Like  you’re just existing in your body and  set the goal to exist more in your body. Let’s have a growth mindset about this.  You can’t change all your thoughts and expect to never feel insecure, anxious or self-conscious again.  But what you can do is move the needle and become more of the person who is  self-possessed

05:05

and focused on what really matters to her  than  managing other people’s neuroelectrical impulses in their brain and their own opinions  and feeling threatened because some other human brain has a thought.  You know, when you think about it, think about all the thoughts you have about other people, even the people you love dearly.  Sometimes you think, you’re not making any sense. You’re an idiot. God, what truck drove over you?

05:32

Even  we think things all the time and yet we can’t control what pops into our brain. And yet we’re trying to control what pops into other people’s brain. I mean, what else could you be doing with your life if you weren’t so focusing on manage managing other people’s thoughts and opinions for them so that you can feel better in your own body?  You can just bypass the third party situation and learn to feel better in your body.  And the question you want to ask is how do I want to feel right now?

06:01

What thought would support that feeling?  What action do I need to take to move in that direction? You don’t wake up one day and become the confident, powerful, badass version of yourself. You have to carve her out of stone in your mind so that you’re real clear on what she thinks, what she feels, what she wants, what she does, what her habits are.  You carve her out, and then you practice being her one

06:29

minute at a time, one hour at a time.  And then as you move between the old version and the new version of you,  at some point there will be a tipping point where you feel like your normal state  is this self-aware, oh grounded, wonderful, awesome, secure person. That will become your normal state. So all you have to do is move the needle. You don’t have to get to 100%. You just have to reach the tipping point.

06:58

where more often than not, you feel good about yourself. And when you realize you’re not feeling good about yourself, you know exactly what to think in order to change that.

07:10

All right, thanks for listening. And if you’re a high achieving, coachable woman who is ready to commit to manifesting your best life, and you’re going to need to reduce your alcohol consumption by about 80 % so that alcohol goes back to being a pleasure instead of a soul sucking problem, get in the show notes and click the link and schedule a discovery call with me or my team.