121. 5 tips to build REAL self confidence (#1 will surprise you!)

In this podcast, I'm sharing five tips for developing true, unwavering self-confidence, and my advice is contrary to what a lot of people will tell you. I hope it helps you as we enter 2025! Let me know what most surprised you or has been most helpful in the comments.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome back to my YouTube channel guys, Jesse here, or if you're listening on the podcast, wherever you are listening to. And if you can hear some construction noise in the background, I am so sorry. It's just, we have to work around it. It's what's happening and there's no other time I can record. So here we are today.

We are discussing five tips to build self confidence as 2025. This is something that I would love for you to take with you. So let's get into it. 

Think of a woman who speaks her mind, who's at ease in her mind and body. She dresses the way she wants to. She exercises, she eats the way she wants to. It is about her being authentically herself and being okay with other people not approving of that. So we're going to get into these tips and also some common misconceptions that many, many people believe, and that will lead you astray.

Number one, stop trying to be confident. And I know that this sounds counterintuitive, but people who are confident are not walking around thinking, Oh, I need to be confident today. How can I show up as confident? This is typically coming from actually a desire to [00:01:00] appear a certain way to other people and makes you feel more insecure.

So instead, what I want you to do is to detach from the idea of being confident at all, which I understand that's the whole point of this video, but you'll see in the other tips, what we're going to be focusing on instead. So get rid of the goal of trying to be confident, 

Remove that from your brain. Delete it from your mind. 

Instead, we're going to be focusing on other things that will actually lead to you feeling empowered, comfortable, and yes, confident.

Tip number two is discover who you are because in essence, what confidence is, it is you being so focused on accepting yourself and being true to yourself and being okay with how other people respond to that, whether they approve of you, they disprove of they talk behind your back, they judge you, you have your own back.

And that is what we want to get to. So what we want to do is start with you discovering your self. What do you value? What do you enjoy doing in your free time? What are your goals and ambitions? They might be in stark [00:02:00] contrast to people in your family or people in society. Do you dress the way that you actually want to dress or are you trying to follow trends and what the quote unquote it girls are trying to do?

What are your values? These might be in stark contrast again to what you were told to value growing up. Maybe it's time to start questioning your political beliefs or your religious beliefs or whatever it is that you feel like, I'm not quite sure that this resonates with me deeply. And I'll be giving you some tips on how to identify that in a little bit.

But for now, I just want you to start getting curious about what lights you up. What does your dream life look like? And a lot of this is trial and error. Pay attention to what things don't feel right to you.

Now, how are you going to know what feels good to you and what feels bad to you? What feels aligned or authentic and what feels inauthentic and unaligned? Start to notice feelings of unease in your body. And there's some nuance here because if you are, let's say, speaking your mind for the first time in front of a group of people where you are afraid of them rejecting you [00:03:00] for who you are, for what you actually believe in, then there will be some fear that you feel in your body.

And this is very normal. Now, at the same time, along with that fear, you will feel a deep sense of rootedness and of calm, of just knowing. This is who I am and even though it's scary I'm gonna say it anyway.

You might be noticing some unease Let's say if everyone around you is gossiping and that just feels wrong to you You don't want to sit here and talk about this girl behind your back Notice that sense of unease that is giving you a signal telling you where you are off kilter

Maybe there's a knot in your stomach when people are talking about a certain subject. Let's say politics, everyone's favorite subject. And you actually disagree and you feel that internal resonance of, Oh, this is not actually what I think. And I want to say something, but I'm afraid you don't even have to say something yet.

You can work up to that. But for now, I just want you to start paying attention to, Ooh, this feels off.

You might feel sadness when you achieve the thing that everyone told you that you should want and that you should achieve. But when you get there, you're like, Oh my gosh, I actually feel pretty [00:04:00] empty. That is a signal. You might be wearing the things that the it girls are wearing or that all your friends are wearing.

But when you put it on, you feel like an imposter. It does not feel like you. Pay attention to that.

For me, when I started my first corporate job at 22 out of college, it was THE job to get. I was in accounting. It was a consulting public accounting role. And it just did not feel like me. Truly, from the first day I stepped into the building, I had this knot in my spine. Stomach and this feeling of despair, which sounds dramatic, but I'll never forget it.

And it was a clear sign that this is just not for me, regardless of what everyone else in society tells me, it is not for me. And I ended up plotting my exit from the first day left almost two and a half years later and went backpacking in Asia. Everyone told me it was a terrible idea. You're going to ruin your career, blah, blah, blah.

But I knew deep down that it was right for me.

Another more trivial example, but it's still important to be following these nudges. Crop tops have been all the rage, right? For the last couple of years, several years. And [00:05:00] anytime I've worn one, I just look at myself. I'm like, who are you? This is just not who you are. It is not me. And these subtle tweaks have been important in me learning to discern what is me, what is not me and how do I show up authentically, which is what leads to confidence.

Wearing my hair perfectly curled in a super girly outfit. That is just not me. That is not me. Anytime I've put an outfit like that on or dressed myself up in that way. Again, it's like an imposter. Who is that? That is not me. Tracking my food. Everyone and their mom says that tracking your food is the way to get leaner.

It makes me feel sad. It just makes me feel kind of blah. So it's something I said, screw it. I'm not going to do it. I'm going to do things my way. 

Be patient with yourself and understand that this takes time and that these things will also evolve over time.

Tip number three for building self confidence is to build self trust. Are you the type of woman where you ask 15 people their opinion before you make a decision? Are you asking people, Oh my gosh, what should I respond to this guy who I'm texting or who I'm dating? Or I'm in an argument with this [00:06:00] person.

I need to get 20 different people's opinions on how to handle it. Or should I wear this? Should I not wear this? Tell me what to do with my hair. If this is you, or maybe you're looking at what I ate in a day videos. To have the validation of, okay, my decisions are okay. Or, oh my gosh, no, she's doing something differently from me.

Therefore I need to change course and do what she's doing because she knows better than me about what's best for me than I know what is best for me. You might, when you hear it that way, realize how ridiculous that can sound, right? So if this is you, and I spent a lot of time there, I think most women do at some point in their lives, I want you to notice the urge to seek that validation from other people when you are outsourcing that sense of trust, that sense of guidance, and leadership, and instead commit to asking yourself, and this is going to feel uncomfortable because if you're used to outsourcing that decision making, which is really outsourcing the responsibility to other people.

Then you're going to feel that sense of fear that discomfort in your body. This is okay This is just a natural part of change. We always feel that sense of [00:07:00] discomfort when we're doing something differently Your brain is gonna say oh my gosh. Are you gonna die? This is scary. We can't do this Slowly, but surely and start with the smallest of things 

Learn to defer to yourself as your best expert, as your own leader. And that is when self trust will start to develop.

Another key part of this is keeping promises to There's no better way to lose self trust than to make all these big grand commitments to yourself about how you're radically going to change all these things that you're going to do tomorrow, this week, this year, and then you don't end up doing any of it.

And this is extremely, extremely normal, right? We see this every year with New Year's resolutions where people make these grand resolutions. And I think that's wonderful. A lot of people have changed their lives, but they get into the state of mind where they are committed to know, I'm going to sit with the discomfort and it is game on.

And that's a little bit more rare. So I would encourage you to focus on small changes that you can make small commitments to yourself that you can actually uphold. So if you're going from sitting on the couch and not working out [00:08:00] for six months, which no shade, it's very normal, and then you declare, I'm going to do two days or I'm going to go to the gym five, six days a week, chances are that is unlikely to happen.

Does that happen to some people? Yes, absolutely. But for most people, we want to start stacking those smaller wins. And if you are eating out all the time and then you make this grand declaration that you are suddenly going to start cooking every single meal at home, that's probably going to feel very overwhelming to you.

You're going to say, okay, I can't even cook one meal at home because I'm so focused on cooking every single meal for this week. And then you throw in the towel, you say, oh, here's another thing that I promised myself that I would do and I couldn't do it. And you lose trust in yourself, which leads to a loss of self confidence.

So focus on small things that you can actually commit to doing and then build from there. And self-trust is like a snowball. The more you get into it, you start to gain momentum. It gets bigger and bigger. You're able to leverage this for bigger decisions, and pretty soon you are unstoppable.

Tip number four for [00:09:00] building self confidence is accepting that people will reject you. And there's a Brene Brown quote that I love and it says,

being ourselves means having the courage to be willing to stand alone. Because if you are actually being true to yourself, there are going to be people who dislike you. And further. This is something I wish I learned much, much earlier. Even if you are trying to be the most perfect, buttoned up, small, amenable human being alive, people are still going to hate you.

People are still going to talk about you. People are still going to gossip about you, judge you, shame you, whatever it is. So you may as well be judged for being who you actually are. And the best thing about this, and as this again was something I read in a Brene Brown book many years ago, was it hurts more when you are rejected for someone you are trying to be.

Then being rejected for who you actually are. 

and the reason is, is because in the former scenario, when you are trying to be somebody and you're rejected, you're actually rejecting yourself at the same time. So not only are you facing disconnection and rejection from other people, which feels scary, but you also [00:10:00] feel that sense of disconnection and rejection from your own body.

Self, and there is nothing worse than that feeling. And that's what leads to true loneliness. We can all sit with ourselves as long as we say, Hey, I have my own back. Do we need other people? 100 percent we're interdependent beings. But that feeling of loneliness really comes from a deep disconnection within ourselves.

So accepting that, Hey, when I choose myself, when I choose to show up as who I really am, there's a really good chance that other people are not going to like it. And that's okay. I will survive. And the best part about this is as you do this, you're like a lighthouse for people who are actually meant for you.

Other people who are also in their integrity, also living authentically are going to look at you and say, Oh, that's my kind of girl. That's my type of person. That's who I want to be with. And that's how true connection forms. Anyway, We all know the feeling of pretending to be someone and then we have a group of friends or people around us and we're like, what am I doing here?

I feel so lonely. That is a byproduct of pretending to be someone you are not of rejecting your self. Interesting, isn't it? That [00:11:00] you can be accepted even by other people. But when you reject yourself, that is a true sense of loneliness.

Now this, like everything else I've mentioned here, is a muscle that you are going to flex, and as a practice, so be really, really compassionate with yourself. Because it is going to feel uncomfortable, especially in the beginning. I still get that feeling of, Oh, I know that people are going to talk about me or are going to judge me or whatever when I just show up as who I am.

And it can feel sad sometimes it can feel disappointing and that's okay. You can feel those feelings, but I would take those feelings all day long over rejecting myself and pretending to be somebody else so that they actually like me.

Finally, tip number five for building self confidence is to tend to yourself like you would a daughter, like you would a child that you deeply love. If you don't have one in your life, then imagine the younger version of you treating yourself, babying yourself almost and treating yourself with a sense of deep respect.

Build so much self confidence. So instead of shaming yourself because you didn't work out [00:12:00] today or you didn't eat the meal that you had planned and you ate out instead, whatever it is, a woman who respects herself would get curious and just say, huh, that didn't go according to plan and I'm a human being.

I'm going to be compassionate to myself and try and understand why I made that choice that I actually didn't want to make, but part of me did want to make it. Now, why is that? So kindness is a big part of self respect. And at the same time, we want to be accountable and responsible for ourselves as well.

We want to aim for eating those veggies, for having nutritious meals, for going to bed on time, for exercising and moving our bodies, for minimizing alcohol intake. All these things that you would look at a child and say, Hey, I get that you want to stay up late and watch cartoons all night, but that's not actually what's good for you.

So I'm going to put you to bed now. You have to have those same conversations with yourself, right? And going back to the first example, where let's say a child starts to lose it. She made a mistake, right? You didn't eat your veggies as an adult. She did something as a child. Would you sit there and berate her and shame her and say, this is how to love somebody?

I hope not. You look at her and say, Hey, [00:13:00] you're learning. That's okay. You're a human being. We're going to do better next time.

Other elements of respecting yourself, babying yourself, intending to yourself is feeling your emotions, truly feel your experiences and be there for yourself. If you're feeling sad, say, Oh my gosh, this stinks that I'm feeling sad. Why am I feeling sad? That's okay. You kind of coach yourself through it.

Hang out with people who actually respect you. Stay connected with people. Being in connection with people is super important for our wellbeing. Go outside in the sunlight. Go talk to a therapist if you need to. Talk to a friend, voice what actually matters to you. If you're struggling, that is a sign of self respect and truly above all else, just remember your humanity.

If that is one of the biggest takeaways I can give to you at this is have so much compassion for yourself, which begets respect because you're a human being. And that will eliminate so much of the shame, which will lead to that sense of self confidence.

I hope this video was helpful for you guys as we head into the new year where there's so much 

New year, new me. This is going to be the best year of my life. And I truly hope that it is [00:14:00] for you and for me. And at the same time, we want to actually get clarity and get clear on tangible action steps and the reality of change that it takes time.

It is a slow process. You're going to fall down. You just pick yourself back up and treat yourself with that kindness and compassion and stop focusing on trying to be confident. And instead focus on being true to yourself. 

And that's when things will start to fall into place. 

If you are interested in more of this work, I cover this in depth and give you a ton of tools to work through in my course, food, freedom, evolution. It is focused on your relationship with food. And all of this work is actually a really big part of your life.

Our food habits. So if you're interested in that, you can check that out in the link below or get started in the overeating training. It is just 11 and I will see you in the next video and the next podcast, wherever you are listening.