Somatic Healing for Wellness-Focused Women

(#105) Embodied Confidence: Nervous System Regulation, Reparenting, Rewriting Your Inner Voice & Self-Knowledge

• Rae The Somatic Coach • Episode 105

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In this empowering episode of Somatic Healing for Wellness-Focused Women, Rae explores what confidence really is from a nervous system-informed, trauma-sensitive lens. Confidence isn’t about pretending you have it all together. It’s about feeling safe in your body, connected to your truth, and rooted in who you are.

🎙️ You’ll learn:

  • Why confidence is an embodied state not just a mindset
  • How nervous system regulation plays a role in feeling safe to be seen
  • Why your inner child might be blocking your confidence (and how to reparent)
  • How to up-level your inner voice and practice compassionate self-talk
  • The self-trust formula: self-knowledge ➡️ self-trust ➡️ self-confidence

✨ Whether you’re in a season of self-doubt or ready to step into your next level, this episode will leave you feeling seen, grounded, and deeply supported.

💌 Want to take this work deeper? Get my Free Somatic Breathwork Bundle when you join the Somatic Healing Newsletter. You’ll receive 20+ guided breathwork practices to support you through anxiety, stress, emotional blocks, and more.

🎤 Have a question or aha moment? Leave me a voice note at SpeakPipe. I might answer it in a future episode.

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Disclaimer: Please remember that the information shared on this podcast is intended to inspire, educate, and support you on your personal journey. It does not substitute for professional mental health advice. I am not a psychologist or medical professional. If you are experiencing distress, mental health challenges, or medical conditions, please seek help from a qualified professional.

SPEAKER_00:

Welcome back to the podcast. If you are new here, I'm Ray. I'm a schemat coach and ref work facilitator. And if you aren't new here, welcome back. I'm so glad that you are tuning in for today's episode. So for today's episode, I'm going to be diving into this topic of confidence from a schematic lens. And I'm gonna share some you know personal tidbits and what I learned in really just working in this area with clients for quite uh quite a long time. So this is a topic that I speak with clients about quite a bit, and you know, I find confidence interesting because it's pretty abstract, and people often don't actually look at it from this lens. So I'm going to share all about it. So let's dive in. Yeah, so the first piece is that confidence is abstract in the sense that it's not something that you can see, and even the most confident people in the world have admitted that there are times they feel insecure. And I was just listening to a podcast the other day, and it's one of my favorite podcasts, and the speaker is such like a strong speaker, like she's so just like so firm, so strong. And she said something that she shared something, and she said, like, something that nobody would know about her is that she's deeply insecure, and I really couldn't believe it. Honestly, I was like, wait, what? And I share that story because that's what's funny about confidence is you can't really measure it, but you can feel it. And so I think sometimes what makes the biggest difference is creating your own meaning around the word and feeling for what confidence means and feels like to you personally. What is your experience of confidence? Like, what does it look like? What does it feel like in your body? Is are there moments that you can reference to where you're like, I really felt confident in doing XYZ? I really felt confident that day at work. Yeah, get curious around that. So, like internally, can you really connect with the feeling of what confidence does feel like for you? And as I was reflecting on working with this idea of confidence from a somatic perspective and a nervous system perspective, I think there's a few different pieces of it. And the first would be reconnecting with what it what a felt sense of safety feels like in the body. We spend, you know, so much time in our minds, but do we have the ability to feel safe in our body? Another piece that I think is important is healing from our past and understanding and metabolizing challenging emotions that arise, and that could look like inner child work, breath work, somatic experiencing. I'm gonna dive into each of these in a minute too, but I'm just giving an overview. And the third would be up-level up-leveling your self-talk. And then the fourth would be creating a foundation of three things, these three things self-knowledge, self-trust, and self-compassion. So, overall, generally speaking, confidence is an embodied experience. It's felt in the body. It's not just our thoughts and it's not just our body. It's about really feeling grounded in who we are, knowing ourselves and feeling safe in our experience. So, from a nervous system perspective, how do you get started with like all of everything that I just said? So I broke it into these four parts because I think it's easiest to dive into them one by one. The first is learning about your personal nervous system response. So, nervous system regulation, breath work, again, building on feeling safe in your embodied experience. So, when does your nervous system collapse? In those moments when you don't feel the most confident, what is happening in your experience? And in the moments where you do feel the most confidence, what is also happening in those experiences too? Can you feel regulated to yeah, be in joy and bliss, take up space, be seen, lead whatever it whatever those things might be for you and your confidence? Does your nervous system feel safe to do all those wonderful, beautiful things? The second piece, something that I really love and I talk about quite often, inner child healing. I like to say that you're only as confident as your inner child feels. And the inner child is this part of ourselves that holds on to these different types of wounds and beliefs from our past. And oftentimes, if we don't have an understanding or an awareness around what these might be, they can affect how we show up in the world. So if you have been taught to shrink or be quiet or self-silence, those beliefs, whatever is around those beliefs, influence your confidence as an adult. So connecting with and healing your inner child is essential for taking your power back, really instilling strong self-beliefs in yourself that may have been lost in childhood or in the past. And you can do that through a few different ways, working with the inner child. One thing that I really always like to speak about when I talk about the inner child is this idea of reparenting. And reparenting is being able to see and meet and understand your inner child, so past version of yourself, figure uh seven, eight, or nine years old, discover what they might need in a moment. So maybe they need safety, love, belonging, being seen, being heard. You can do this through a visualization practice, you can do this through journaling, and yeah, really using these kinds of tools to meet and tend and care for your inner child. And I can share from my personal experience. I had read about the inner child in books, like when I first really started going like deeper into emotional healing and just my inner world experience. So I had read about it. So I had heard of the words, but I didn't really understand the concept or even really understand like what it was until I did a somatic healing session. And in that session, connected was like guided through a visualization practice where I was able to connect with an inner child of mine that was really like in need of just like holding and being safe and being seen. And I had no awareness, no access to this part of myself. So I'll never uh like I can still like see it in my mind, like the moment like things clicked for me. I was, I at the time I had my own apartment and I'm like sitting on my bed in this like little studio apartment, and I'm on the phone doing like a somatic healing session, being guided, and I was just like, whoa, afterwards, I was just I just was so blown away, and it was really empowering for me. And so it was really the catalyst that led me to go down like the entire somatic healing path was inner child work. So I'm really passionate about it. I think it really, really helps with knowing yourself and building that self-confidence. And then the third piece, and something that I think really builds off of inner child work and regulating the nervous system, is up-leveling your self-talk. So typically this looks like affirmations or just like the sound that you hear in your voice, the voice that you hear inside, I should say. The sound of the voice that you hear inside. What I also like to sometimes call, or maybe you've heard of the inner critics, I like to call that um, it's like a little bird, and everyone has a little bird, and it just sits on your shoulder, and sometimes it chirps really freaking loud, and other times not so much. But we can work with that voice, we can work with that sound, and we can befriend that inner voice. And depending on your past and your lived experience, if you reflect, you might actually have more time in your life where maybe you did not speak to yourself as kindly as you would like to today. And we cannot expect ourselves to know the language and the words of what we need to hear in a kind and compassionate way, especially if the majority of the time that we've spent has not been speaking kindly to ourselves. So I like to kind of bridge these two worlds where I take the affirmations that the inner child might need to hear, and I use those to up-level self-talk. This could also look like affirmation meditations, breath work meditations with affirmations, practices, journaling, where you're able to write down different affirmations that feel really empowering and really bringing you a sense of wholeness is really the idea. So these are all tools that you can do to work with this idea of positive self-talk, up-leveling your self-talk, and building that confidence. And in terms of structure when it comes to working with affirmations, you can do these at night before you go to sleep. You can keep a note section in your phone, you can make it the background on your phone. Like if you really like an affirmation that's really landing for you, you can do them in the morning when you wake up. So, in terms of like actual application of those affirmations, you can be as creative as you'd like with it. And then this last piece that I will share with you is something that I also just like really love and enjoy. And that is this idea that the more self-knowledge you have, the more self-trust you will build, and the more self-trust you have, the more self-confidence you'll have. So, in terms of these three areas: self-knowledge, self-trust, self-confidence, there are a few practices that I really love. I think are really helpful for just building that self-knowledge. You can do a few different um personality tests. So, like the Enneagram is one of my absolute favorites. You can do uh human design. That's not as much personality, that's based on like your uh date of birth and place and time, but even so, human design is really helpful. Um, I would even say astrology can be really helpful for building an idea of self-knowledge around who you are and always taking what lands and leaving what doesn't. Always, always, always. What I really like about the Enneagram is that it's I think it's like uh maybe like a hundred questions. So it just takes like a few minutes to fill out, and you answer all of these questions, and there's um nine different types. And I could probably do an episode just on the Enneagram, actually, now that I'm talking about this, but you can you can Google it. I use Trudy, truity.com, uh, so that's a great resource for the Enneagram personality test, but it's nice because you fill out this, you know, a hundred question thing, and then you get um a lot of information on yourself, and you can even, you know, pay a little bit. I think it's like 20 bucks or something, and you can receive like a per like a like a whole uh 30-page PDF. So it's really, really interesting stuff and really helpful to just know more information about yourself and about who you are. And then another tool that I love to use for self-knowledge, if you've read the December monthly newsletter, you saw that it talked a bit about core values. I love, love, love working with core values. I think it is extremely helpful. I think that they are unique to you. So we're all gonna have different core values and they're connected to what your beliefs are. And from that point, that's going to be your root, that's going to be your base. You can build out from there. So you can build out your vision, your goals, all based on what feels in alignment to you, which is like so powerful. So working with core values, working with personality tests, human design, astrology, like the more information you have on yourself, the better. And then self-compassion, creativity, play, joy, really loving yourself so deeply, there is literally nobody else like you in this world. That's pretty incredible. That's pretty amazing, and you are amazing. So, quick recap as we wrap up this episode that the four different uh tools that I would recommend nervous system regulation, inner child healing, up-leveling your self-talk, and working with your self-knowledge, knowing yourself, self-knowledge leads to self-trust, which leads to self-confidence. So if you are in a season of not believing in yourself, know that I believe in you. I think you are incredible. You are here for a reason, and I am so glad that you are and that you've been tuning in to this episode. So, also, if you want to check out and you want to dive into your core values, uh check out the show notes because there is a link. It's called Work With Me. And for the core values this season, I'm offering just around the new year's, I like to do it, uh, core value sessions. So this is going to be guided by me and includes breathwork, uh, time for integration, reflection, and a core values activity. So it's really fun. I absolutely love these, and uh check it out. And if you haven't already signed up to receive the monthly newsletter, you can do that by signing up for the for access to the breathwork resource library also in the show notes. So thank you so much for tuning into today's episode. I love recording these for you. I had so much fun with this one. Uh, really good stuff. And I hope that you have an incredible rest of your week, an incredible rest of your day, and I will talk to you soon. Thank you for being here and tuning in to Somatic Healing for Wellness Focused Women Podcast. If you were moved or inspired by today's episode, please take a moment to leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. It truly helps the podcast grow and helps more people find me on their healing journey. Make sure to check out the show notes to sign up for the monthly newsletter, links to more resources, opportunities to work with me, and ways that we can stay connected. If we aren't already connected on social media, head over to Instagram to follow me at Ray TheStematic Coach. Send me a DM. I'd love to connect with you, and I answer each note that comes in. I am so happy you're here, and I cannot wait to talk with you on our next episode of the podcast.