Embracing Authentic Confidence: Shifting Beliefs Through Experience and Intentional Focus

If you want to start believing in yourself, scrap the affirmations and do this instead. Beliefs that we have about ourselves and the world live in our subconscious minds. And the subconscious doesn’t really learn from thoughts and words as much as it does experiences. That’s why if I’m really stressed out and overwhelmed and I say to myself, I’m calm, I’m calm, I’m calm, that’s not really gonna make me feel better. But the experience of a deep breath or getting a hug from someone would actually start to shift how I’m feeling. So if you want to start to feel good enough, if you want to start to feel confident, rather than just arbitrarily saying, I’m enough, I’m confident, I’m wonderful, it’s going to sink in so much faster if you actually lean into the experiences where you do feel enough. So start intentionally focusing on those moments where it feels like it’s true. Because what we put our focused attention on is amplified in our minds, informs our experience, and indicates to our brain that that is important. So as you move throughout your day, start to notice when someone holds the door for you, when you are good enough at cooking to make yourself lunch, when you are enough to receive love from your pets, when you are enough to take care of yourself and feed yourself and take a shower, start affirming the teeny tiny moments where it’s true. The more you focus on those experiences and affirm that enoughness when it’s actually happening, the more your brain is going to actually start to trust and believe it. It’s going to be primed to seek out more and more and more experience and evidence that supports that belief and it’s going to snowball into a wonderful sense of self-esteem.