Good evening ladles and jelly-spoons. Happy Monday night. Oh, not quite nighttime yet, but close enough. It’s getting so dark and winter-y in Sydney. It feels like you’ve got the chills and they’re multiplying. Oh my God, I’ve just given myself goosebumps as I did that. That’s hilarious.
Okay. So tonight I want to talk about your own confidence self-care pack. What I mean by that? Because I’m not talking about facials and pampering, although I really, really do believe in them from a self-care point of view, actually from any kind of care point of view really. I’m talking about the little arsenal of things that you need to have in your back pocket that make you feel great about yourself and acknowledge the confidence you have in yourself rather than looking for external validation.
So quite often, if we’re going through a phase where we’re not feeling quite so confident, we want external reminders. We want people out there to tell us we’re great. Or we want someone to go, “Oh, I love your dress,” or, “I love your hair,” or, “Oh, you did a great job on that presentation,” or, “That report you did for the finance manager today was awesome.” That kind of thing.
And you don’t always get external validation. As I’ve talked about before in love languages, some of us need that stuff more than other people do, but it’s not always there for you. So it’s important to have some little things where you can just whip it out yourself to make you feel like you’re okay, you’re confident. So what are my five tips for you to have in your little confidence self-care hack?
Okay. Number one. I want you to… Oh, and this is all written stuff. So whether you want to do it in your journal or just on a piece of paper, type it up… Remember, I don’t suggest typing these kinds of things up. I think that active writing stuff is a lot better for you. So if you can, write it out.
So number one, what do you like about you? So things I like about me, and these can be soft skills. They can be things that other people might think are really irrelevant. You might like the fact that you fold your underwear a la Marie Kondo, and that makes you feel good about yourself. Okay? But five to ten things that you like about you. Your color of your eyes, how you make scones. I’ve seen so many people posting photos of scones today on Facebook and Instagram. I’m like, “Okay, maybe I’ve got to make some scones.” But you might be a really awesome scone maker. And you’re like, “You know what? I love how I make scones.” So pop that on your list. Okay?
The second thing I want you to do is your strengths. Now it’s a little bit different to what you like about yourself. So your strengths might be your resilience. One of your strengths might be your ability to multitask, which is actually no one can do it. If you’ve got to write that down, just a heads up, you can’t. You might be able to flip between tasks quickly, but multitasking, that’s a whole other Facebook live. So what are your strengths? You may have great dinner parties. You may be really good at conflict resolution. So the things you like about you or the more softer stuff. The strengths of the definitive things. Okay?
Then the third thing I want you to write down are your core beliefs, paying attention to the fact that we want to write down our positive core beliefs. So if you have a core belief that money doesn’t grow on trees, no, we don’t want to write that one down. It’s negative. We want to write down positive core beliefs. Okay? So I’m trying to think of an example. This just popped out of my mind. One of your core beliefs might be that charity begins at home and you think you do that really well. You’ve nailed it. Okay? So those core beliefs that are the bigger-picture things, the positive ones, that love will happen. You will find love. That might be a core belief, and it’s a really fricking positive one. So write that down. If that’s one of your core beliefs, okay?
Number four, I want you to write down some wins there. These can be big wins, little wins, any kind of winning in the world. It might be the great scones that you made today and popped on Facebook, or it could be that you won a great contract for something. It could be that you nailed that 5k run. A win could be remembering that certificate you got in Year Two for a writing project, but I want you to write down, again, five to ten of the most significant wins in your life. Remember, you don’t need to share any of this stuff. This is just for you to have in your little toolbox for things to make yourself feel good about yourself. Okay? So five wins.
And then lastly, and this is where the fun starts. So we talk about, we do visioning exercises with clients and things. We go, okay, what would your life look like in five years’ time? What are you aiming for in ten years’ time? What would you like people to say about you at your funeral? What would you want to have your great-grandchildren say about you from stories they’ve heard passed down. They’re all great exercises, and I encourage you to do all of them. But this is a little twist on one. I want you to write down… And just free-write. If you want to write a paragraph, write a paragraph. If you want to write five pages and turn it into a book, do that because it’s about what makes you feel good.
I want you to write down what your life would look like, what you would do if you had unlimited confidence. If there was confidence, not arrogance, confidence, oozing out of every pore in your body, and you had that little shimmy knowing you could do anything you wanted to do. What would you do? What would your life look like? Okay? And it’s got nothing to do with other people. It can be so fricking out there. Okay, you can’t develop Uber because it’s already been done, but I want you to just go absolutely wild with this, because having that vision in your mind of what the truly confident you would do, if you can capture that, and then anytime you are feeling a little bit, “Mmm, whatever, not feeling so confident today, I feel like my butt looks big in this,” whatever it is that’s dragging you down that day, if you can bring up those memories of what a truly confident you would be doing and how they would feel, it changes everything. Okay?
So they are my five tips for things that I want you to have in your little confidence self-care pack. And when you write them in a journal… I actually don’t have a journal. Oh, here. I’ve got one. When you pop them in one of your journals… This one doesn’t have it on it, but I quite often write on my journal, or on the side, what it is. So if I’m using one of these to go through a book and do exercises, for example, I might write on the side what the book was, where I was actually doing that.
Because another tip for you, bonus free tip for you tonight, guys, when you’re reading a book and it’s got exercises in it, do them. No point just reading the book, do the exercises. Like with this live tonight. If you just listen to me say these things and don’t do the exercises, you’re not going to get the benefit. So I really do encourage you to do the exercises. Write them down. And you want to be able to refer to it.
So with things like this, another idea is, I think I have talked about it before, a little confidence jar where you put good things that have happened or things people said about you in it. You could even put these notes in there if you wanted, or in a general, but you want to be able to refer back to them any time you’re not feeling so confident. Okay?
So they are the five to ten things you like about you. Your five to ten most kick-butt strengths. Okay? Your five to ten positive core beliefs. Remember the positive bit. Five to ten amazing wins throughout your life and then free-write what the most awesome confident you would do with your life. So much fun. Go for it. And let me know what you come up with. I want to hear your stories. I want to know what the most confident you would be doing. Really want to hear about it. Have a great night and I will see you all tomorrow. Bye.