Its freezing. Did that look dramatic enough? I hope so. Tonight I want to talk about… Happy Hump Day. Yes. (singing). Anyway, you’ve heard me do that on a lot of Wednesdays. It’s getting a bit tired, like I am. Tonight I wanted to talk about building confidence on promises that you make to yourself. And I have touched on how important promises are to yourself before, but I really want to dig into it on this one. So what do I mean by a promise you make to yourself?
So every time you say to yourself, you’re going to clean your teeth three times a day, it’s a promise you make to yourself. The first time you only clean your teeth once that day, you’ve broken that promise to yourself. And as you break that promise to yourself, a tiny little chink comes out of your confidence muscle. It’s like you didn’t make it to the gym that day. If you were all at the moment, probably watching everyone do five gazillion pushups and all of those challenges. Thankfully, no one’s tagged me. Please don’t tag me, please don’t tag me.
And so if you… As I’ve talked about confidence being a muscle, every time you do something that takes a chink out of your confidence, it’s like that muscle atrophies a little bit. So it’s really important when you’re in a moment of life… Because we all go through swings and roundabouts in life. We have moments where the confidence is bursting out of our skin.
And then we have moments where it’s like, “I just want to crawl under the blankets. And I’m not feeling so fabulous right now.” It’s really important in those moments to make even the smallest promises to ourselves in order to build that muscle back up. Because sometimes we can think, “Okay, well I’m feeling like crap. So if I do this really big thing, then all my confidence will come back and I’ll feel fabulous.” The problem with thinking like that, is a lot of the time when you’re in that state of feel crap, you can’t do the big thing.
You don’t have the capacity to do the big thing because of how you’re feeling. So you got to build up to it. And building up to it can literally be as simple as, “I bought that book. I’m going to read a page a day.” And you make that promise to yourself and you stick to it.
And then you make the next promise to yourself of, “Okay well, I’m going to walk for half an hour.” And then you make the next promise to yourself of, “I’m only going to have two glasses of wine. I won’t drink the whole bottle.” And then you make the next promise to yourself, “I’m going to ring that client who I haven’t spoken to for a while.”
And as you build up from that first little promise of… I’ll give you a great example for girls, for women of the first promise when you’re feeling crap to make to yourself… That’s relatively easy to stick to, is take your makeup off. Make that promise to yourself to take your makeup off.
Or if you’re not wearing makeup because you’re feeling like crap, put on lipstick that day. If you’re not a makeup wearer, it might be, do your hair. But do just that one tiny little thing that one little bitty promise to yourself, that day one, to help you get out of that slump. And then day two, you get to make a bigger promise.
Day three, you might make three promises to yourself and keep them all. And day four, you might go, “Okay, yeah. I’m going to submit that job application. I’m going to submit it. I’m going to submit it.” And then you don’t submit it. And you’ve broken that promise to yourself. But because in the last three days, you’ve stuck to those littler promises, you don’t go back down to where you were.
You’ve started building that confidence up just little by little by little again. So a knock doesn’t take you all the way back down to the bottom. So what do you do? You get up. You start again with another little promise, “Today, I’m going to take my lunch to work,” and do it. “Today, I’m not going to bite my fingernails.” And do it.
And then by the time you’ve got to week one, week two of these tiny little bitty promises, you get to the point where you’re like, “Okay, I can now put in my calendar that I’m going to do X, Y and Z. And I trust myself. I built up enough faith in myself and confidence in myself. Because I’ve kept these promises, that I’m going to do that.” And it feels awesome. And it’s quite often when we’re going through a phase where our confidence has taken a knock, we think we need a magic pill.
We think we need someone to tell us we’re gorgeous. So we need someone to ask us on a date, or we need to get a great job, or we need to get that… Land that dream client. And when that thing happens, all our confidence will come back. And it’s not how it works. That confidence that you get… Because don’t get me wrong, you do get confidence when those kind of things happen. But that confidence is coming from an external source.
So it’s a bit like dressing on a salad. It sits there and it kind of falls through. That confidence doesn’t last. The confidence you build in yourself by setting tiny little promises, big promises by starting to better self-talk by those daily habits, I talk about an awful lot.
All those things will build that confidence that you have control over. And you can reach for that confidence at any time. At any time when you’re feeling crap, you can build a little bit more of that confidence. At any time when the world feels like it’s going astray, you can reach into the reserves that you have of that confidence and find your way back up again.
And I promise you even the tiniest thing makes a difference. Promise you, promise you, promise you. Like that pinky promise thing that I do. That’s a pinky promise, isn’t it? So, yeah. I forgot what your fingers are called. Anyway, you know the little thing that you do in school yard? “I promise, I promise.” So that’s all I want you to do tomorrow. Just start in this phase that we’re going through at the moment of life.
We’re all at different levels of pain, trauma, anxiety, stress, depression, confusion. There’s all this stuff going on. And virtually everybody I’m talking to at the moment, their confidence has been knocked for six, everybody. You’re pretty sure I don’t know if I’ve spoken to anybody who hasn’t in some area of their life, had their confidence take a knock. So if you’re one of those people whose confidence is feeling a little, it’s not quite where it should be.
Don’t go for the big thing. Do not try the big thing to start feeling better about yourself. Wake up tomorrow and do that tiny little promise. Walk for 10 minutes, put makeup on, or take your makeup off. Brush your teeth twice, phone a friend, put the dishes in the dishwasher instead of the sink. And then build up from there.
A little promise at a time and another promise and another promise. And before you know it, you will be making that really big promise to yourself and you’ll stick to it. And you’ll go, “I got this, I got my confidence back, I’m okay, everything is all right in the world.” And any time you go back down that slippery slope, you’ve got that reserve to draw in from. Because you haven’t looked to the outside world for that confidence. Okay? It’s all about the promises you keep to yourself.
So tell me what promise are you going to make for yourself tomorrow? I know what mine is, because I’ve had to do this recently. I’ve absolutely had to do this recently. And I think everybody should do it. So if you haven’t already, we’ve already got a couple of weeks to go. So excited. Get the party started.
Please head over to samanthaleith.com/365days, to get your invitation to the party of… I’m not going to say party of the century, because it’s probably not going to be the party of the century. But it’s going to be a good party, I promise. Whether you’re there live or virtually, it will be fantastic. So please be there and please for the next 24 hours, make one promise to yourself and keep it. The world will change.