The Confidence Cure: How Connecting To Your Values & Mission Will Immediately Crush Self Doubt
By now most of you have caught on to how destructive self-doubt can be to our progress both in our personal lives as well as in our professional lives. When self-doubt shows up through the voice of the inner critic, we unconsciously sabotage our advancement because the primary role of the inner critic is to keep us “safe” inside of our comfort zones so that we will not risk failure or making a fool of ourselves. Unfortunately this concept of “safety” can only be achieved by maintaining the status quo and as most of us know when we don’t evolve we get left behind. So actually as it relates to advancing in our careers, staying stuck in self-doubt is much more dangerous than taking a risk and failing because when we don’t develop the confidence to at least try, we will consistently be overlooked and not seen by leaders as someone ready for the next promotion.
We all however have lying internally within us the most powerful force to overcome self-doubt, if only we knew how to harness it. In this blog I introduced the concept of values and how powerful they can be to serve as anti-dote for the paralysis that comes when we listen to voice of the inner critic. Values, as a reminder are a judgement of what is important in our life. These values are self-defined and self-determined. They are not what others tell us that we should prioritize, feel or think but we make a personal choice based on our life experience. If we connect to a powerful enough value, it can immediately stop our self-doubt in its tracks. This blog will give you the tools to crush the power of self-doubt so that it will no longer hold you back from stepping up and playing bigger in any area of your life you chose to.
Before I explain the power of connecting to our values on a daily basis, how to connect to our authentic values and the freedom that this exercise brings, let’s take a second to review the detrimental impact that comes from listening to the unrelenting and inaccurate voice of self-doubt.
Consequences of Listening To The Inner Critic Rather Than Living According To Our Highest Values
1. Paralysis: When we listen to the the voice of self doubt it often leads to paralysis from this fear of failure of being shamed. Unfortunately when we do not take action, learning doesn’t happen and our development and growth is stunted
2. The False Self: We don’t get acquainted with what we truly want because we are driven by avoiding fear rather than by manifesting our deepest desires and it causes us to be out of touch with the essence of who we really are. The reason many people live out of alignment with their authentic selves is because they are afraid of the imagined consequences of discovering and revealing that authenticity.
3. Confusion and Indecisiveness: Many times confusion and indecisiveness occur because we are not tapped into our purpose or what many refer to as their true north. There is not driving force or anchor to our decisions so we become confused and indecisive because all options seem equally important or equally irrelevant when we haven’t identify the “why” for what we are up to.
4. Lack of self-trust: One of the most powerful ways that we are able to develop self-trust is to keep commitments to ourselves that are driven by our personal values. Every time we break a word that we have made to ourselves we diminish trust in our own abilities and integrity. The essence of living congruent with our integrity is ensuring that our actions are in line with our values and beliefs, but if we have not done the work of uncovering our own personal values then we surely will not have the personal integrity to live according to them.
The Freedom That Comes From Connecting To Your Values
The majority of my coaching clients are absolutely amazed by the powerful shifts in perspective and the resulting motivation that empowers them to act in ways they only dreamt of being able to act when they connect to their values or deepest driving force. Maybe they didn’t have the courage to speak up boldly in a meeting but once they identified their strong why, somehow that boldness flowed out of their very beings, nothing they had to conjure up or force themselves to do. It reminds me of an incident where my tiny 5 feet 0 inches mom could never lift up the bedroom dresser in our home growing up but she found the strength instinctively to move that dresser to block dangerous people from entering the home so that her children would be kept safe. She found a big enough why that gave her the fuel to do something she could never do before. As the late author, entrepreneur and motivational speaker, Jim Rohn said “The stronger the why, the easier the how becomes.” When we find our powerful why’s by connecting to deeply held values that we have personally such as justice, service, development, achievement, family or love we find the motivation and drive to take action where we otherwise would be stuck.
1. Finding our voice: Many times we are not able to boldly speak up and we are seen as not confident, but the problem is potentially a lack of passion resulting from focusing on unimportant things, the ones that don’t really matter to us. Many times for example I will coach a client who has challenges speaking up and expressing themselves or will be nervous before a presentation. Most often than not the suppressing of their voice is due to focusing on what others will think of what they will say or how their performance will be judged rather than focusing on the purpose of the presentation. When we take the focus off ourselves and put it on the purpose or mission that is connected to our deepest driving values we find the boldness to use our voices in ways we didn’t think possible.
2. Free to define what success means to you: So much of our fears and the resulting paralysis come from an over emphasis on what others think. We define success according to how other people react to what we do. When we however empower ourselves to define success by our own standards we experience a certain internal liberation that a client of mine refers to as internal empowerment that allow us to live free in alignment with our own internal purpose. This proactive rather than reactive definition of success allows us to soar freely in a way that we perhaps have never imagined.
3. Authentic living: There is so much talk about authenticity and living our truth, and it is because we have over valued external appearances and keeping up with the Joneses. When we however release ourselves from the expectation of others and connect to that is truly important to us, we begin to discover the true self within that we have spent many years burying. It is not so much that we have to find the true self within us, it is already there. It is just that we have to discover this powerful person within that we have had a lot of practice ignoring the beckoning within.
4. Finding our mission: I am not really sure if I should put finding our mission or re-connecting to our mission here as this point is similar to the one above, authentic living. It is possibly both depending on our life experience. Some of us had a deep sense of mission and purpose at one point when life was less complicated, when we were younger perhaps but life happened and we lost that sense. Or it could be that we have never explored our purpose and mission because we have been busy living a life of duty and obedience to everyone’s expectation of us. I believe that reconnecting to our deepest mission and purpose will give us meaning and a driving force behind what we do that can make us virtually unstoppable.
I hope you enjoyed this blog. If you would like to do deeper work to unveil your most powerful and potentially transformational values, reach out to me via the link below and I will email you a copy of the Personal Values Unveiling Workbook to help you walk the path back to your truest self.
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