5 Steps to Building Unshakeable Confidence
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Want to build more confidence? Girl, you’re in the right place! In this episode of Embrace Your real, I share my best tips to help you appear more confident, feel more confident, and BE more confident from the inside out!
I know we all wish we could just wake up, snap our fingers, and be more confident. But unfortunately, it doesn’t work as simply as that. Sure, it may work for a couple of minutes, but most likely our lack of confidence stems from deep-rooted insecurities and habits that take lots of work to overcome. When you tune into this episode, get ready to dive deep within yourself in search of your confidence! I know it’s in there, you just need to follow these practical steps to help you pull it out!
Questions to ask yourself for building self-awareness:
What are your core beliefs?
What qualities do you hold as a person?
How do you react in different situations?
How do you act in different surroundings?
What are your weaknesses?
What are your strengths?
How do you treat others?
What choices do you repeatedly make?
What do you value most?
What makes you feel fulfilled in your heart and mind?
What makes me feel good, mentally, physically, and emotionally?
What makes me feel bad, mentally, physically, and emotionally?
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Hey there beautiful human. You're listening to Embrace Your Real, with me, Julie Ledbetter, a podcast where I empower you to just be you. With each episode, I dish you a dose of real talk and actionable advice for building your confidence, honoring your body, and unconditionally loving your authentic self. Stay tuned if you're ready to embrace your real, let's get it, let's go.
There is nothing more rare nor more beautiful than a woman being unapologetically herself, comfortable in her perfect imperfection. To me, that is the true essence of beauty. Dr Steve Mirabelli said it best. Now, today I'm going to be sharing with you a few quick tips on how to be confident, how to appear confident, and how to feel confident from the inside out. Now I know we will all wish that we could just wake up and snap our fingers and be more confident. That might work for a couple of minutes, but most likely our lack of confidence stems from a deep rooted insecurity and just overall habitual habits that we have in our life. So while these might be quick tips for me to share, there's no quick fix solution for gaining more confidence. Everything that I'm going to be sharing with you today, requires work, but I'm telling you it's worth it.
So tune in, listen in, if you have note pad, be sure to take that out. I'm also going to be putting some things in the show notes, so that you can actually visually look at it instead of just listening to it. But before we dive into the episode, I'm going to share the review of the day. It comes from Smitty, L Marie, she says, "The podcast is a breath of fresh air. Fantastic podcast, I look forward to every new episode and embrace your real. Julie Ledbetter does a fantastic job, encouraging women to lead a more confident and healthy lifestyle. Her pointers are great and they make me realize that I can lead the lifestyle I always dreamt of having. It's such an encouragement. If you're looking to improve your health, mental process, start new habits and gain confidence, take a listen.”
Thank you so much for the review. Honestly means the world to me. If you haven't already rated and reviewed the podcast, it means the absolute world to me. It just helps us so much in the podcast land. If you do write a review, please screenshot it, DM it to me and I will personally send you a voice memo back. I really, really appreciate those. All right, so we're going to dive into the episode. I'm going to be sharing with you five tips on how to gain more confidence from the inside out. Tip number one, be self aware of who you are. Now I know the term self awareness is tossed around so much, almost as much as I hear mindfulness and meditation right now, but have you ever stopped to ask yourself what does that mean? What does self-awareness mean? Or better yet, have you ever stopped to think about, okay, if you're telling me that self awareness is important, then what does it mean for me to be self aware and here's how I look at self-awareness.
So being self aware for me, is knowing what my values are. It's knowing what my beliefs are. It's knowing the qualities that I hold as a person. It's knowing your strengths and your weaknesses and how you react in different situations and how you react in different surroundings. It's knowing how I treat other people and how I make them feel and knowing the choices that I make and also knowing the consequences that comes with me. It's knowing what annoys me, what upsets me and what brings me joy. It's me knowing what makes me feel good and what makes me feel bad, mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. And I think the thing about self awareness is sometimes when you first get into wanting to become more self aware of yourself, the first piece of advice that I always encourage you to do is go to the one or two closest people in your life.
So whether that's a significant other or that's your best friend or that's your sister or someone that knows you very, very well, ask them a couple of questions. Ask them, what are my strengths? What are the biggest things that you see I'm good at? What are some of my weaknesses? And I want you to go into this conversation feeling open and receiving what they have to say to you and then I don't just want you to take their word for it though. I think it's really important that we ask others their opinions and their perspectives, but it's really important that we take those back and we sit with it and we evaluate it, we see what our intuition feels like.
Once we hear those things, we really try to dissect it. And like I said before, this is going to be an ongoing process and I honestly think that self awareness is not something you ever achieve per se because you're constantly going to be growing and evaluating and going through different seasons of your life, which is going to require you to show up differently in different seasons, Thus, your self awareness is going to change.
So maybe a strength that you had is getting even stronger or maybe you haven't focused on that strength so it's slowly getting weaker or vice versa. Maybe you had a weakness a few years ago and you really focused on developing that and now you feel like it's one of your biggest strengths. So self awareness is not something that you ever achieve, it's something that is constantly ongoing. And to be completely honest with you, these things, I never really thought about before. I was just living and I didn't honestly know who I really was. It wasn't until a few years ago that I really sat with myself and asked myself, how can I become more self aware and learn about myself? And this is where I talk about it a lot just on various different platforms, but it's so important that you become your own best friend.
I say that in obviously gaining more confidence, but I also say that because when you think about your best friend, you know pretty much everything about them. You know the things that they've done, the things that they've accomplished, their strengths, their weaknesses, things that maybe upset them or things that make them happy and joyful. And so in the same way of you having a best friend that you can confide in, similar to a husband or spouse or something like that, it's important that you do that yourself. I didn't really know myself and it was kind of a scary thing. Once I started to dive into self awareness, I was like, wow, I don't really know myself that much, but it's okay. It's okay that you're at that place.
I remember being in that place and I still, I go back to this and I'm like, man, I haven't really evaluated where I'm at right now, and so it's something that I'm constantly going back to and so I just want to remind you that right now is the perfect time, after listening to this episode, or right now, if you can, writing down, taking a pen and paper and writing down some things that I just mentioned, is a great place to start.
How do you react in different situations? How do you treat others? What choices do you repeatedly make, whether good or bad, or just neutral? What do you value most in your life and what makes you fulfilled in your heart and your mind? And you might be looking or listening to these things and being like, "Okay, well how does that really relate or correlate with confidence?" It is everything to do with confidence. I truly believe that you've got to know yourself more and more to be able to show up more confidently. Self awareness is a key component in confidence. I know I mentioned a long list of things, so I've included that in the show notes so you can easily ask yourself those questions or pick some questions and ask somebody closest to you for them to answer them.
Again, if you've never done that, it's going to feel a little odd, going to them and just saying like, "Hey, what are some of my strengths?" But it's so, so important that you get somebody else's perspective and then take it home with you and sit with it and see how you feel. Because sometimes people point out things that you didn't even know or things that you downplayed. I know for me there are certain strengths in my life that, it was almost like me trying to be humble and I was like, "No. I don't really want to dive deeper into this." I'll give you a perfect example. I love speaking. I love connecting with women. I'm definitely an extrovert, but I also have introverted parts of me, but when I feel like I am able to speak in front of a crowd of people, I just feel alive and that was something for years that I felt I downplayed.
I wanted to be "humble" and I think that there's a balance in that. I think that it's important for you to know your strengths because that's why you're here on this earth. We all have different strengths and it's important that we really lean into those and know those better, so that we can grow and develop them. Self awareness though isn't always reflecting, you should be self aware in each moment as well. When you react in a certain way in that moment, becoming aware of why you're reacting this way or what's causing you to react this way or when you make a choice in the moment, becoming aware of why are you making that choice or when you act a certain way with somebody in the moment, asking yourself what is triggering you to act this way? Because self awareness really boils down to questioning yourself with everything you do.
Not in a bad way, but just to get to know yourself more. Think about if you're married. I know for me, when I was on my first date with my husband, granted that's a crazy story if you haven't listened to it, I talk about it in episode one of this podcast, but with him being deaf and me being hearing and me not knowing sign language, it was a little bit different, but the similar common thing that I know many of us do on a first date is we question, we ask all the questions. Sometimes you go with 20 questions, other times you ask a hundred questions. You just really want to get to know somebody and I think that's the same thing when you're on the self awareness journey, just becoming more self aware with who you are, will help you with confidence because if you think about it, how can you be confident in yourself if you don't even know yourself? You need to know who you are in order to be confident in who you are.
Tip number two, you have to make the conscious choice. Now, what does making the conscious choice mean? It's actively aligning the actions that you take and the choices that you make, with the way that you want to feel, be and live. In this case, you want to be more confident, but in what way do you want to feel more confident? Do you want to feel more confident in your body? Do you want to feel more confident at work? Do you want to feel more confident in your abilities or as a mother or as a wife or as a girlfriend or as a friend or talking in front of others or just interacting with others? There's so many different areas in our life that we might want to be more confident, but us just broadening and saying this vague thing of, I want to be more confident, it's going to be overwhelming and we're not going to be able to make the conscious choice in that specific moment and pinpoint it.
Define what aspects of your life you want to be more confident in and then ask yourself, what do I need to do in order to be more confident in those areas? How do I get from point A to point B? Whatever those things are, you need to make the conscious choice to do the thing, do the actual thing. For me, I wanted to be more confident in the way that I saw myself. So I started looking in the mirror, literally looking at myself in the eyes, which I had never done before, every single morning saying, "You are beautiful, you are powerful, you are capable and you can absolutely dominate this day with confidence." It's going to feel weird if this is something that you are struggling with, with just seeing your body and just feeling more confident in yourself.
If you've never looked, really looked at yourself in the mirror and talked to yourself, it's going to feel kind of woo-y. But I'm telling you the moment that you can connect with yourself eye to eye in the mirror, truly looking within your eyes. You will start to see yourself in a whole nother light and it's amazing. I still make this conscious choice every single day, when I look in the mirror. It might not be the first thing that I do every morning. Some mornings it is, other mornings is on the back burner, but I really try every single day to look at myself in my eyes and tell myself, "I am beautiful, I am powerful, I am capable and I will dominate this day with confidence."
So maybe you want to be confident in other areas of your life, like how you interact with others. This was something that was me a few years ago. You need to make a conscious choice to put yourself in situations that make you feel a little bit uncomfortable. You need to focus on your posture. You need to focus on being more assertive with the way that you speak. You need to focus on how you look people in the eyes. Making the conscious choice in that moment is so important and that will hold you accountable to actually doing it because it's one thing when you know you need to do it, but it's another thing when you actually make yourself do it. Determine what type of confidence you are looking for and what aspects of your life you're wanting to be more confident and then define the choices that you need to make and then consciously make the choice in that moment, in that specific area.
So, so important that you are constantly evaluating and asking yourself, what areas do I feel like I lack in? What areas do I feel like I'm strong in and where do I want to show up more confidently? When I tell you on this podcast so many times, I want you to show up to your life in a powerful way, I want you to show up for yourself. Yes, it's one thing to say that, but it's another thing to actually show up in your life, in the most confident version of yourself and it starts with just making that conscious choice.
Tip number three, is be aware of your surroundings, take an inventory of the people that you're surrounding yourself with most. Are you surrounding yourself with people who aren't taking risks or aren't chasing opportunities or aren't putting themselves out there or not challenging themselves or aren't speaking words of love to themselves or aren't believing in their capabilities or aren't just living overall confidently? I know we've all heard this before and I've even said it before in the podcast, but we are truly the sum of the five people that we associate with most. This is not just a fun saying or an interesting thought. It's actually proven science. You will take on the qualities of the people that you spend the most time with. This is why it's so imperative that you become hyper aware of who you're spending your time with and being aware of the conscious and unconscious people in your life that you are around because ultimately it will lead you to live the same way.
Whether now, you're looking at your life like, "Yes, that is my life. I feel like I've taken on these qualities of these people around me." Or you might be hearing this and you're like, "No, that's never going to happen." I promise if you spend enough time around them and you're not hyper aware to it, you will start to see down the road certain things that you start to take on, whether it's in your mind first and then becomes actions or it's your actions and then slowly the actions become something internal. Whatever it is, ultimately you will tend to live the same way. Are the people that you are spending time with, are they self aware? Are they making conscious choices? Do they have confidence? Do they possess the qualities that you want to possess? Do they radiate the same energy that you want to radiate? For me, I made the conscious choice to spend more time with people who intimidated me in a good way. So I'm going to give you an example.
So a few years ago in my business, I really wanted to become more confident. I wanted to be around more intimidating business people that are high level thinkers, that have the same type of mindset of me, of just wanting to change people for the better and making a massive impact in people's lives. And so I had to spend time around people who intimidated me in a good way. I forced myself in a situation where I was surrounded by confident, successful, fearless, determined, hardworking, and ultimately just bad A women. Literally these women were on fire and they were doing incredible things in their business. And as a result, I can tell you, I remember the first time that I got into this room of these business people, I was like, "This is so scary." I was sweating. I was so scared. And in that moment I had two choices, either told myself, "This is the worst decision that you've ever done or this is the best decision that you've ever done."
And I chose to believe that it was the best decision that I've ever done. And I can tell you 12 months later after being just around those women, once a month on Zoom calls and then four times during that year, I feel so much more confident as a business woman, but it started with me being scared. It started with me being intimidated. And I can tell you yes, even on month 12 when I was in that room with those women, I was still intimidated, but I could tell that I had gained confidence because I had forced myself in that situation. So I want you to ask yourself who is it that you want to surround yourself with and how can you learn from them? How are you acting in those certain situations? How can you position yourself? How do you interact with them?
And I know for me, when I came back from the first dinner, the first time I ever met these women in person, I did a self evaluation of do you feel like you showed up in the best version of yourself? What areas did you felt like you lacked in? And throughout that whole weekend I really tried to challenge myself, making sure that I'm making the connections, making sure that I was looking them in the eyes, making sure that I was aware of my posture and things like that. It's so, so important that you do that. And one thing that really helped me was really observing what they were doing and observing the women that I felt really drawn to, their energy, drawn to their mission in life and things like that, observing and then replicating that. I felt their confidence and as a result I decided to make the conscious choice to match their confidence in my own way.
That's really important to note. You don't just want to look at somebody and try to be like them because then you're just trying to be a second rate version of them, you're not being a first rate version of yourself. So just look at the characteristics of what a confident woman that you admire in your life looks like, and then try to match that in your own way.
Tip number four, establish gratitude. Having gratitude at the center of your life really does make you feel and realize how blessed you are. I can't help but feel confident when I realize how many blessings have been bestowed on my life. It brings me to tears almost daily just thinking about it because I am so blessed and you're so blessed and it just takes the eyes to see it. I've talked about gratitude so many times, but for me, I establish gratitude first thing in the morning, it is the number one thing that I do in my journal. I ask, myself what I'm grateful for. I really try to dig in and say five things that I'm grateful for that happened in the last 24 hours that I'm really hyper present in my moment.
There's so many ways to establish gratitude. It doesn't have to just be writing it down, it can be laying in bed and when you wake up just listing things off in your head or saying them out loud or maybe you establish gratitude in a moment for someone or something that happened. Maybe someone said something to you and you just felt so deeply touched and you just immediately established gratitude with them. You acknowledge them. You say, "Thank you so much for sharing that with me. I just want you to know that that means so much to me." And really just establishing gratitude for that person.
This is actually something that I learned from my mentor a few years ago. He is so good at acknowledging people and I never really understood that because I was like, "Man, he's always constantly acknowledging people. Why is he doing that?" And when I asked him, he was like, "I acknowledge people because I feel like my mission in life is to remind people how loved they are. And as a result of reminding people how loved they are, I feel so loved to know them and to be around them and to be in their presence." And it's so true. Giving is far more better than receiving and we're wired to give. We're wired to connect with people. And so I just want to encourage you to start acknowledging people more because you never know how deep that acknowledgement could touch that person in any given day.
I know there's been so many times that I have just prayed and I've just been like, "God, I just ask that you bring people into my life today that either I can touch or that will touch me in a way that is far beyond my comprehension and something that I ultimately need or something that they need." And I can't tell you how many times people have come into my life and they've acknowledged me and they've said something to me and I literally just burst into tears because I'm like, "You don't understand how much I needed that. I really, really needed that." So I just want to encourage you to acknowledge people and that is a great way to establish gratitude.
Another way too that I've been doing it recently, is just establishing gratitude after I get a workout in. Really just thanking my body and thanking my lungs and thinking my capability to be able to move. And just like those simple things throughout the day, it's so, so important. No matter what things are going on around you or no matter how bad things seem, there's always something or someone to be grateful for, always. And that's why I think it's so important that you're constantly asking yourself, either how can I establish gratitude or how can I acknowledge someone in this moment or in this next hour, in this next 24 hours?
It's so important that you are living in the moment and it's a beautiful, beautiful thing when you can recognize those small things because the more blessed you'll feel, the more blessed that you will actually live. And honestly, it's extremely difficult to not feel confident when you realize how blessed you truly are. Let me say that again. It is extremely difficult to not feel confident when you realize how truly blessed you are. So tip number four again, establish gratitude.
And tip number five, fake it till you make it or I like to say faith it till you make it. I truly, truly believe that when you first start out on this confidence journey or really just trying to become more confident in a certain area of your life, you're going to feel weird. You're going to feel out of place. You're probably not going to feel it, but the more you act with confidence, the sooner you will begin to embody that confidence and actually believe in the confidence. I talked about this in one of my previous episodes, the changing your story episode, I talk about how repetition is the mother of skill. By constantly doing a task over and over and over again, you actually start to master that specific skill because it's becoming either a behavior or it's becoming a habit in self regulating. So, so important that you constantly just show up.
I can't tell you how many times when I was in that room of powerful, confident women, I was like, "Oh, who am I to be in this room? I feel so intimidated." But I just kept showing up every single time, every single conversation, I just kept showing up. And of course I stumbled. And of course there was times that I was like, "Man, I could have shown up better." But the beautiful part about this journey is that you are becoming more and more self aware of the things that ignite you, the things that may be a struggle, the things that you feel more gravitated towards. So it's just a learning process. And so sometimes you just got to fake it till you make, faith it till you make it, girl, you've got this, you can do this.
So that is my five tips for confidence, becoming more confident inside and out. Like I said, yes, it's easy for me to share these quick tips and it's a lot more difficult to implement them. But I truly, truly believe that over time you will see such a dramatic result in your overall confidence, in your career, in the way that you show up in your relationships, in the way that you show up to yourself, in the way that you show up with your family and friends and colleagues and all of those different things. It's just going to take time. There's no quick fix, but it's just going to be this constant process.
So let me recap the five tips. Number one, build self awareness. Number two, make the conscious choice. Number three, be aware of your surroundings. Number four, establish gratitude. And number five, if all else fails or if you just need this reminder, fake it or faith it until you make it. That is all that I have for you today. I am so excited to hear what comes from this. I am so excited to hear your aha moments. I want to hear it all, the good, the bad, the ugly. Bring it to me girl, we are here on this journey together. I super appreciate you.
If you have somebody in your life that you feel like this podcast, this episode in particular would really impact them or speak to them. I just ask that you click the share button, literally it's as simple as clicking the three dots on Apple podcasts and you can copy that link. You can send it in a text message, you can send it in a DM, you can post it up on your Instagram stories or your Facebook or whatever social platforms you use. I appreciate you so much and I will talk to you guys in the next episode.
All right, sister, that's all I got for you today, but I have two things that I need you to do. First thing, if you're not already following me on the gram, be sure to do so, Julie A Ledbetter. Yes, it's with an A in the middle. For that daily, post-workout real talk, healthy tips and tricks and honest accountability to keep your mind and heart in check. The second thing, be sure to subscribe to Apple podcasts to never miss an episode. Thank you so much for joining me. It means the absolute world, and I'm going to leave you with one last thought. The most beautiful women that I have met in my life, are the ones who are completely confident and secure in being authentically themselves. Remember that beauty goes so much deeper than the surface, so go out there and embrace your real because you're worth it.