3 Steps to Confidence — EXPERT INTERVIEW

Wendy Pitts Reeves,
Courage 2 Confidence Expert

About a month ago, I got an email from a woman who said this,

“I met you at Spark & Hustle a couple years ago and I wanted to give you an update.  At Spark & Hustle I got the courage & confidence to leave my job and start my business full time!”

This was — indeed — a welcome update!  I was thrilled to hear it.  But those words, “courage” and “confidence” seem to be showing up everywhere these days.  Many people are feeling like they didn’t get the Courage or Confidence gene.   Well, there’s good news!

I happen to know the ONLY Courage to Confidence expert in the WORLD… and she’s agreed to share HER STRATEGIES for deliberately developing your confidence muscle.  I hope you enjoy — and employ — her guest interview response below!

A love letter from Wendy Pitts Reeves, C2C Expert: 

First of all, it’s not about Courage. 

That, you already have.

Because you were born Courageous.

You may not know it, may not FEEL it, may not even see it when you look hard to find it. But there are waysevery day that you face what life throws at you with TREMENDOUS Courage. You think you’re just doing what you have to do. And because you do so, you assume that anyone else in your shoes would do the same, don’t you?

You would be wrong about that. 🙂

What many of you are really missing is the Confidence that should come in one so Brave. Thank goodness (!) Confidence is a muscle you can build, a skill you can learn, a strength you can develop in very intentional ways. You don’t have to wait for it to magically appear in your psyche.

The good news is: you can go after it and EARN it. Now.

Here are three steps you can begin this very week.
But keep in mind – they sound deceptively simple when they are not.
In fact, they are never easy; they are always effective.

Because real live in-your-bones Confidence doesn’t come from doing what’s easy.
Confidence comes from doing what you never thought you could do – and living to tell the tale. 🙂

So – ready?
Here you go.

#1. SAY SOMETHING you think you can not say.

What would happen, if you went through the day saying exactly what you REALLY thought?
Would the world blow up? Maybe. Would some of the things that frustrate you get better? Maybe.

Or you might actually get what you want…. like one woman I work with who did just that.

She worked for a large corporation that was headquartered in our area, and her company was going through some of those massive changes that happen from time to time. You know what I’m talking about. They were downsizing and rearranging, moving folks around and out the door…and her boss asked her to move into a department she didn’t want to move to, and take on a job she REALLY didn’t want to take on.

In fact, she was so not-happy about this that at first she was ready to walk.

But in truth, the benefits were pretty good and the pay wasn’t bad…
And she was a single mom and she had to think about her kids.

So this is what she did.
She thought about it a while, then she went to her boss.
And this is what she said.

She said: I’ll tell you what. I’ll take that job you know I don’t love in that department you know I don’t love… if you’ll do something for me.
Each day, I want to be able to go home in the early afternoon so I can be there with my kids when they get home from school, and I’ll continue my work from there. You’ll still get eight hours worth of work from me, maybe more, but I’ll finish it at home.

If that will work for you, then that’s great.
If it won’t, I totally understand, and I’ll just be on my way.

And you know what? He said yes. Even though that had never been done before in her company.

If you don’t ask, the answer’s always no.
And when you say something you thought you could never say ONCE, it get’s easier the next time.

#2. DO SOMETHING you think you can not do.

Because it is through EXPERIENCE that Confidence grows best.

Some of you know that I lead unique experiences for women called Secret Adventures for Courageous Women. Each month, I’ll invite a small group of women to join me on some kind of Adventure. What we do may be large or small, easy or hard, but it’s always fun.
The SECRET is that they have no idea what we’ll be doing until they get there.

(I know! And they love it! I don’t understand it either…)

Sometime back I announced a trip where I told them in advance that they needed to be  “relatively comfortable” around water, because they MIGHT get a little wet, or they MIGHT get a little dirty on that particular trip.

Now, that could mean anything, right?

Then, once we were in the cars and on our way, I discovered that one of the women in our group not only was NOT comfortable around water. She couldn’t even swim.

I don’t have time to tell you the whole story, but I have to say the whole thing was pretty funny as it unfolded. There was a moment when I had visions of liability lawsuits dancing in my head, but in the end, what she did was in fact amazing and completely Courageous.

See, what she didn’t know was that we were going kayaking that day. It wasn’t whitewater kayaking, that’s true. We were on a big, beautiful lake that fills from a creek out of the Great Smoky Mountains.

But if you can’t swim, that wouldn’t matter much.

Would you believe that she was the first person in the water? She was scared to death at first, but with a good life jacket, and the right kind of help and support, she rallied in no time. She could not wait to get her picture up on Facebook so her grandchildren could see her.

And she was a foot taller when she went home that night.

That’s what happens when you do something you THOUGHT you could not do.

#3. GO SOMEWHERE you never thought you’d go.

I don’t care if it’s Local or Long Distance, if it’s across town or across the world.
Travel is one of the best confidence boosters of all.

Some of you have traveled plenty and don’t think anything about it. And some of you probably travel all the time for your work. But odds are good for many that you go to the same place or do the same thing year in and year out.

It’s a completely different experience with you go somewhere you’ve never been before and you have to figure it out yourself.

In my coaching and counseling work, I am always encouraging women I know to Do Something Big, like, take a trip, for pete’s sake. Go Somewhere. And when they do, amazing things happen.

For example, I worked with one woman who was a force in her own right, but didn’t know it. She had everything she needed – intelligence, education, experience, talent, even beauty and very real personal strength… But she lived in the shadow of a loving but successful husband, and didn’t have the Confidence she needed in her Self.

So, with a little pushing, she took a trip. Two weeks of wandering across the country with no particular plan, visiting a museum here, enjoying a cafe there. She kept a journal, took photos, walked, thought, dreamed.  She was amazed to find that she enjoyed the time on her own. And when she came home, she, too, was a different person.

She bought a business, because an entrepreneur, began to develop her own personality and put her own stamp on the community in which she lived. It was a beautiful thing to witness, and I was immensely proud of her.

And you can do something as simple as take a different route to work,  explore the county next door to yours, or try driving by yourself in a city that seems too much for you.  It doesn’t matter where you go or how you get there. It matters THAT you go.

You may get a little lost – but don’t worry about that. It’s all part of the learning. 🙂

So here’s a recap.
EXPRESS IT.              Say something you think you cannot say.
EXPERIENCE IT.       Do something you think you cannot do.
EXPLORE IT.             Go somewhere you never thought you’d go.

Repeat daily. Got it? 🙂

And one day on down the road, sooner than you think, you’ll suddenly realize that you don’t worry about things quite the way you used to. That you are, in fact, more Confident. And you never even saw it coming.

Congratulations.