Episode 130: Self-Confidence, Pt. 4: Actions Speak Louder Than Words

In the final episode of the series "Self-Confidence in Uncertain Times", we'll explore how it's easier to change your actions than to change your thoughts or feelings, and how the things you choose to do each day can affect how you feel about yourself.

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Transcript

(Transcript is autogenerated and may contain minor errors.)

Hi again, we are back and we are talking about part four of our series on confidence. And today I wanted to talk about  taking action. We often think about our thoughts as leading to an action but it works in the other direction, too, that if we do certain actions  then that can in turn shift our thinking about ourselves. 

 And it's easier to change your behaviors than to change your feelings or your thoughts, okay? You can have thoughts like, “I'm not very good at mechanics. I'm not very good at foreign languages”. Whatever it is. “I'm not very good at writing essays”.  You can try to not have those thoughts.  You can catch yourself and say,  “Oh, you know, I don't want to be thinking that way. I don't really be limiting myself.” And you might have some success, but you're not going to, as we talked about last time, you're not going to be able to just silence those thoughts, more than likely. They're going to still kind of chatter away.   

And the same thing with your feelings. We don't have a switch inside of us. It would be nice,  but we don't have a switch inside of us where we say, you know, I'm in a lousy mood. I'm just going to flip that switch and I'm going to be in a good mood. And you can't just paste on a smile and be like, I am happy, happy, happy.  We did talk in the first part of this series about how, if you do have a positive facial expression, that can certainly help you to feel more positive. But  bottom line, changing your thoughts, changing your feelings, or changing what you're doing, which one is easiest? It's easiest to change what you're doing.

You can make up your mind and say, ”I'm going to do this essay”. And yes, it can be hard to motivate yourself to do the essay, but ultimately, if you say, “I am turning on the computer, I'm going to start typing and just see where it goes. I'm not going to censor myself. I'm just going to start”. It's easier to talk yourself into starting to take action than to  battle with your thoughts or your feelings. 

 If you play it safe and you don't do activities that are a bit of a stretch for you, if you do the same things that you know you like, the same things that you know that you're good at, then, you know, you can very well be stuck in a rut. You're playing it safe and not only can that get boring,  but also when things go south, when things happen in your life that you didn't expect that are really challenging, you can feel less prepared to handle them because you haven't really been kind of building that muscle of doing difficult things. 

So now when something difficult happens,  it's really, really difficult as compared to somebody who is accustomed to challenging themselves. It's still going to be shocking. It's still going to, you know, be unsettling, but they're probably going to be more able to take action quickly than someone who has kind of played it safe.

 I can definitely share a story about this, about something that I've observed in my own life that had a profound effect upon my own self confidence. As a child, I had developmental coordination disorder. It was never formally diagnosed, but as a psychologist, when I learned about developmental coordination disorder, I was thunderstruck. I was like, wow, that's a name for what I had when I was a kid. And it basically refers to this disconnect between the brain and the muscles. And so I would, any kind of a PE class that I would take when I was a kid, I would get Fs on everything. I could not kick a soccer ball around cones. I could not bounce a volleyball to myself. I could not shoot hoops. Sometimes I would like fall sideways when I would walk. I was always the last person when we had to run the track. It was just very difficult to do these gross motor activities. And I, you know, I just would avoid them. I would avoid anything that would involve me needing to run or kick or jump or anything like that because I created this label for myself based on repeated observations that “I am just uncoordinated. I can't do this” and so I wouldn't. So I spent my childhood doing things that did not involve physical activity. I did a lot of reading. I did a lot of writing.  

When I became an adult  and I became a therapist, I realized that as great as therapy is, it just seems short sighted. I thought, “the way to  recovering from depression, the way to feeling less anxious, to working through some of these psychological problems, it can't just be  through talk”. You know, we talked previously about not living from the neck up and I felt like “ if we're just doing talk therapy, isn't that living from the neck up? I mean, we're really ignoring everything from the neck down and that doesn't seem right”. So I started to really think about “how can we bring in the whole body? Because that's gotta be a part of it.” When we feel anxious, I reasoned, you know, our heart's pounding, we're feeling tight in our chest, and so forth. When we're feeling depressed, you know, you can feel like, kind of like Charlie Brown, my stomach hurts, you know, it's that kind of a thing. You can just feel heavy. So, I thought “there's gotta be some way to bring the body in”. And, in fact, there are various forms of body centered therapy that are really fascinating, but what really intrigued me was yoga, because I had discovered yoga when I was a teenager. 

I discovered it quite by accident. I came home after school, I turned on the TV, it happened to be on the local PBS channel, and here was this woman doing yoga. And she was doing a sun salutation and I was mesmerized. I thought, that looks so cool. And then she started teaching the various poses. She started explaining them and I tried to do them, and I thought “this is really cool”. And she was very good at explaining. This was Lilias Folan.

She was one of the first people to teach yoga, you know, where you could watch  on your TV or on a video.  So I practiced, and I was able to do, finally, to be able to do something physical.  My mother had tried to help me by having me take a ballet class, by taking a tumbling class, and those things really hadn't worked, but yoga actually, I felt like it kind of rewired things. It really helped me to start to be able to do things and not be so uncoordinated.  

So as a therapist,  that was when research started to come out about yoga as a treatment for depression and anxiety. And I thought, “wow, okay, I want to learn about this.” So I signed up to go through yoga teacher training.  

It's a 200 hour training.  We were in class every day, including like seven days a week,  for the first, uh, think like 120 hours of the program. I mean, it was it was insane, right? It was like, uh, close to 10 hour days for two weeks, and then we got a little break. And so it was really intense. We were doing yoga for  seven hours a day, six, seven hours a day. And then the rest of the time we had lecture and that sort of thing. So it was an awful lot.  And I, I felt like, “what the heck am I doing here? I am uncoordinated. I am not an athlete”. I was looking around at people, and fortunately, not everybody was an athlete. There were certainly people who had their own physical challenges. But I thought, “have I just made a big expensive mistake? Am I deluded? Why am I doing this?” But I persisted and I got certified, and the feeling of accomplishment was tremendous. Just feeling like “I am not only able to do something physically, I am not only coordinated enough to be able to do this, but I can even teach it”  just blew my mind. And I got hired before I was even done with my certification. I got hired to be a yoga teacher quite unexpectedly.

I was just working out, but someone at the gym said, “Hey, we need a yoga teacher. I understand you're near the end of your training. Would you be interested in applying to work for us?” And so that started. That was at the Y. I have been teaching at the Y since 2005, so a long time.  If you told my younger self, “you know what, you are going to be a fitness instructor when you're an adult”, I would have laughed in your face and said, “you are so high. There is no way that I am going to be a fitness instructor. Are you kidding me? I can barely walk without falling over.” But that's what happened.  It really gave me more of a boost of self confidence than just about anything I can think of in my life, quite honestly.  

So that's a powerful example of taking action and really extending  yourself outside of your comfort zone to do something that is  a challenge.  If you don't want to sign up for a 200 hour yoga teacher training, and I honestly don't blame you, that is not the point of this podcast to say, “hey everybody, go sign up to be a yoga teacher”. No, the point of this is to really think about, “Am I playing it small? Am I doing certain things that are really selling myself short? Could I make a difference by doing some actions that could actually build my confidence?” So some things that you might want to think about are,  “what kind of impact do I want to have in my life?”  

When I ask people this question, when I ask them, when I say, “okay, imagine that it's your 80th birthday party, for example, imagine that people are at your party to celebrate you and people are taking turns saying something about you. What kinds of things would you like them to say about you?” 

Across  the board, the common thread that I always hear is that it's always relational stuff. It's not stuff like,  “They always kept a neat house”,  or “they were so good with money”, or  “their company was so incredibly successful that they made a million dollars”. Nobody says that. Everybody that I've asked, and I know it's not an unbiased sample, but everybody I've asked has said things like, “They were really encouraging to me. They really helped me feel good about myself. They really helped me to feel loved. They were always able to listen”.

In other words,  people that I've asked this question to, “what kind of impact do you want to have in the world”, have always given me answers related to  their lifting other people up in some way, helping other people, teaching other people, encouraging other people.  

We all have different values. There's no right or wrong value set here. You know, we're all going to have different things that really speak to us. But are you doing things each day where you can kind of sprinkle some of those values into that? For example, if you really value kindness, then you can think about, “okay, so what can I do to be, you know, sprinkling a little bit of kindness into my day? It doesn't have to be this earth shattering action, but what can I do that would feel like I was bringing some kindness  into my day, having that kind of impact?” Or whatever your values are. I actually  have a list by my desk  of  my core values: Authenticity, creativity, engagement, growth, and vitality. And that's by my desk because, while I'm not going to have every day of my life include all five of these things,  I want to make sure that I am sprinkling some of these things into each day. That I'm living fairly authentically; that I'm using creativity as I'm going through life, thinking about how I solve problems and how I do things just for fun; that I am  living life with vitality, that I'm thinking about health and energy; and so forth.   When you do that, when you sprinkle your values into each day so that you're taking actions that are values consistent, this can really have a powerful effect upon your self confidence because you just feel like, man, you're here doing what you're supposed to be doing. You're feeling a sense of purpose, which can translate into a sense of feeling confident. You can think of it as some of the things we do move us toward a more fulfilling life. Those are the values oriented things, the things that are important to you,  where you feel like, “I am having a positive impact”.  

And there are some things that we all do that move us away from that kind of life. Things that are not contributing to that and are in fact pulling us further away.  Maybe it's ways that you are with other people when you're not really at your best, you're thinking you're maybe snappish with people. Or maybe you have some habits that you're just not proud of. You don't get back to people when you say you will,  you break promises. Those can be called away moves because you're moving away from the kind of life you want to live. Obviously, if you're doing a lot of away moves, that's going to affect your self confidence. You're not going to feel good about yourself.  If you catch yourself doing those away moves, then think about, “how can I turn this back around?”

And I don't mean to sound overly simplistic. I know sometimes we can be caught up in addictions and it can be very, very difficult to get back on track. And of course, seek professional help if you're having difficulty with this, but otherwise, especially when you know there's a choice to be made, think about what is values consistent, what is going to pull you more in the direction of the kind of life you want to live that's going to be fulfilling, and then try to take those actions whenever you can. And that will have a positive, powerful effect upon your self confidence. 

Thanks so much. Have a great week.