091: Confidence vs Self Confidence
Confidence vs. Self Confidence
In this episode, I dig into confidence vs. self-confidence, a common issue among us nurses, is believing we are not confident enough to do something. I started by separating confidence and self-confidence into external and internal factors, where confidence is seen as an external validation and self-confidence comes from within.
Three main factors contribute to self-confidence: trusting yourself at all times, being open to experiencing any emotion, and your thoughts about yourself.
There is also a misconception that confidence comes from being competent in something, and it clarifies that confidence comes from repetition, but self-confidence comes from within.
Self-confidence is not arrogance but rather trust in oneself, willingness to experience both positive and negative emotions, and managing thoughts about oneself.
This episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to build their self-confidence. I provide insightful and practical tips on cultivating self-confidence, which is essential for success in any career or aspect of life.
Key takeaways:
03:28 - Confidence and self-confidence a common issues among people.
04:48 - External and internal factors.
06:54 - Three main factors of self-confidence
08:10 - Self-confidence is not arrogance
09:43 - Overcoming misconceptions
15:53 - The importance of self-confidence
18:53 - Self-confidence is your ticket to your dream job
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**This transcript was automatically generated using Descript.**
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Hello, beautiful humans. Welcome back to the podcast. I hope you're all well for those of you that are listening to this, hopefully it sounds much better in your ears cuz I've got a new microphone. For those of you that are watching this hello on YouTube, come and follow us on YouTube subscribe. we're gonna be doing a lot more on YouTube this year.
I say we. Me. But you know, of course, as you know, there are people that help me do all of this amazing work. And, I've also got a new microphone, that's why it sounds so good. I'm feeling a bit Parisian today. I've got like my little stripy blue top on, and I feel like all I'm missing is a beret, of course, funny story about beret my friend Charlotte came, she's been on the podcast. She's an aesthetic nurse in the UK. Runs an incredible business, super proud of her. Big shout out to Charlotte's Aesthetics. Charlotte came a couple of weeks ago to Paris with our partner Jamie, and we had an incredible time. And Charlotte said to me before she came, Liam, I'm gonna bring my be, I'm gonna get all the pictures taken.
And I said, Charlotte, you do know that only tourists wear berets in Paris. And she was like, no. I was like, you're pretty much putting a target on your back for pick pockets and all of the things. So she got her pictures with the beret on, do not fear, and then from there, . she went out and, you know, took it off, put it in her bag, and then just tried to merge in with her Birmingham accent.
So it was a little problematic. But anyway, I feel like I've literally become a tour guide since I've moved here. I'm gonna open up a new branch of high performance nursing. It's gonna be high perform. Parisian tours, . but I'm loving it and it's a great experience and I love being an example for all of you listening that you can do, you know, I'm not nursing here, but you can use your nursing skills and experience anywhere and I love being evidence of that for people that want to do that in their life.
So that's a little update. Sorry, I just smacked my table. today we're talking about self-confidence and confidence. Now, I chose this topic because there are so many people that I see in the wild west of Facebook that are struggling with confidence and self-confidence, and I figured it's about time that I talk about it on the podcast and help free some of you from this maybe misunderstanding around what confidence and self-confidence is.
So we've talked a lot about the human brain on this podcast. And I love this idea of how can we normalize the nursing brain? You know, like how can we normalize all of the things that come up for us as nurses in our brain cognitively? And this internal argument of I'm not confident enough, I'm not self-confident enough, is something that comes up a lot throughout every stage in our career.
Think about our graduates. Our graduates are like, I'm not confident enough. The uni hasn't set me up enough. I don't feel confident to be a nurse. Maybe you're telling yourself that, or maybe you are more senior and more seasoned, as I like to say, and you have more experience, but you've maybe got experience in one specialty and now you're like, I don't really feel confident to move to another area.
Wherever you are on that spectrum of confidence, today's episode's really gonna help you understand what's really going on for you. So without further ado, confidence. I like to separate the two, confidence and self-confidence into external and internal. Confidence for me, the biggest misconception is that people say I need to be competent in something to be able to feel more confident, and I don't really agree with that. Okay. Confidence does come from repetition and doing it over time, but confidence is always accessible to you, okay? You can always be confident, and really where that comes down to is self-confidence.
Okay? So we can look for external things, external to us to validate that we're confident. So for example, I can do a cannula 20 times and develop confidence for sure, but in order for me to be able to be a confident clinician. I don't need the cannula to be confident. Does that make sense? the two don't intermingle.
I can be confident already with that skill. Okay. That skill just adds to my level of confidence. So when people say to me, I'm not confident, I think what's often happening is that they're highlighting what is missing. In their nursing career, and they're forgetting about all of the incredible things that they're already doing that they have.
Okay. So maybe just think about that in your own context. So that's confidence. It's an external thing that you do to kind of validate that you're confident. That's kind of really tricky because sometimes when you rely on external validation for confidence, you're gonna come across failure. You're gonna not get that vein.
You're not gonna get the wounds dressing done the right time, even though you spent two hours on it. And often we use that against ourselves to be not confident. You see where I'm going with this? So when we rely on confidence and the external world to make us feel more confident, it's really out with our control.
So I want to give you the insights into how you can be more self-confident. And the beautiful thing about self-confidence is that it's 100% accessible to you right now. Okay? So let me talk you through what that looks like. So self-confidence for me. In the coaching that I've done, the nurses that I've worked with, the coaching training that I've received and my understanding of the human brain comes down to three main things, okay?
Self-confidence is about having your own back. It's about trusting yourself at all times. That's number one. The second part of self-confidence is about being open to experiencing any emotion in any feeling. Okay, that's the second part, and I'm gonna look at my notes cause I forgot the third part. Hashtag Human.
The third part is the thoughts that you have about yourself. That's self-confidence. Okay, so notice. Number one is about trusting yourself. Number two is about experiencing and feeling all emotions on the spectrum of emotions, not just the positive things, the not so positive things as well. I'm talking like shame, embarrassment, failure, fear.
Worry, stress, anxiety, all of those things as well as the excitement, the glee, all of that as well. And then the third thing is the thoughts that you have about yourself. Now, what I love about this is that when you think about it like this, you can just actively choose to be more self-confident in your abilities, okay?
And often when I say this to people, they look at me and they squint the eyes and they're like, isn't that arrogance? Isn't that being cocky? And there's a separation here. There is a difference between the two. When you show up as self-confident you that trusts yourself, that has your own back, that's willing to experience the highs and the lows of being a human and the whole human experience and has really strong thoughts about yourself, like you're really practice managing the thoughts that you hold about what's possible for you.
You are not arrogant, my friend. You are self-confident, arrogance. is Belittling other people. You know, where in trying to uplevel your game, it's about thinking that you're better than people and it's using other people against yourself. That's arrogance. Okay. And it's also not having that emotional awareness to be able to like, read the room and be like, okay, what's happening here?
I want you to separate that and free yourself from thinking that being self-confident means that you have to be arrogant or cocky. And this comes up all the time in interviews, right? People say to me, oh, I don't wanna be cocky. I don't wanna be arrogant. The way you become arrogant and cocky in an interviews like, I'm the best.
Pick me. There's no one else that's better here. Versus self-confidence, which is I know that I have shot falls and I understand that this role requires X, Y, and Z, but based on my experience, I am confident in my abilities to learn this within a week and to be able to hit the ground running, notice the difference, right?
It's totally, totally different.
So when you think about self-confidence for you, what comes up? Do you trust yourself to make the right decision? If you do, great. If you don't, why don't you trust yourself? That's a choice. Why are you choosing to not trust that you know what is best for you? When I first learned this that I was actively choosing to not trust myself.
I was like, never again. Never again. And one way that you know that you don't trust yourself is that you spend a lot of time asking other people's opinions about your life and your. career That's how you identify if you don't trust yourself, If you spend more time taking other people's opinions on board, rather than listening to your own wisdom, your own knowledge and experience and understanding of yourself, maybe you don't trust yourself.
Good exercise if you don't trust yourself, is to find examples of times where you've made a decision about your life and it went really. . Of course the opposite is true. There's times where you make decisions. and it didn't go very well. I went to Barcelona on the weekend and I had 40 many gin and tonics.
Okay, , and that wasn't a great decision in the moment. That was fine. Okay, but where in your life can you recognize where maybe you are outsourcing the trust, and how can you bring it back in and build that self-confidence? That's number one what you can do, number. experiencing any feeling. Now, this is why most people play small.
This is why most nurses, even though they detest the work that they're doing, or the ward or the manager, they stay put. , they stay put purely because it's safe and it's familiar, even though it feels terrible. And what happens when we do that? Trust me, I've tried all of it, is that we use external things to make us feel better.
In the coaching world, we call it buffering. So I'm gonna buffer with food. I'm gonna buffer with pizza. I'm gonna overeat, I'm gonna over-indulge. Maybe I go and drink more, maybe I don't know, like maybe somebody I don't know watches more porn. Maybe somebody, I don't know what that is. Maybe somebody plays more video games.
Maybe somebody over shops and overs, spans. Whatever ways, like there are healthy buffering, there's unhealthy buffering, maybe you self-sabotage and don't go to the gym. All of those things I've done . I want you to think about what does that look like for you? What are you doing to not feel your emotions?
What are you doing in your life where you could be spending more time just feeling the loneliness, feeling the sadness, Experiencing the burnout instead of trying to escape it all. When you allow yourself to feel your feelings and go through the motions, you take back all of your power.
Cause once you realize that your thoughts create your feelings, your feelings draw your actions and your actions create your results in your life, you take back all your control. because your feelings are created by the thoughts that you have about something that's happening external to you. Now, sometimes we want to feel shitty.
Sometimes we want to just indulge in overwhelm and pity. Sometimes we want to feel shame. Sometimes we want to feel embarrassment. As a nurse, all of these things are part of the human spectrum of emotion. and We've just been designed and programmed and socialized to believe that feeling any of those things is an absolute no-no.
Like you're gonna die, , you're gonna die if you feel those things and he had to tell you that you won't. Okay, so How would your life look if you could open yourself up to experiencing. any emotion and still having your back and still being like, you know what? Even though I got up on stage, I presented at a conference, I tripped on the way up, I felt shame and embarrassment.
I nailed it, right? I'm gonna give you an example of this when I was working as my first education job. I remember it vividly. My first education job as a nurse educator, I was working a learning development team. I was teaching advanced life support and, compass, which is like,between the flags, you know, early recognition of deteriorating patients and in that job,
The first week I felt this need to prove my worth. I felt the need to show people that I could do the job right? Cause I hadn't done any educating up until that point. So I organized the session. I tried to get as many people there. You know, I was new so everybody was curious and I set up the training room and I didn't fully understand the content that I was presenting, cuz I did it all in a rush in my first week whilst I was onboarding and dealing with all the.
Mind drama, and I had educators come down and everything and I was standing there and I thought to myself, Lee, what have you done? But obviously on reflection, I was engaging in self-confidence at that point in time. I had my own back. I was willing to fail in front of 30 people. And the thoughts at the time was like, you know what?
Maybe they weren't so healthy, but I was like, I can do this. This is my job. I have to prove that I can do this. So I had self-confidence in that moment, and here's what happened. Started the presentation. People came in halfway through and interrupted me. I did not know a single soul in the room, so I was absolutely terrified.
I got to one of the more in-depth pathophysiology slides, and I totally lost it, like totally lost my train of thought and did not know where I was going. I did not communicate it very clearly. and I was super embarrassed. Like I felt shame. I felt embarrassment. I came home that night and said to look, my partner said, I can't do this.
I'm not designed for this. Like I stuffed it up, I don't even know, basic part of it. And I was like six years into my career and had worked in icu, come on, Liam, stop it. So in that moment, I had self-confidence. I knew that I could do it. I was willing to fail. I was willing to experience anything, and then I was able to cognitively set myself up for success. Now, if I had all the tools that I had now I'd be able to, at the end of that, have a laugh, , then have a chuckle, and that's what we wanna get to, right? That's what self-confidence is. So where in your life can you apply all of those three factors?
Self-confidence is a very attractive career growth skill. When you can instill confidence in others through your self-confidence, you open up so many different doors. Couple of ways that you can do this in your career is by obviously called emailing, called outreaching to people, in your network about potential jobs that maybe are not even being advertised, but you're super interested in.
That exudes self-confidence, right? I trust myself. I'm backing myself. I'm willing to be told no. I'm willing to be rejected, and I believe that I can do this. I believe I have something of immense value to offer this job here. So the next time that your brain wants to offer you that you're not confident, maybe that's true, but what I want you to take away from today is that you can always choose.
To be Self-confident Self-confidence is always available to you in every moment. The goal of self-confidence is not to know all the answers. I think we get that mixed up. The goal of self-confidence is not to be perfect. The goal of self-confidence is not to succeed. , sometimes the goal of self-confidence is to allow yourself to fail, but to fail gracefully.
Okay. Another example of self-confidence is we worked with an amazing graduate last year in 2022. her name is Luna. Luana came to us. She joined the G C L P. Incredible. Had a very clear vision for her career. She wanted to be an ED clinician at the time. She wasn't overly confident in her abilities. She joined the program.
We did some coaching. We looked at all of these things. Do you trust yourself? Can you back yourself that this is perfect for you? And can you convince your mind as to why you are the best ed nurse? Again, that's self-confidence. It's not arrogance. Number two, are you willing to experience failure on this path?
Can you open yourself up to all of the things and truly feel those things and process them? She said yes. And number three, what thoughts do you have about yourself? Are they serving you? Are they going to get you closer to your goal? Are they gonna sabotage your goal? And we had to do a bit of work there and explore all of that.
Now, I'll tell you what happened for Lu. Luna, asked us to do a couple of applications for her. She applied for her dream graduate program and little to our knowledge, we didn't know that. She actually only applied for one program. One program. That was it. And we had done like four applications for her, but she just applied for one and she came back to us a couple of weeks later in the coaching call, she was finishing our internship and she got the call.
She'd gone to the, I. Fully embodying self-confidence, like exuding self-confidence. She went to the interview. She aced the interview. She came back. She got a ed job offer, which she was so proud of from the only program that she applied for. Now, those of you that tell me it's impossible, I can't get my dream specialty.
Self-confidence is your ticket. To your dream job, whether you're a graduate or whether you're a senior nurse. Self-confidence all the way. Okay? Because if we rely on confidence, if we rely on having the experience, you're gonna be waiting longer. Luana not only got a job offer for the ed, there was somebody on the panel that loved her so much that they also made her an offer two job offers from one job.
And the second job offer topped the first job offer She got offered icu. Incredible. As a graduate nurse, do not be mistaking my friends Self-confidence is your ticket to nursing career growth and sustainability. When we rely on confidence external to us, it's out of our control, and you'll be waiting for a long time.
If I could wave my magic high performance nursing wand and give everybody self confidence, I would. It's totally accessible to everybody. You just have to do the work to explore it. Okay, so as we wrap up today, hopefully I've inspired you that you are self-confident. Really challenge those thoughts like confidence.
I'm not just not a confident person. I want you to notice, when you tell yourself stories about confidence, how does that feel for you and your. If you tell yourself, I'm not a confident person, I'm pretty sure that doesn't feel very good. Okay? It's so limiting. I feel so closed. I want you to think about how can you think in a way that really helps you embody self-confidence?
Because what do we know here at High Performance Nursing? We know that we get to choose what we think your brain's gonna offer you 60,000 thoughts. They're all subconscious. You get to decide intentionally. You know what? Today I'm gonna practice believing that I am incredible and I deserve this opportu.
Because that's totally available to you. Alrighty. Hopefully you choose to embody self-confidence. After today's chart. I'd love to hear from you about your self-confidence journey. Come and message me. Tell me I love hearing from the almost 3000 people a month that now listen to this podcast, and I want you to tell me how you're gonna move forward with self-confidence in your nursing and your personal life to achieve your goals.
So, You can do it. I'll see you in the next episode.
