“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” John Lenon
And, yes, John’s wisdom proved to be right for me again. I intended to do “The week of the confidence” as a one-week event, but life put me in a situation to do it like a whole month event. (You can find below the links to the first two articles about the confidence)
And before we continue I would like to ask you several questions:
How often does it happen to you to have some plans but something happens and you find yourself in a situation where you have to postpone the work you intended to do?
How often does it happen to you that some urgent things make you shift between tasks that make you overwhelmed in meeting some of your deadlines?
- How do you tread yourself in such situations?
- What do you say to yourself?
- How do you feel?
- Do you start long explanations about the reasons that made you delay instead to apologize with respect and responsibility?
- Do you feel guilty or uncomfortable, losing part of your focus and some time to cope with your emotions?
If yes, you are not alone. Often this is a confidence issue that usually is related to old feelings that people carry with them from the past. This is also one of the reasons why sometimes it may be difficult for us to say NO to people’s requests or if the new issues are very important, to shift our focus on them without inner suffering and later come back to our previous plan with confidence. I was in a similar situation in the last 2 weeks. My Old Me most probably would be shaken with emotions taking from my energy, focus, and self-confidence. But my Current Me just said, “Okay Ivet, even if you wanted to do it in one week, you can do it in one month period. And it is OK.”.
Of course, the deadlines could have a different level of importance. Our plans too. But our actions and reactions are related to our confidence. If we change them, we change our confidence as well. Other times we need to improve our confidence in order to change our behavior.
Sometimes we just need to practice confidence and in this way, we enhance our confidence. Other times we need to release some feelings in order to get our confidence back.
You may be a leader in a large organization or a business owner with a fast-growing business, and at the same time, you may experience some shaking in your confidence when things are not going according to your plans. When you bring your confidence back, everything falls into place.
The topic of today is FEELINGS and their relationship with our confidence.
First, let’s clarify the difference between emotions and feelings. Maybe you know it, but we need to mention it here in relation to our exploration.
- So, we feel feelings in our bodies and we could carry them with us through our lives. We cannot change them through our thoughts. We can just release them which is a process.
- Emotions are provoked by our thoughts and we can change them by changing our focus, hence thoughts.
Today we are going to talk about feelings. Next time we are going to talk about emotions and practicing confidence.
Here are some examples of feelings that impact our confidence (according to my experience with clients and my personal experience):
- Fear – we experience it in our stomach or as something cold, or as something that constricts our heart, or as a tingling in the back, etc.
- Guilt – usually we experience it in our chest, or in the head, but it could appear in other parts of our body as well.
- Anger – usually we experience it around our heart, or in the throat, it could be in the head as well.
- Shame – shame usually shrinks our hearts, but we also can have it in other parts of our bodies depending on the reasons it appeared in the past.
- Love – we experience it as warmth in our hearts.
- Emotional pain – could be from rejection, insults, loss of people we love, or other types of loss, etc. Emotional pains are provoked by the attitude of others and how we perceive it, as well as by the attitude we have about ourselves, and the way we experience situations. We experience it in the stomach, in the heart, in our chest, or in other parts of the body. That’s why for the purposes of this article we are classifying emotional pains as feelings.
All these feelings could impact our confidence hence our results in business, as leaders, or in our life, because our negative feelings impact our inner balance and self-esteem. But LOVE is the feeling that heals them and brings our confidence back.
How?
Our natural state is to be connected with love. This is the way we are born. But during our lives, we could lose this connection due to different reasons. Most often we lose it because of the way people communicate and connect with us, especially the most important people in our lives.
Very often the negative feelings we experience are because our expectations were not met. We can carry them for a long time. It could happen in different stages in our lives and their impact on our confidence has different extend:
1. When we are small children, we are open to love but we don’t know how to cope with the negativity that comes to us. If we grow up in a negative environment instead of loving one, especially at home and at school, we close ourselves due to the emotional pains we experience. This is a very intelligent way for children for coping with situations. But by closing our hearts, we close our pains inside as well, and we continue to carry them with us. This kind of pain impacts very seriously our self-esteem, hence our confidence in important situations. We can manage it in many moments and situations by doing different practices to enhance our confidence. But we cannot hide it for long periods of time. At some moments in life, it appears on the surface and impacts our performance at work or at home.
The solution is: to release the negative feelings. How? As adults, we can choose how we perceive the same situations and we can choose to change the way we experience them. But in order for this to happen, we need to reconnect with the love inside us and then see the situations from a different perspective. It is a process of transformation that I help people do with ease and fast.
2. We may have grown up in a very positive environment and at a later stage in life, we could get disappointed by someone special to us. Or we could be disappointed by ourselves if we don’t reach a particular goal. It could be a very painful experience, provoking a lot of anger or other types of feelings. In such situations, we lose our connection with love. This can shake our confidence and if we continue with negative internal talk, we accumulate more and more negative feelings that undermine our confidence.
Again, the solution is: to release the negative feelings and reconnect with love. Then to see the situations from different perspectives.
Our natural internal state is LOVE. If we are connected with love inside us, we experience confidence.
While we experience negative feelings inside us we are disconnected from love. These are two different internal states of being and cannot exist together. That is why we cannot experience confidence when we are overwhelmed with negative feelings. They shake us and get us out of the balance. We can experience balance when we have inner balance. And this is an internal state of love.
So, either you feel guilt, fear, shame, anger, and emotional pain, or you are connected with love. You cannot feel them together. These internal states may alternate. But negative feelings will come from time to time to remind you about their existence until you release them completely. And I help people do it with ease.
If you want to discuss your challenges about your feelings with someone experienced and different from your own environment, connect with me. I am here to support you in this process. And I love to do it.
Here you can read the first two articles about the confidence:
