What are your go-to strategies when you want to bolster your sense of inner confidence?
Do you look to your past accomplishments, or to the aspects of your present circumstances that you find most pleasing? Or, do you focus on your positive attributes, doing things to enhance your appearance?
While these are all good short-term strategies, they’re fleeting and unreliable in the long run.
After all, if we’re relying on our good looks for confidence, what do we do on days when we just feel blah? If our confidence comes from excelling at work, what happens if we get a bad review – or get fired?
Outer confidence is only as stable as the conditions that support it. This means, at any moment it can come tumbling down. Inner confidence is the prize we’re truly after.
Here are 3 steps to instantly increase your inner confidence, regardless of your present circumstances:
Step #1: Understand what inner confidence is, and where it really comes from.
There are essentially two types of confidence – outer confidence and inner confidence.
We derive outer confidence from having faith in the external conditions of our lives. For example, you have confidence in your vehicle to get you where you need to go. You’re confident in the strength of your personal relationships. You feel confident in your body’s ability to perform certain actions or accomplish certain tasks.
Because it’s dependent on producing specific results, external confidence naturally fluctuates. Some days we got it, and some days we don’t.
Inner confidence, on the other hand, is an energy we can choose to cultivate and connect to, regardless of the external conditions of our lives. It’s trusting in our own abilities and our capacity to create. Basically, it’s having the belief in ourselves that we have what it takes to meet life’s everyday challenges and demands. Inner confidence is the energy we take with us in every situation. It comes from an understanding that we have the ability to create, and re-create, our lives in each new moment.
Step #2: Reclaim your power of focus.
Your mind is a momentum-generating machine. The thoughts you entertain on a regular basis are taking you down one of two paths. They’re either leading you closer to manifesting the things you desire, or they’re leading you in the opposite direction. And in both cases, you’re in the driver’s seat.
Many of us simply don’t realize that we have ultimate control over how and when and on what we focus. We think that just because something lands on our radar that we owe it our energy and our attention. But we were all born with the priceless gift of free will. And this means that we can choose in every moment how to apply our most precious resource: the power of our focus.
Inner confidence is about giving your precious energy and attention to only those things that nourish you back.
You can’t be focused on the fulfillment of something you desire and feeling doubt about it at the same time.
To use the power of focus to build your inner confidence, spend more time imagining and feeling your desired results into being. When your thoughts begin to dip into the range of doubt, comparison, or discouragement, reel them back in. And if you start seeing your life through a lens of lack, remind yourself of all the abundance that surrounds you.
You can’t give your attention to your doubts and your desires at the same time. You have to pick one or the other. We enhance our inner confidence by choosing to have faith in what we’re creating, even before there’s evidence to support it. And this requires us to exercise our fundamental right to choose the direction of our focus.
Step #3: Focus less on conditions, and more on the feeling state you’re seeking to experience.
This final step requires a pretty radical paradigm shift from the way most of the world thinks about confidence.
It’s a shift in mindset from “When I get the job, I will feel confident,” to “When I align myself with the energy of confidence, I will attract the job.”
Outer confidence is about going after the external result, hoping it will bring us the internal feeling we’re seeking. Inner confidence is created by generating within ourselves the feeling we desire, and from that feeling state, magnetizing what we desire.
The illusion is that in order to feel confident we first have achieved the result. But this is entirely out of sync with the laws of the universe. The way it really works is this: First we conjure the feeling, and then circumstances assemble themselves around that energy.
Take a moment right now to intentionally breathe in the energetic essence of inner confidence. And on your out-breath, release any energy you do not want.
Breathe in ease and flow, and breathe out tension. Breathe in light, and breathe out all doubt or resistance. Breathe in empowerment, and control over your own focus.
The fastest way to increase your inner confidence is to realize that everything comes from within you. You are the attractor of all of your life’s experiences. You are the one who mines the gold – or the scrap metal – from the infinite resources of this universe. Use the power of your focus to connect with the essence of how you desire to feel. And watch as circumstances and events coalesce around the energy that you are sending forth.
Christy Whitman is an energy healer, Master Certified Law of Attraction Coach, and the New York Times bestselling author of The Art of Having It All: A Woman’s Guide to Unlimited Abundance. Her forthcoming book The Desire Factor: How to Embrace Your Materialistic Nature to Reclaim Your Full Spiritual Power is available for pre-order now at www.thedesirefactor.com. She communicates with, and for, The Quantum Council, a collection of non-physical ascended masters who desire to help humanity understand that we are divinely designed for well-being, abundance, success, and loving relationships. You can take the first step in alignment and creating your desires by a free 30-day program called Watch Your Words by going here: www.watchyourwords.com.
