How to Build Self Confidence

Chris Albert 00:00:00 (link to this point)

This is Chris Albert, and I'm here to remind you of one thing. Someday, you're going to die. Now that's not some morbid statement or scary idea. It's solid fact. Your time here on this earth is limited.

And you need to be reminded of this as much as possible for one simple reason, to live your best life while you can. This is the Warrior Soul Podcast.

You know, like like many people, I've always dealt with a lack of self confidence. And I could try to to tell you exactly where that comes from. You know, there's aspects of my child. I grew up without a without a dad. I had a single mom who worked all the time.

I was alone a lot. Me and my sister didn't interact much. You know, my mom, she did her best. She she tried everything she could with me. She she pushed me into sports.

She pushed me into a whole host of different things. But, you know, at the end of the day, I wasn't really a anything but an awkward child. You know, there's no other way to put that. And for me to sit here and say that it was any one cause kinda kinda just goes around everything because I think that a lot of us, we look at our childhoods and we say, oh, I didn't have this or oh, I didn't have that. But you know what?

I had a roof over my head. I had a mom who was willing to do everything she could for me. I had teachers. I had people around me who wanted help. So I can't really sit here and say that I had a crappy childhood because I did.

And I think we have this impetus inside of us to to wanna point to one thing, to wanna point to something and say, that's the cause. And it's because when we're able to do that, it kinda lets us off the hook, And it kinda tells us, you know what? It's okay that I don't have self confidence. It's okay that this is a weakness for me. I don't have to work on it as much because, you know, that's how I've always been.

And the truth is that that's in and of itself a really limiting belief because the truth is that confidence is something that can be built, and being awkward is something that is a habit, and that is continually learned through our own practices. So what I want to do today is talk to you a little bit about building self confidence and things that you can do to build self confidence. The first thing is this, you wanna think about where a lack of self confidence comes from. And it comes about because we don't feel capable in a specific situation. We don't feel capable in a certain place, a certain time, a certain interaction with another human being, we don't feel capable there.

And so, because we don't feel as confident, a lot of times, try to hide. So we'll try to hide around by not talking to people at all, or a lot of us will try to hide by cracking jokes or being immature. Some of us might hide by just becoming angry and saying we hate people, we don't want to deal with people at all, and we turn into really negative souls. But the truth is that the only thing that's really going to help you to build confidence is to build a sense of capability, and to allow yourself to be put through the crucible of learning something and failing at it a couple of times, but but then continually trying to improve yourself. For instance, when I was a kid, I was really, really bad at sports.

I was a chubby little kid. I couldn't run. I was weak. I had very, very little coordination. And that was something that really smashed at my self confidence.

I didn't like to play games on the playground. I didn't like to try to participate in sports. My mom forced me into Little League so that I could be around other kids, and I absolutely hated it. I would go out into the outfield and pick daffodils the whole time. And it wasn't until I found weightlifting as young 12, 13 year old that I actually started to build some physical self confidence.

I found something where I can improve myself, I can improve my strength, I can improve my ability to move, I can improve my coordination through training. And up to that point, I hadn't ever made that connection. And that allowed me to eventually play high school football and actually be pretty good at it. It allowed me to wrestle in high school. Know, and I have to say that if my mom had never brought me to the gym that day, I probably would have never joined the Marine Corps, and I probably would have never gone to college, right, because the success I got from that translated to everything else.

It translated to me being more confident on the sports field. It also translated to me becoming more confident in learning, learning how to do things in the classroom. So the biggest thing I can tell you is that if you want to build self confidence, find something that's challenging and work at it. The more you work at it, at first, you're gonna fall flat on your face. It's you're gonna feel weak.

You're gonna feel, you know, really, really inadequate. But the more you work at it, the more you're going to feel more confident, the more you're going to feel adequate, the more you are going to feel like you can't get knocked down. And that comes from the trials and tribulations of challenging yourself and learning something new. The other thing is this, if you lack self confidence with other people, the biggest thing you can do is to put yourself into situations where you've got to interact with other people. Joining a team, joining an organization, working with people toward a goal, that is something that will definitely build your self confidence because it traps it it taps into our own tribal sensibilities.

You know, human beings are at their base, at their core, tribal people. And from the dawn of time, we've worked in small groups to accomplish tasks. So when you can participate in a small group, whether that's a club, whether it's a project you're doing at work, whether it's a team that you can join, a sports team, if you can contribute positively to that group, that will exponentially raise your self confidence. It will exponentially raise your perception of yourself, because you're literally bringing value to other people. And again, there's going be some hurdles you're going to have to overcome there.

If you're going to do that, you're going to need to be able to accept some positive criticism. You're going to need to be able to accept the quirks and inadequacies of other human beings, and you're going to need to learn how to work with them. But that comes about because you haven't been exposed to those things before. If you're not comfortable with dealing with those things, it's because you haven't worked with people before, you haven't dealt with people before. But the more you can participate with people in a team setting, the more it's going to build that ability for you to work with others, to follow others, but most importantly, to lead others, to teach others, to help others to become better versions of themselves.

And that is the epitome of what will raise your self confidence. The next thing is this, a lot of us deal with inadequacies and lack of confidence in our relationships. And this can manifest itself in a number of different ways. It can manifest itself in not wanting to deal with the opposite sex. It can manifest itself in creating jealousy between you and your partner.

And when I look at a jealous relationship, I always see a lack of confidence on the part of the jealous partner, because that jealous partner is constantly scared he's gonna lose that other person. And he's projecting his own inadequacies onto the relationship. And the funny part about that is that the more you do that, the more jealous you become, the more likely it is that that other partner is going to want to leave you and get out of the situation. So, where does confidence in these types of situations come from? Well, number one, it comes from finding the right person, finding a person you can trust, finding a person that is going to allow you to to be confident around them, to be yourself.

Right? And you never want to enter a relationship where you have to pretend to be somebody else in order to get that other person's affection. That's the big no no, and that's going to lead to a lot of pain and a lot of jealousy on your part. The other the other part of it is that in order to get into a relationship like that, you have to be doing these other things that I just talked about. You have to have been overcoming challenges.

You have to have been working on yourself, allowing yourself to become stronger, so that you can be confident in a relationship, and so that you can add things to it. And if you're not working on yourself, and you get yourself into one of these relationships, it becomes a codependent mess. You end up fully dependent on the other person for emotional stability, you end up completely dependent on them for everything. And that's not healthy either. You want to be a healthy contributing member of that relationship.

You need to be working on yourself. You need to be constantly making yourself stronger before the relationship, but definitely in the relationship as well. And beyond all of this, the biggest thing I can tell you is that when you are looking to get in a relationship, make sure it's the proper time in your life. I see so many people entering into relationships when when they shouldn't be because they just feel like they need to be in relationships. Right?

They can't be alone. You need to have the confidence to be alone before you could be in a loving relationship. Right? You need to have the confidence that you can make it in this world on your own without anybody else's help. And once you have that confidence, then you could bring everything to a relationship.

You could bring everything to your partner. You could give them so much. But until that time, you need to be out there at war with the world. And when you're at war with the world, it's it's not a time to be committing yourself to something that that you can't deliver on. So that's the first Warrior Notes episode of 2019, and I hope you guys got a lot out of it.

You know, a lot of times when I'm talking about these things, I don't know whether or not it's resonating with you. And so please let me know what you thought about this episode, what you thought about what I just said. If you disagree, let me know. This podcast is here because I'm trying to help US military veterans to live their best lives. And that's because over the past decade and a half, The US military veteran community has faced extremely high rates of suicide, depression, chronic disease, and homelessness.

And when you look at what's being done out there for it, you know, there's a lot of awareness raising, but not a lot of solutions. So what I wanna do with this podcast is to give you deliverable solutions every episode that you can use. If you're not a veteran, you can stick around because there's always gonna be something that can apply to anybody and everybody. The only thing we ask is that you let other people know about the show, that you share these episodes out if you found something valuable, and that you write us a review up on iTunes. Let me know what you think of the show.

Let me know how it helps you, and that really helps us to spread word. The other thing is that Warrior Soul has a lot of different components that you might not know about. We have an awesome media page over at warriorsoulagoge.com that contains our our fitness videos. It contains our podcast episodes, our blogs. You can head over there.

You can check that out. In addition to that, we've got a massive fitness component here. If you head over to the Warrior Soul Agoge YouTube channel, there's videos on absolutely everything and anything you ever wanted to know about fitness. I've compiled them over the last seven years since I've been on YouTube, and you could find out anything you want to know about diet, nutrition, anything like that. They're there to help you as resources.

I'm not banking my life on becoming a YouTube superstar. Those are just there for all of you to consume and to use for your benefit. Beyond that, we've just developed a business coaching component, and that's through the Warrior Business Academy. And this is where we help people to become entrepreneurs, coaches, consultants, people out there who are trying to help to make people's lives better. We're teaching them the business skills that they need to become successful, and we've got a free training up right now at www.warriorbusiness.net.

It's a real training. It's not a pitch session. You can go through that. You're gonna get tons of information that can help you out. Finally, I just wanna say that this podcast would not be possible without the good people over at f bomb nutrition.

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Use the code Warrior Soul at checkout, and you'll get 20% off of your first order. With that, thank you so much for listening to the Warrior Soul podcast. Now get out there and live your best life while you can.