Building Confidence Through Resilience
Think of a time when you did something really hard. Something that, at the time, you believed you couldn’t do or could not overcome. I think back to when I used to smoke cigarettes. The wild part was I didn’t even enjoy them. It had just become such a regular habit that I maintained from my teenage years into adulthood, that I didn’t know any other way. Over the course of my early 20s, I tried so many times to give them up, but I couldn’t seem to cut the habit. Then around age 25 when I got heavy into heated power yoga, I decided cigarettes didn’t have a place in my life anymore and I let them go. Just that small little switch of belief in my brain and that was that. It was that minor change in belief that began my journey to truly building confidence within myself.
According to the American Psychological Association, ‘Resilience is the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands.’ Now I want you to think about a time when you experienced something challenging. Maybe at the time you said to yourself, ‘I don’t know how I am going to get through this.’ I think back to July 2020, when I decided enough was enough and I walked away from a five-year toxic relationship. At the time, that relationship was all I had ever known. I never even lived alone at that point in my life. About a year later, when the grieving process had subsided, I felt more in my power than I ever had before.
Confidence is not belief that we are inherently born with. It is a skill that we develop over time by overcoming life’s obstacles and doing the hard shit. I am not talking about the superficial confidence that we see on filtered Instagram photos and magazine covers (no shade, just facts). Confidence is built through resilience. It is built through our ability to peel ourselves out of bed even during our darkest moments. It is our awareness of the people, patterns, and behaviors that do not serve us any more and learning to let them go. Confidence sometimes takes hitting rock bottom and climbing yourself back up. It is not an instant gratification. Confidence takes time, patience, and commitment to doing the things that challenge you.
The most confident person in the room doesn’t need to be the most aesthetically beautiful, but you will be fully aware of them by the way they hold themselves; by the way they are unapologetically exactly who they are. We are not talking about arrogance either. Confidence is not saying every little thing that comes to your mind even if you believe it to be true. Confidence is having the emotional intelligence to understand what to say and when it is appropriate to say it. Confidence is being aware that you will not always feel confident. Sometimes you will feel small, low, and defeated. Confidence is understanding that these feelings are a natural part of the human experience and not allowing them to consume you.
So let’s bring your mind back to a time when you overcame something challenging in your life. At first, you probably felt like shit. Maybe you cried for days or couldn’t get out of bed. Now try to think about how you felt after the emotional pain subsided; or after the desire to still have that thing in your life went away. How did you feel? I believe, at the least, most of us can say that we were proud of ourselves. I look back on cigarette-smoking Bree and I can’t even believe she existed, but shit how proud I am at how far she’s come. I know I say this often but life is truly a butterfly effect. Once you build the confidence from overcoming one hardship, it’s so much easier to meet the others head on. Life will continue to throw challenges our way. None of us make it through life without them.
The belief that confidence is built through aesthetic beauty is absolute bullshit. I don’t care how many likes you get on your Instagram selfies or how many injections you’ve had. You will not be able to maintain true confidence until you learn how to move through the hard shit. Until you’ve looked at yourself in the mirror during your darkest hours and decided in that moment that you were going to keep going. The most confident person in the room will probably have some wild ass stories about how they got there because confidence is built through resilience. If you are interested in diving deeper into this topic with me, I am hosting HER – a twelve-week intimate group to heal the inner feminine. The feminine has inherently struggled with maintaining confidence through generations and it is time to break the cycle. If you want to learn more about HER and see if it aligns with your vision please schedule a call.
