A Key to Self Confidence: Stop Explaining Yourself

I had a bad experience with someone. I don’t usually have bad experiences with people. I have an incredible amount of self confidence, and it is a general expectation of mine that people will treat me well. Honestly, they usually do. Since I made the shift a little over a year ago to embracing a life of love and light, I have had very, very few bad experiences with people. I have attracted the most amazing, loving, genuine, kind people from all walks of life. Recently though, I have had a few bad experiences, and since they’ve been piling up in a little handful, I’m recognizing that these are experiences I need to learn from.

The Big Lesson: It Is None of My Business What Anybody Thinks About Me.

I know this. On a logical level I do realize that what someone else thinks of me or says about me is none of my business. They have created a version fo me in their head that is based on their own life experiences. It usually has nothing to do with me. When it does have to do with me, even when it’s really good, it’s still not going to be the same as who I think I am.

So thinking about, worrying about, caring at all about, what anyone thinks of me is a complete waste of time. All I can do is be myself, my authentic self, and live my life. What anyone else does or says has nothing to do with me and only ever about them. 

This lesson has been really helpful when I flip it too. As a person who aims to be love and light as often as possible, falling in to the dark as a natural part of life and then getting back into love and light, I have to look in the mirror.

Where Does My Own Judgment Come From?

Why am I judging someone? Angry with someone? Hurt by someone? Because of me. Always.

If I am hurt, it is because of how I feel about myself, not about what someone else says or does. If I am thinking or saying hurtful things to someone else, it is because I am not seeing them through eyes of love, but through some other lens, a lens I don’t want to see through.

So this lesson is a great gut check for me.

But obviously it is a difficult road to walk on all the time. We live in a world of constant comparison, competition, criticism, and shame. It takes a highly enlightened person to rise above it all the time. I’m working on it.

The Little Lesson in Self Confidence: Self Love

So what I do as part of that work, as part of any work really, is break down the big goals into little goals.

A huge part of rising above shame and criticism is self love. If you love yourself unequivocally, if you believe that you can never get it wrong and that you’ll never get it done. If you believe that you are here for life experience and fun and that everything you do in this human form contributes to that, you can stop judging yourself.

If you can stop judging yourself, you can stop feeling judged by others.

I have almost mastered complete self love. As I said, I have always been full of self confidence. My mother grew up, and still is, incredibly self conscious, shy, and self critical. She has also always known that about herself, so when she had a baby girl, she was determined that I would be the opposite, even naming me after the strong willed, fierce and fiery red headed main character of a bodice ripping romance novel: Shanna.

Well, she got her way.

I’ve been a strong willed, fierce and fiery copper headed main character of my own story for forty years now. I have loved myself for all my flaws and mistakes.

Recently, I have come into the understanding that my “flaws” are actually strengths and my “mistakes” are merely my experiences with contrast.

Little Lesson in Self Confidence: Stop Apologizing

I stopped apologizing for myself a long long time ago.

As women we are trained from an early age to shrink back and apologize for ourselves at every turn.

Run into someone: “sorry!”

Miss a deadline: “sorry!”

Hurt yourself when someone runs into you: “sorry!”

Late for work: “sorry!”

Say what you think is the wrong thing: “sorry!”

Interrupt a conversation: “I’m sorry…”

Someone else gets hurt: “I’m sorry.”

As soon as I realized that every single time I say I’m sorry I give away my power, I give away a piece of myself and I give power over my emotions to someone else, I stopped apologizing.

Now I say “excuse me,” “thank you,” “almost done!” “almost there!” or any other myriad combination of responses that keep my power firmly in my own hands.

“Thank you for waiting.” I’ll say to my student who waits until I finally get to work five minutes late. (Or ten!) “Thank you for your patience.” I’ll say to a client who is waiting for my draft of an essay.

It still puts the other person at ease, and you don’t give away any power. Now you have no room to judge yourself and hang your head in shame.

Little Lesson in Self Confidence: Stop Explaining Yourself

Recently, I have learned this little lesson as I build toward complete self love, which leads to complete self confidence: stop explaining yourself.

I am a thinker. Maybe because I’m a woman, maybe because I’m a mom, or a wife, or a writer, or a sister, or an empath, or or or. For whatever reason my mind is going a mile a minute always.

I have trouble meditating quite often because I’ll start to quiet my mind and a new thought will come to me about my business, my writing, my kids, my life, you name it.

This constant thought flow is why I actually thoroughly enjoy the meditation process. It gives me a break from my brain.

Overthinking

My classic routine is that I’ll act, then I’ll overthink what I did, or how others responded to it, then I’ll explain myself.

But once I realized that really, I’m the only one thinking about it, and that even if someone else is thinking about it, nothing I can say or do is going to change what they’ve already decided. I’ve been stopping myself.

When I was attacked last week for a piece I posted on the depth of love, I would typically have tried to explain myself, to get the other person to see my side, to make amends or make friends.

Instead, I simply wished the angry woman love and joy, telling her that fortunately, I don’t need to be understood by anyone.

Because this is, in the end, what it comes down to.

We have this need to be understood by others, so we join groups, we put on our best faces, and when we think our best faces (based on our perception of other’s perceptions) aren’t showing, we try to explain why.

Whoo!

Talk about exhausting!

If we can realize that no one will ever understand us the way we want to be understood, we can let go of explaining ourselves.

If we can trust that we can do the good work of loving ourselves, and understanding ourselves, and that the relationship we have with ourselves, with our own inner being of pure positivity, love, and light, is the most important relationship we can ever have, we can let go of explaining ourselves.

When we can reach that goal, just stop explaining. Stop trying to be understood. Stop needing love from outside ourselves, we can build self confidence that is unstoppable.

Why Is Self Confidence So Important?

Because it gets you everything.

The only way you ever get anything in life is by believing you will. That’s it. It’s that easy.

It is the work we have to do toward believing that is difficult. We come up with so many reasons why we are not worthy or why it’s impossible.

But with self confidence, we believe we are worthy, we believe that if it exists, we can have it.

And then?

And then we start to believe that even if it doesn’t exist, even if no one has ever done it or had it before us, we can.

We can have it. We can be the first. We can have it all, even the things that currently feel unreal.

That is where the real magic lies.

Stop explaining yourself, stop apologizing for yourself, love yourself completely, grow your self confidence.

And do magic.