Even the most confident of us have moments when self-confidence seems to vanish quicker than a pre-election manifesto promise (ooh, topical).
What you can’t do is think that losing confidence in yourself means that you’re not confident. You still have confidence, you just have to apply it. Here are 3 of the biggest reasons you lose confidence in yourself and what to do about them.
1. You’re somewhere new
But who said that’s not how it’s meant to be? You’re supposed to be feeling a little scared; if you weren’t then where you are wouldn’t matter, and that would be a dull place to be (believe me, I know). So don’t think that shaking in your boots when faced with something new, big and scary means that something’s wrong – it’s just means that it’s the first time you’ve been here.
But please remember that you’ve been in new places before. Your first day at school or college. A new job or a new relationship. Life is full of “somewhere new”, and you’ve got through it all just fine and learned all kinds of cool stuff to help you deal.
So use what you’ve learned and use what you know to be true. Start at the start, do what you’re best at, make decisions that serve you well and trust yourself to make a new decision when you need to. You’ll be better than fine – you’ll be confident.
2. You start role-playing
Your brain’s very cool, I want you to know that. It has a bunch of maps stored away, maps that help it navigate through situations based on the routes it’s learned in the past. Left to it’s own devices your brain does the most efficient job it can of plotting a course from point a to point b and keeping you safe on the way.
But sometimes your brain is where the problem lies. There are times when your brain picks a really old map, something it’s used time and time again successfully, but it completely forgets that the landscape might have changed. In the blink of an eye your brain picks a pattern of behaviour that’s out of date and no longer matches with who you are and what matters to you today. Sometimes, your brain picks a route that emphasises safety over results.
Let’s say there’s a family occasion that means you have to head home to see your folks (and siblings if you have any). You love them, of course you do, but they drive you a little nuts if you spend too long with them. At some point when you’re back home with them you start behaving differently. Maybe you get a little moody. Maybe you get a little silly. Maybe you get a little irritable.
You start playing the role of the person you were years before; whether that’s the 8 year old little angel, the 16 year old stroppy teenager or the 21 year old rebel without a clue.
At a party filled with strangers you fall back into the role of a nervous teenager. At an important meeting you fall back into playing the role of an ill-experienced new starter, scared to speak up. With your parents you fall back into the role of a child.
I hear this a heck of a lot, I really do. People switch back to who they’ve been simply because their brain brain matches the inputs it’s receiving to the best developed map it has for safely navigating through the circumstances it finds itself in. And that means you sometimes start playing roles that no longer apply.
Playing a role switches you immediately from the capable, resourceful and confident you to a you that might be none of those things. Watch out for these moments when you swicth roles, because they’ll always make you feel like your confidence has vanished and it’s only by noticing them that you can take a new, better direction.
3. Your Expectancies Get Muddled
This rulebook is constructed from expectancies – everything you expect of yourself, everything you expect of others, and here’s a real brain-teaser, everything you expect others expect of you.
Yep, that’s right – it can be a real mess. You carry around with you an expectancy set that says things like “I expect my boss to listen to me”, “My manager expects me to be quiet when we’re meeting with the CEO”, “I expect my friend to jump through hoops” or “My partner expects me to not display affection when we’re in public” – dozens, hundreds of expectancies piled up on top of each other that guide your thinking and your behaviour.
Different expectancies flying around that are often in conflict with one another leads to one thing – second guessing. And what does second guessing mean? It means you can’t have confidence in your behaviour.
So leave the rulebook behind. So stop living your life according to a set of expectancies that might not be true. Don’t assume how you should behave, don’t assume how other people need to behave and don’t make assumptions about how other people expect you behave. It’ll drive you crazy.
You Lose Confidence Because You’re Not Paying Attention
Put simply, you feel like your confidence vanishes because you’re not paying attention to how you’re thinking. Each of these 3 causes occur when an automatic thought pattern gets triggered that you don’t notice. You don’t need to understand how these patterns came about or how they work, you just need to recognise them so that you can trigger a new, better behaviour.
That’s where the magic starts, learning to recognise those situations where you feel your confidence leaving you, acknowledging the thoughts that take you there and making a deliberate decision to do something else, something better.
So I’m interested to know – when you feel your confidence leaving you is it because you’re somewhere new, because you’re playing an old role or because you’re behaving according to your expectancies? Let me know in the comments.