How to build true confidence (and then teach it to your children)

0:01Zoe Blaskey:Welcome to Motherkind. It is me, Zoe Blaskey. We are proudly supported by World Nutrition's Women's Supplements and I am so happy that you are here. I have gone from someone who in early motherhood lost all my confidence to now being the most confident I've ever been. I've interviewed hundreds of experts on confidence in motherhood and even written a book on it and I want to share with you in the next 10 minutes what I've learned that actually works. Not the generic fluffy confidence advice for actionable steps you can take right now to rebuild your confidence quickly because the truth is confidence isn't fixed it's not a personality trait it's a skill and I am going to teach it to you.

0:42Okay so here's what I've noticed rebuilding your confidence isn't about making massive changes it's definitely not about getting back to the old pre-motherhood you or just kind of masking up, armoring up and pushing through. It's none of that. It's actually built in tiny steps. So in six months, you will wake up and realize that you are miles from where you used to be. And I can't wait to teach it to you. So in this episode, I'm going to show you the five things that I did to completely transform my confidence. All right, let's dive in. So the first one is to stop comparing. Every time you compare yourself, it just chips away at your confidence, right?

1:23It's so easy to do. I still catch myself doing it today. You compare how you look, how your child is doing, even how you feel. I remember comparing myself to my friends who were devastated to go back to work after mat leave, whereas I was really excited about it. And I felt so bad about that.

1:41Zoe Blaskey:And I forgot that every single one of us is different. And the key is to own how you feel and what you want to do. So there's this psychological phenomenon called the contrast effect, which is a cognitive bias, right? Where we evaluate ourselves relative to what we've just been exposed to rather than to actual reality. So what does this mean? It means if you open social media and you see maybe other women, other mothers talking about their work successes, or they're looking amazing, or they're saying how their kids don't have screens, or they only cook organic because your brain is wired for what's called relative evaluation right this means that your brain is always looking to rank how you're doing versus who is around you which is why who you follow who you surround yourself with is so important you've got to surround yourself and follow online people who are giving you the behind the scenes not just the highlights real because your brain is wired to compare.

2:45Zoe Blaskey:And this isn't just online, by the way, it's also at your baby group. It's in your friendship group. It's at work. So the key is right to, to cut past this is to stop thinking, how am I doing compared to them and bring that focus inward and start thinking, how am I doing compared to where I want to be? Have I grown a little bit from last month, last year? Of course you would have, right? So you've got to bring your focus inwards, not outwards. Okay. The second tiny little micro thing that you can start doing today to build your confidence is to stop apologizing. We say it all the time, right? Sorry, I'm late.

3:24Zoe Blaskey:Sorry, I have to leave. Sorry, the buggy takes up so much room. Sorry, I can't make that time. Sorry, it's nap time. Sorry, I have to leave early for pickup. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, right? Every time you apologize, it's making you feel small and contracted, which is the opposite of confidence, which is expansive. So every time you apologize, it takes a chip away from your confidence. And psychologists call this low power language, which is where your language reduces how sort of confident and competent you appear to be, not only to others, but also to yourself, because remember, you're always listening to yourself.

4:01Zoe Blaskey:So some other things that I hear people say is, especially in a work context, this might be a silly question, or I just wanted to. These are like low power language phrases. These are little precursors that we use before we say something. And I have been so conscious of this the last few years, switching my language. I'm being way more assertive, way more confident, and it is just skyrocketed my confidence. What you say is so important. All right. Third one is boundaries. You know me, if you know me and you know my work, I'm obsessed with boundaries. Boundaries are an external representation of your confidence.

4:39right? So if you're going to be low in confidence and low in self-worth, it's really hard to say no or state your needs. So what worked for me as someone who in early motherhood did have low worth and low confidence, right, is I started to reverse engineer this. So in small steps, I started saying, no, that doesn't work for me anymore. I can't make that time.

5:05Zoe Blaskey:That doesn't work. And the result was incredible because it was through setting those boundaries, through having the courage to say what I needed and what we needed, my confidence rose. Because what we are really doing is with every boundary that you're set, what you're really saying is my needs matter too, which of course is the basis of confidence. I matter. I'm important too. Fourth one is body language. So before I do anything that requires my confidence, I use a trick that I learned from social psychologist Amy Cuddy. You've probably seen her TED talk, it's viral. The core insight of her work is that your body just doesn't reflect how you feel, it can shape how you feel.

5:48Zoe Blaskey:So if you adopt expansive, open, grounded power poses, she calls these power poses, then your brain receives signals of strength and confidence and capability. So before I go in to record a podcast or if I'm doing a big talk, I will stand with my arms wide open like this and my legs out wide. And that is a power pose. And then I breathe deep for 10 seconds. And I've got to tell you, I don't know if it's psychosomatic or the placebo effect, but it feels like it makes a massive difference to me. So you can use this before anything, before you have to go to the doctors to advocate for yourself or for your children, before you have to go and, I don't know, have a hard conversation with your partner or a friend or at work, whatever it is that's going to require you to embody that confidence, use those power poses.

6:39Zoe Blaskey:Okay. And the last one is to celebrate tiny wins. We are typically so bad at this, but your brain builds confidence from evidence, right? So every win celebrate it. There is something called negativity bias. I talk about this a lot in my book, Mother Kind, which is that your brain is actually wired to focus on what is wrong. So we have to counter this by doing and celebrating and recognizing these little wins. I am militant about this. Okay. I am so focused on every tiny little win. I notice it and I celebrate it. On the other side, every time I hear that voice, that's like, you're not doing well enough, you're failing.

7:24Zoe Blaskey:I will counter that with some evidence. And it is so important because confidence only grows when the brain registers evidence. I feel like I want to say that again, confidence only grows when the brain registers evidence. So if you want to feel more confident, you've got to start feeding it these little bits of confidence. Okay. So if you're wanting to feel more confident again, remember it's not a feeling, it's a set of skills, okay, and one of these skills comes from noticing these little wins, however small they are, okay, so start noticing those little wins and build that evidence and your confidence will grow, okay, so those are five tiny confidence shifts that you can make right now, today, in the next hour.

8:20And if you keep building these, I promise you those impacts will compound and you will have moved on significantly from where you were. So if you liked this episode, you should go and check out my Mother Kind episode with Mel Robbins, where she reveals how becoming a mother impacted her confidence and the tools that she's used to be where she is today. It is linked below. Don't forget to subscribe wherever you are listening or watching to this and I will see you next time.